More Natural Bloom Effect with "Cascaded Blur"

[tcpp]

(I don't know what this should be called, so let me call it "Cascaded Blur". )

I wanted OA's bloom effect to be more natural and smoother, so I implemented an new bloom effect for OA with "Cascaded Blur". This bloom effect spreads the glow of the image more widely and more slenderly, whereas the original one spreads it in the narrow area.

Now, what's "Cascaded Blur"?

It's an blur algorithm that adds blurred images from less blurry one to more blurry one (blurring is done with downsampling). It seems to look more nature. That's why this algorithm is used by some modern commercial games.

This bloom effect requires much less GPU power than one that is currently used in OA.
But you might see aliasing more often if you specify the large alpha value.

--

Sorry for my poor English skill

[tcpp]

I forgot to attach one more screenshot.

[Someone_mad]

I like it, but, on the last screenshot, is that normal all the red blur all along the screen...?
                     ±END¤CONNEXION±

[fromhell]

* fromhell likes this.

[BlankBruno]

Just from my perspective as a player:  I like what I see in the screenshots.  I think it looks more realistic, and if it's less GPU intensive that's just an extra bonus.  I'll take every extra frame per second that I can get.   

[Gig]

Only one fear: maybe having portions of the screen blurried may have a negative impact on aiming? Maybe adding this new blur effect as an alternative to the "standard" bloom effect, instead of replacing it?

[fromhell]

Gig only one bloom can stay

[tcpp]

I like it, but, on the last screenshot, is that normal all the red blur all along the screen...?

no, the red vignette in "OpenArena Cascaded Bloom_4.jpg" is just because of my call-of-duty-ish "You are hurt. Get to cover!" mod, which is not related to this bloom effect.

[Gig]

Gig only one bloom can stay

Sorry for posting in a thread of some months ago (I returned here following the bloom problems noticed in version 25 executables, that disappears if setting r_bloom_cascade to 0).

The r_bloom_cascade 1 or 0 allows to switch from the new to the old bloom? So Fromhell's sentence quoted above is not exact, right? It's because I am thinking about what more to write about bloom on the wiki after 088 release.

The other reason for posting here is that if tcpp reads this, maybe could take a look to the binaries thread and investigate on the version 25 bug.

[Gig]

I know this thread is a lot old (sorry for resurrecting).

I simply wanted to "complete" this thread with a final post, to say what happened then, and to point to a new thread.

Well, it was not possible to fix the cascaded bloom glitch before 0.8.8 release, so it has been released that way (anyway, let's remember that is annoying only under some circumstances, and you can enjoy cascaded bloom): cascaded blur is available in OA 0.8.8, but not enabled by default (old-fashion bloom is selected by default instead - please notice anyway that in OA 0.8.8, texture depth has to be forced to 32 bit, or any bloom will self-disable).

Infos in the wiki:
http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Manual/Graphic_options#Bloom
http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Manual/Graphic_options#Cascaded_bloom

Now, in september 2012, tcpp returned on the effect, and mostly fixed "cascaded blur", but also created a "cascaded blur 2" effect, therefore the discussion continues in the new thread:
http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4620