ATI SMARTSHADER competition - win a 9800 XT !!

Roger ATI

Sure, if Zardon wants to. Zardon, I'm off work today, so I'm not reading my email, but if you PM me the instructions we can host it here. I'll need to make updates to it, so you can give me ftp access or I can send you the modified files- whatever suits you.

Roger ATI

Oh, good. I'm glad you figured it out. If you have trouble in the future you can post your .pss here and I'll look it over and try to tell you what's wrong.

toddsmack2k

Guys the support is here so lets see what you can come up with!

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CATALYST maker

Thats why I suggest DH host it. It will get alot more visibility. Right now the only people that know about this are people that wonder into this thread. If DH hosts it it can have a news post, and a permanent link on the front page.

Zardon/Roger why dont you guys plan it out offline on email. You have each others email addy.

Zardon

read here

zerodamage

Great job on the tutorial Roger. This is looking very promissing.

Super Cheetah

Great read on the tutorial. It will take a little while for me to absorb it though....I'm BLONDE I will have to toy with this stuff this weekend. I have an idea on what "look" I would like to end up with, but I am not sure if I can get ti to work. But I will try

ATI Support ROCKS!!!

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"Built by Roadee"

Zardon

Anyone managed to create a shader yet? or are we all still learning ? this will probably close the weekend around 8-9th march, so make sure you get working !

Penski

awww sucks! I really wanted to enter this comp, sadly I don't have an ATI card

Logla

Not yet, still trying to get my head round it all. Very complicated stuff.

JCLW

My 9600 is in Toronto, and I'm in Halifax with the 8500 .

Thanks for the tutorial Roger, it's an interesting read even if I can't play with them.

psychoduck

thx alot roger, the tutorial helped me alot!
my first smartshader is allmost done

Roger ATI

Great! I'm looking forward to seeing it. Remember, the competition says "Enter as many times as you wish", so enter early and often. :-)

Roger ATI

Well, hey, if you need help, ask us here. I'll bet a lot of people would be willing to help out with advice, including me.

Logla

I'd love to know what each of the commands are - incase I've missed something elsewhere.

Things like MOV, MUL (know these from the tutorial), DP3, ADD, RSQ, RCP etc etc.

This is literally my first attempt at doing anything like this. I've never coded anything before and its difficult to get my head around the way things work.
One thing I liked about the tutorial was when told to use the multiply command. You didn't actually give specific examples and I had to figure out how to implement it. That way I learned how to do it myself and therefore remembered it better.

faraday

Is this contest for U.S. citizens only, or for europe too?

Thanks!

edit: Oh and by the way, either I missed it in roger's tutorial, or he never explained the alpha component of the pixel in the tutorial, he mentioned it in the beggining but I dont seem to find a explanation to what it stands for later on in the tutorial. One more thing, I cant run the OGL sample , I get an error saying the dll is not a windows valid image.

Zardon

the competition is open to everyone, ATI are shipping the card out.

Roger ATI

Okay. I'll add parts to the tutorial to help you learn what the other commands do, too- explanations and exercises for some of the different commands.

toddsmack2k

Just so you alsop hear it from another DH member here, Thanks for all of your efforts Roger, Maurice and Terry.

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Roger ATI

The alpha part of the color isn't very useful in the programmable SMARTSHADER, and it's broken to boot- it doesn't get correctly written to buffers. :/ I'll be fixing it.

Since blending and alpha test are not enabled during SMARTSHADER, for the purposes of SMARTSHADER you can imagine that the alpha is just another color, but it's invisible. You can store things in it and use it but in the end you won't see it on the screen.

I can add an explanation of what it's for to the tutorial, though, for people who wondered. Maybe I'll put it in an appendix.

ChrisW

Is there any way to access the 3D information (x,y, and z) or are we limited to treating the screen as a 2D texture?

