When engine growth, community will start to develop plugins and some became commercial. I noticed, that there are no commercial plugins for EE (maybe I am wrong). It is because nobody did anything like it, or Esenthel is against it?

What kind of plugin would you need? An extra plugin in the editor would require company source access if I'm not mistaken.

There is lots of space for plugins. Virtual texture system, OC system, various tools, GUI mods...of course that it would be probably aimed for company licencees, but aim on free users is never good idea, they are usually not solvent

(12-19-2011 11:03 AM)Demostenes Wrote:  It is because nobody did anything like it, or Esenthel is against it?

why esenthel would be against it? one would be selling own code. besides if someone is willing to spend money on plugin for esenthel then one should be aiming for some income. it means requirement for esenthel license and income for esenthel. as i see it custom commercial additions are only a good thing

and no, noone made anything

I am just asking, because this engine is quite capable, c++ alows to access lots of functionality, so there is space even for more complicated extensions.

We will try to port our licenced virtual texture technology.

i bet everyone will be very interested to see it! :] could you link your site?

when I first heard about the virtual texture system I was interested in how it works, it would be great to see some technology video

This is how generic VT system works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49vOX-_LyU

Here is some tech explanation:

http://silverspaceship.com/src/svt/

Anyway using for example 16k*16k textures is not main benefit (AFAIK John Carmack is using it for 128k*128k texture for terrain). It is more nice side effect .
What is going on. You take all textures you have and system makes one huge texture for whole game (for example 512k*512k, you can have even tiling textures there). Textures are streamed (so it solves texture streaming) and they have own oclussion system, so you stream only what is visible, it adjust quality of texture in realtime (!) and displays only visible pixels =>

- Constant texture memory budget. Even with 4k textures you have far lower memory usage than with for example 1k, because it loads only what you see.
- You dont have to care for high/low res version of textures, you just set size of cache and systems automatically adjusts quality (even very heavy scenes with hundreds of textures usually take around 120MB of video memory for textures, cca 5x less than with convencional technology)
- And main benefit, is that whole virtual texture can behave as ultimate texture atlas (whole game is one texture), it usually lowers dracalls 10x(!!!) in texture rich scenes. Imagine that performance boost.
- All this means, that it greatly improves/speeds up workflow, you dont have to do any atlases anymore and VT can handle even tiling texture, dont have to care about texture resolution, etc...

We licenced such system for Unity3D and now we are researching possibility of its migration to EE, because that system is very important for us. Maybe it can be interesting for Esenthel to cooperate directly with that company, because it would be benefecial for both sides (wider market for one side, great technology for EE).

That is very interesting. The potential for that in EE is huge! If the performance benefit is that good, then nobody would ever be able to complain about EE performance again.

I see the guy released his demo code on his site. Could be a good research opportunity Esenthel.

http://linedef.com/personal/demos/?p=virtual-texturing

Features what I described are features of our licenced system. So each VT system can differ by implemenation, but generally idea is still same.
We are checking possibilities of migrating that system, because it is made as separate .dll and connected to Unity via API. So if EE provides similar functionality/accessibility, probably no problem to migrate it, especially with some small assistance of our supplier.