Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hey Tino!

I'm the art director for the Melee HD retexture project at http://meleehd.boards.net. You seem like the main trailblazer in the field of graphics enhancements to Dolphin games so in my role as said art director I'm duty-bound to follow your work. I really like what I've seen so far and I think you're making a lot of great advancements to the graphics infrastructure, many of which might change the direction of the Melee HD project for the better.

I'd like to propose an idea to you for a future version of Ishiiruka:

http://meleehd.boards.net/thread/117

You may also wish to read this thread:

http://meleehd.boards.net/thread/45

When we first release a non-development version of Melee HD it will probably be pretty popular, so for it to require Ishiiruka should help spread awareness of Ishiiruka. If 25,000 people play Melee HD and if Melee HD requires Ishiiruka, that's 25,000 more people with Ishiiruka. This seems to me like a great way that we could help each other with our volunteer projects to the benefit of both the Smash and emulation communities. What do you think?

(11-12-2015, 03:21 AM)MeleeHD Wrote: [ -> ]Hey Tino!

I'm the art director for the Melee HD retexture project at http://meleehd.boards.net. You seem like the main trailblazer in the field of graphics enhancements to Dolphin games so in my role as said art director I'm duty-bound to follow your work. I really like what I've seen so far and I think you're making a lot of great advancements to the graphics infrastructure, many of which might change the direction of the Melee HD project for the better.

I'd like to propose an idea to you for a future version of Ishiiruka:

http://meleehd.boards.net/thread/117

You may also wish to read this thread:

http://meleehd.boards.net/thread/45

When we first release a non-development version of Melee HD it will probably be pretty popular, so for it to require Ishiiruka should help spread awareness of Ishiiruka. If 25,000 people play Melee HD and if Melee HD requires Ishiiruka, that's 25,000 more people with Ishiiruka. This seems to me like a great way that we could help each other with our volunteer projects to the benefit of both the Smash and emulation communities. What do you think?

There are reasons why nobody in the industry use vectorial textures, and everybody use raster textures
The main reason is the lack of detail in vectorial design concept.

Thanks for voicing your concerns, otherman. I disagree with them, so I'll explain why I do.

(11-12-2015, 04:16 AM)otherman Wrote: [ -> ]nobody in the industry use vectorial textures, and everybody use raster textures

It's simply not true that nobody in the industry textures with vectors. I've done game development in the industry both as a hobby and as a profession and I've textured with vectors.

I could give you a few thousand examples of this, but that would take a lot of time. I'll instead give you five examples for the Unity engine, which is one engine of the 170 listed here:

Procedural Materials can use vector images in the form of SVG files which allow for resolution-independent textures.
UnitySVG is a library for reading SVG files and producing Texture2D objects from them at runtime.
Unity SVG renderer for parsing and rendering SVG in Unity 4.5 or 4.6.
AltGUI + AltSketch integrates SVG and vector graphics into the Unity UI.
SVGAssets is a runtime library for rendering SVG on Texture2D objects.

I think what you mean to say is that the minority of people texture with vectors, which is true, but irrelevant to Dolphin. It's true because in most game creation engines (used in the industry to make games) you have creative control in 3D space to specify 2D geometry like font glyphs and UI elements as types of vector meshes. When your mesh basically is your vector, you don't need to rasterize vectors as textures.

Dolphin is not a game creation engine. In Dolphin you don't have the same creative control to make vector meshes. You're limited to work with what you have and what's already there, and I imagine it'd be much more work to hack the game and reprogram each mesh to conform to more recent industry standards than the outdated ones from the low-res time period of Smash Melee than it would be to add what I propose.

The Melee HD project aims to be forward-compatible with 8K monitors and beyond, so for too many of our textures to be PNG would mean we'd very quickly run up our project file size.

(11-12-2015, 04:16 AM)otherman Wrote: [ -> ]The main reason is the lack of detail in vectorial design concept.

The word detail in itself is a pretty imprecise term. It's important to make a distinction between different kinds of detail.

I assume by "detail" what you mean is "photorealism," for which use case a PNG is obviously superior. I account for this in my post, where I emphasize that SVG renders should be an alternative and not a replacement for each texture file.

However, for certain kinds of graphics, like font glyphs, UI elements, line art, and the cartoon visuals you see in Smash Melee, vectors give you more detail. SVG line geometry is precise and exact, where for PNG it's approximated by a pixel staircase.

