1Tesseract is a fork of the Cube 2: Sauerbraten engine. The goal of Tesseract 2is to make mapping more fun by using modern dynamic rendering techniques, so 3that you can get instant feedback on lighting changes, not just geometry. 4 5No more long calclight pauses... just plop down the light, move it, change its 6color, or do whatever else with it. It all happens in real-time now. 7 8Tesseract removes the static lightmapping system of Sauerbraten and replaces 9it with completely dynamic lighting system based on deferred shading and 10shadowmapping. 11 12It provides a bunch of new rendering features such as: 13 14* deferred shading 15* omnidirectional point lights using cubemap shadowmaps 16* perspective projection spotlight shadowmaps 17* orthographic projection sunlight using cascaded shadowmaps 18* HDR rendering with tonemapping and bloom 19* real-time diffuse global illumination for sunlight (radiance hints) 20* screen-space ambient occlusion 21* screen-space reflections and refractions for water and glass (use as many water planes as you want now!) 22* screen-space refractive alpha cubes 23* deferred MSAA/CSAA, subpixel morphological anti-aliasing (SMAA 1x, T2x, S2x, and 4x), FXAA, and temporal AA 24* runs on both OpenGL Core (3.0+) and legacy (2.1+) contexts 25* Oculus Rift support 26 27Editing: 28 29To make shadowmapped point lights, just make light entities as normal. Optionally you can control the shadowing properties of the light using attribute 5: 0 = shadows, 1 = no shadows, 2 = static shadows - world and mapmodels only (no playermodels or pickups). Shadowmaps are cached from frame to frame if no dynamic entities such as playermodels are rendered into them, so static lights (2) will generally be much faster than normal lights (0) during gameplay and should be used where possible. Unshadowed lights (1) are even faster as they further reduce shading costs, so they should also be used where possible. 30 31To make cascaded shadowmapped sunlight, just use the normal sunlight commands: 32sunlight 33sunlightyaw 34sunlightpitch 35You can also set sunlightyaw and sunlightpitch from your current direction with the following command: 36getsundir 37 38You can control the diffuse global illumination of sunlight using the following parameters: 39giscale - scales the contribution of indirect light 40gidist - limits the distance which indirect light travels (smaller values are more intense, but higher values allow farther travel) 41giaoscale - controls the contribution of atmospheric light 42skylight - controls the color of atmospheric light 43 44Screen-space ambient occlusion affects mostly ambient light and to a lesser degree sunlight, 45but it does not affect point lights. If you want to make use of SSAO in your map, just use 46the ambient command to set an appropriate ambient light color/intensity. 47 48To make refractive alpha cubes: 49First mark the cubes with the alpha material. Use valpha or texalpha to set the transparency level as normal. 50Then use either of the following commands: 51vrefract K [R G B] 52K is the strength of the refraction, on a scale of 0 to 1, 1 meaning distortion spanning the entire screen, 0.5 spanning half the screen, etc. 53The direction of the distortion is taken from the normal-map of the texture. 54R G B are optional and specify a color for the refraction, with each component being on a scale of 0 to 1 as well. 55 56After editing operations your map may be full of small cubes and triangles, and you will notice that your map looks faceted. 57To fix this you still need to use the calclight command, however, it no longer generates lightmaps anymore. 58It just does a remip optimization pass as well as calculates smoothed normals to make things look better. 59Eventually this may be done differently using some sort of background optimization while editing. 60 61To make decals: 62 63newent decal SLOT YAW PITCH ROLL SIZE 64 65If you don't specify the yaw, pitch, and roll, or leave them all 0, then newent will fill them with current direction you are looking at. 66The slot refers to a decal slot in the map configuration, starting at offset 0. 67The size is specified in cube units. 68 69To make decal slots: 70 71decelreset // functions like texture reset, clears all decal texture slots 72 73setshader bumpspecmapdecal // shaders work like for world shaders, but with the -decal suffix instead of -world 74texture decal "diffuse.png" // all decal slots start with the "decal" sub-slot instead of "0", and this texture must have an alpha-channel 75texture n "normals.png" 76texture s "spec.png" 77 78
