image.et upcoming features

Most of you interested in movie making probably already played along with image. The latter being a camera tool, replaces opengl's pinhole view of the world and thus, enables real life camera effects such as motion blur, depth of field, etc. image.et is a complete rewrite of image specifically for Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory. Having access to the game engine instead of only dealing with the outer opengl layer means capturing is faster, better and packs a whole new range of camera effects.

Since most of the code changed, there won't be much similarities between the two versions. Instead I'll brief any changes in behavior and highlight some new features.

• image.et makes use of in game cvars to update any settings which instantly provides feedback to the user. All the cvars are prefixed with "img" such as img_motionBlurExposure.
  
• The game engine was patched to allow both unlimited precision to internal and external FPS. This means that rendering high velocity scenes where individual frames could be seen can now be blurred by increasing the internal FPS such as 2,000 / 3,000 / 4,000 / etc. Tests have been performed with values as high as 16,000 FPS with no side effects other than being slower. It should be noted that external FPS refers to capture FPS (cl_aviDemo) and is not related to the internal FPS in any meaningful way other than boosting quality. Since precision is now of the order, any external FPS can be used. Most people are used to capturing at 30 FPS and end up with 30.3 and the like but this has now been fixed. Capturing at 30 FPS will yield precisely 30.0 FPS.
  
• Bullet Time is now possible using timescale. The latter now behaves as expected and indeed, a value of zero will freeze the game while values close to zero will slow the game speed to a crawl without any losses whatsoever to motion blur quality. It is also possible to script such values externally, making it even easier to use with paths. For instance, it is perfectly feasible to script a path that starts with normal timescale and then slowly steps it down after a shot was fired then step it back up afterward.
  
• Curvilinear Perspective has been implemented using a Mercator projection instead of linear perspective. This offers a whole new view to the game. Field of views of any angles can also be specified, even those well beyond 180 degrees.
  
• The New Old Thing: Motion Blur now passively applies Anti-Aliasing to the game on top of hardware enabled AA without any penalty to performance while depth of field has been completely rewritten to work with the game. It is now possible to target individual player ID to focus on and also being able to focus on transparent textures such as rain drops or bullet tracers.

I'll be posting updates every once in a while until a stable version can be released for public beta testing. For more information and first hand updates, do so @ #image