@theboy181: currently i only support materials affected by ligth, will try to add suport for flat materias after i finish fixing the main implementation.
@MeleeHD: I have no problem supporting SVG as a source, to make it work i can rasterize the texture at load time using the efb scale to calculate the optimal size. if you find a opensource implementation I will have no problem merging it.
about 32 bits support, is a really frequent request but with my limited time I prefere to fix things and implement new things, if someone can extract the jit code from old implementations i will merge it , but i cannot do it myself with my available time.

Oh hey Tino. I found a game that is completely broke with tesselation on. Check out Pandora's Tower. Everything on screen seems to stretch outwards weirdly. O.o

(11-12-2015, 09:58 AM)Tino Wrote: [ -> ]about 32 bits support, is a really frequent request but with my limited time I prefere to fix things and implement new things, if someone can extract the jit code from old implementations i will merge it , but i cannot do it myself with my available time.

Who in their right mind would request 32bit support after Dolphin dropped it ages ago? Any 32bit only CPU wouldn't be fast enough for Dolphin/Ishiiruka anyway.

(11-12-2015, 09:58 AM)Tino Wrote: [ -> ]@MeleeHD: I have no problem supporting SVG as a source, to make it work i can rasterize the texture at load time using the efb scale to calculate the optimal size. if you find a opensource implementation I will have no problem merging it.

Sure, I'd be happy to help.

The Gecko layout engine of the Firefox Web browser uses the cairo graphics library for its SVG file output. It's what GTK+ has used for rendering widgets since version 2.8.

Its language bindings are available here. You may want to look into cairomm, which is a C++ wrapper for the cairo graphics library.

(11-12-2015, 09:58 AM)Tino Wrote: [ -> ]about 32 bits support, is a really frequent request but with my limited time I prefere to fix things and implement new things, if someone can extract the jit code from old implementations i will merge it , but i cannot do it myself with my available time.

That's unfortunate but understandable. I can see how that wouldn't be worth the opportunity cost to someone with your skill set.

(11-12-2015, 02:09 PM)Panchito Wrote: [ -> ]Any 32bit only CPU wouldn't be fast enough for Dolphin/Ishiiruka anyway.

The reality of the situation is more nuanced than this. How fast is "fast enough," and fast enough for what, exactly? You can't measure the speed of "Dolphin/Ishiiruka," just that of specific situations in specific games. I had around full framerates (60 FPS) on Smash Melee in combat scenarios on an x86 processor from 7 years ago. Not all of us who use Dolphin are using it to play Xenoblade Chronicles at max settings, nor do all use cases require speed.

(11-12-2015, 02:09 PM)Panchito Wrote: [ -> ]Who in their right mind would request 32bit support after Dolphin dropped it ages ago?

I'm interested to know if there's a recent 32-bit build of Dolphin somewhere. My reason for this has nothing to do with speed. My reason is that I need degasus' custom texture format in a 32-bit build, which was released after Dolphin dropped x86 support and so far as I know is x64-exclusive.

I've met several 32-bit users who want to collaborate on the Melee HD retexture project. As far as I can tell, to do so at present they need to go through a convolved and tedious process of sending their textures to an x64 user who converts them to the newer nomenclature then sends them back.

Were someone to point me to an updated 32-bit build of Dolphin that includes degasus' new custom texture format, I could then point my users to it and they wouldn't need to go through this convolved process. I don't personally think this makes me "out of my right mind," but to each their own.

(11-13-2015, 12:27 AM)MeleeHD Wrote: [ -> ]I'm interested to know if there's a recent 32-bit build of Dolphin somewhere. My reason for this has nothing to do with speed. My reason is that I need degasus' custom texture format in a 32-bit build, which was released after Dolphin dropped x86 support and so far as I know is x64-exclusive.

There are no recent 32-bit builds of Dolphin. If you want to use the new texture format on 32-bit systems, I think your best bet is to make a custom build based on the last 32-bit compatible build, with the texture format changes backported.

(11-13-2015, 01:23 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]There are no recent 32-bit builds of Dolphin. If you want to use the new texture format on 32-bit systems, I think your best bet is to make a custom build based on the last 32-bit compatible build, with the texture format changes backported.

Yeah, I worried that this might be the only option. Thank you for the information.

(11-10-2015, 03:04 PM)rlaugh0095 Wrote: [ -> ]https://youtu.be/xeUaE0Hl4bU

Water is broken. Can it be fixed?