Tex2D

Ok, i love OST, mainly movies OST, i’m a huge fan of John Williams’ Soundtracks, Klaus Badelt’s ones and such…

Lately i’ve started to listen some video games soundtracks. Given the massive budgets of AAA titles, usually they have an orchestated soundtrack, and some of them are really good, classic soundtracks like Mario, Zelda (and their recent Wii incarnations) have wonderful soundtracks. Halo 1,2,3 are brilliant too, Metroid, Dragon Quest, Metal Gear Solid or Shadow of the Colossus… well there are a lot of games with wonderful soundtracks. With Main Themes that could compete with some of the most famous tunes in cinema.

And then we have Mass Effect OST… I won’t say it’s bad. The best i can say about it is that is not so good. There’s no single theme that lures your atention. Its simply too ambient. I’ve listened to it from the begining to the end without even noticing it was there, and that’s really bad

Of course, perhaps Mass Effect OST wasn’t thought as a piece of music to be heard stand alone, but as a complement to a game. That’s something that probably is the best compliment you can say to a OST… excepting if you plan to sell it. Yes, you can buy this OST at amazon if you want, but if you’re not a huge fan of the game… don’t buy because you will be disappointed.

Summarizing, the OST is not bad, just that it’s not what you will expect of a Blockbuster OST… too simple to become a classic.

Well, tried it, played it and liked it

Blockbuster games for linux are … well… we could say there are some of them :). GTA SA is not one of them, but as i said on a previous post, now it works under linux thanks to the Wine crew.

Honestly i can’t complain, one of my fav games works in my favourite platform. But for those who are willing to try it, here are some warnings:

• Seems that the game only works with nvidia cards
• Pixel shaders must be disabled (run winecfg -> Graphics and uncheck pixel shaders)
• You can leave vertex shaders enabled (by hardware) if you want

My experience also says that San Andreas is a quieter (sp?) place in linux machines. I don’t know why, but vehicles don’t make any sound, so i can hear the music, but not the engines

Anyway, other issues like frame rate… i can say: the game is playable, honest, but it suffers of horrible slowdowns sometimes

About textures… i would say that seems wine is not translating properly the mipmap filtering or something… that would explain some slowdowns. I mean, SA is constantly loading textures, geometry and such. Being being a complete ignorant of Direct3D, i don’t know if “it” uses some kind of mechanism to stream textures and calculating the mipmaps right to the GPU and thatis not implemented yet in in wine.

Well, that said i must congratulate again wine people, and well, ask to rockstar from my humble position: PLEASE, PLEASE PORT GTA SA TO LINUX!.

What i know it could be ported is GTA IV :D, it is donein ogl too (ps3 works with ogl) so… let’s make linux and mac people happy and port it to Real Operating Systems (ROS(tm)) when you release the windows (NROS evidently) version!

God will congratulate your efforts killing 3 fairies and 1 kittie!…mmmm it didn’t work that way, right?

I remember when i had to design an algorithm to produce soft shadows in a non real time way (but even with that some kind of interactiveness (that is 1/5 fps or even 1/16 fps) ).

I was with shash coding like crazy and my 1st approximation simply didn’t work… and well i don’t remember it… For that time shash and me were huge fans of post processing…and in some kind of enlightenment we said “Hey, why don’t we try this?”

An “this” means something like:

• Make an area light with several dozens of light samples in the area
• For each light render the scene as if it was with shadowmapping (that is, render the shadowmap from light POV, then use that as shadowmap and render the scene from camera POV) but with an special shader that outputs depth instead color.
• Acumulate that frame in something like would be like “accumulation of shadows”
• Then divide each pixel of the accumulation buffer by the number of ligths

• Finally draw the scene lighted and draw a full screen quad with blending on multiply and the accumulation buffer.

Really, sounds weird, and it’s increddible slow… but quality talks by itself….

With 256 lights and a shadowmap of 256×256 here you have the results

I’m discovering that wine supports far more games than i expected… right now i only have installed the orange box… but in this GTA IV era i’ve just seen that GTA:SA works in wine!….

That’s great, i will install it as soon i get home… and i will play again with Carl, as i did when i was in windows… a pity that studios don’t use ogl and multiplatform libraries… even just to do cross compiling and have the binaries in several platforms. They could then do like iD does, sell the content, not the binary :), they could even sell the windows version in a cd, and we, linux people could download the linux version from the website or something…

After all, wine is great, but native is better

This is my, hopefully, 3rd and definitive blog…so let’s see what do i post here ok? Stay tuned my friends…