Hey there everybody. Today I am introducing a new feature in the ever growing Axel Project, HDR powered bloom. If you were to remember way way back into January, we had Valve’s prototype HDR pipeline working to an extent, but, it was severely handicapped, in that you had to do two passes, one for opaque objects, and the other for transparent objects and didn’t look that great either.

I took it upon myself to research and come up with a new HDR pipeline, which happened to last a very very long time. After removing Valve’s original code, I started from scratch, using several ideas from various web sites (gamedev.net in particular) and publications. We are using two floating point 16-bit buffers to hold downscaled and blurred luminance values, along with a simple “ping-pong” 4 stage shader pass. This culminated into my whipped up prototype which was enhanced to the point of what your about to see:

Test Video:

This video was rendered in-game at 1920×1200 with AA enabled and Fraps turned ON, hence the kinda stuttering effect you may see (Looks downright mouthwatering on my cinema display btw). Everything is configurable by use of console variables (cvars), even the vignette (*cough*Denis*cough*).

I’m also investigating adding some other shader effects in order to differentiate our engine and give us a somewhat “classier” look.

Current Release 2 Status:

Release 2 is charging ahead, with a ton more done to stabilize the engine core done in the past two weeks. We happen to have an August due date, but as everybody knows, could slip away due to “the fabric of TAP time”.

Happy Fourth of July,
Pat