Logla

)Thanks Roger, all help is appreciated. I've actually given up on the idea of winning the XT(although I did come up with a simple but effective modification of some of the other effects) but it is so much fun to play around with. I have a go then give up, delete the shaders, and then re-download them for another try. I may be crap at writing these pss files but it has opened my eyes to a new thing to play around with. Thanks again (hope i'm not sounding like I'm sucking up too much )

Roger ATI

You can only access the screen as a 2D texture. There's no access to ZBuffer information from SMARTSHADER.

Roger ATI

Hey, never give up, especially when you can enter as often as you like and there's no entry fee. :-)

Just submit whatever you've done that seems interesting. You never know what kinds of neat things will come up.

wertret

Can we add image sequences with trasparency to create effects like the "old cinema style" of the opening part of futuremark 2003 demo?

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Logla

Are we allowed to enter 'modified' versions of the examples - I'm finding some interesting results by 'tweaking' some of those

faraday

Hmm roger just one more thing, I was looking at ATi's documentation on the ARB_fragment_program and noticed that ATI only provides pseudo code of the implementation of the functions, and no data on the usage (arguments location). Am I seeing it wrong or is there another manual for it

for example:

3.11.5.1 ABS: Absolute Value

The ABS instruction performs a component-wise absolute value
operation on the single operand to yield a result vector.

tmp = VectorLoad(op0);
result.x = fabs(tmp.x);
result.y = fabs(tmp.y);
result.z = fabs(tmp.z);
result.w = fabs(tmp.w);

I was hoping for something in the line of : MUL arg1 arg2 arg3 , arg1 = arg2*arg3 , for example.
So, is there a better manual than that one?

Roger ATI

You could do that, yes. You'd have to create some textures and replace part of the frame buffer with them, or blend them onto the frame buffer. This is doable.

Roger ATI

ARB_fragment_program is a low-level language rather than a high-level one. It's coded in a sort of pseudo-assembly format. Unfortunately, the manual isn't particularly easy to read unless you already know what's in it- which is quite a shortcoming if you're looking for a tutorial rather than a technical spec.

I can help a little. If you have questions about specific operations, you can ask me and I'll help if I'm able.

In general, the operations look like this:

OPERATION destination, source [, source 2] [,source3]

An example of this would be:

MUL destination, source1, source2;

This would multiply source1 * source2 and store the result in destination.

Another would be:

ABS dest, src;

This would take the absolute value of src and put it in destination.

In the example you quoted on ABS, the pseudo-code there means it takes the absolute values of each component individually- the red, the green, the blue, and the alpha- and stores the results in the destination.

I'll try to add more different ARB_fp commands to the tutorial to help people who are interested in learning them.

taurus1900

How do you use more than one user defined texture? Below is the code I'm trying.
In the line
TEX temp3, fragment.texcoord[0], texture[1],2D;
it always uses the last texture that was loaded so in this case it uses the "normalNoiseColor.raw" texture not "256x256.raw".

Can anybody give me an example of how to use multiple textures??



CODE BELOW ---------------

shader dirtPixelShader =
"!!ARBfp1.0
PARAM myparams= {0.5,0.005,256,1};

TEMP pixel;
TEMP temp3;

OUTPUT oColor = result.color;
TEX pixel, fragment.texcoord[0], texture[0], 2D;
TEX temp3, fragment.texcoord[0], texture[1],2D;
MUL oColor,pixel,temp3;

END";

shader copyPixelShader =
"!!ARBfp1.0
OUTPUT oColor = result.color;
TEMP pixel;
TEX pixel, fragment.texcoord[0], texture[0], 2D;
MOV oColor, pixel;
END";


surface temp1 = allocsurf(width, height);

surface blank = allocsurf(256,256);
load_texture(1, 256, 256, 1, "ubyte", "256x256.raw");
surface normalnoise = allocsurf(256,256);
load_texture(2, 256, 256, 1, "ubyte", "normalNoiseColor.raw");


texture[0].source = backbuffer;
destination temp1;
apply copyPixelShader;

texture[0].source = temp1;
destination backbuffer;
apply dirtPixelShader;