a more 'technical' question

[Jay]

How will RF2 render the world? I mean does it render it directly to the Backpuffer or does it render it to a texture which is then displayed at the screen? The method of rendering to a texture which is then displayed at the screen would allow for pixel shaders that can alter all of the screen at one time or also complex ones like a toon shader that outframes the objects.

Also, RenderToTexture is possible, isn't it? And also Cubemapping? I am sorry but i couldn't get very much information out of the OgreFeaturesList.

[AndyCR]

I do not know for sure since I have not looked at the relevant Ogre code, but I believe it adapts in a way to the scene in question. For instance, post-processing effects are implemented in Ogre, such as HDR lighting and many other interesting effects (look at the OgreDemos for some examples, especially the compositor demo).

Yes, all of those are possible, and are showcased in the Ogre demos.

Ogre has the best material system I have ever seen outside of Unreal Engine 3, actually, though they are done in text files, so I plan to make a GUI interface for them.

[AndyCR]

Ok, now that I've experimented more with Ogre I saw this post and decided to bring it back up to answer it.

Ogre can render directly, but it can also render to a texture which can then be run through any number of materials and shaders before being rendered to the screen. These are called Compositors and are how this is handled in Ogre. There can be any number of compositors, each feeding the texture result of the last into the next until it hits the end of the "Compositor chain", which is actually rendered to the screen. Each compositor in a chain receives the texture from the last just as though it were the unmodified texture which the scene was rendered to, so no special chain-specific scripting is required so that two compositors can be hooked together - none know that they aren't the only one in the chain. This allows, for instance, a scenario where your game uses HDR but you also want to have nightvision. You can simply add nightvision to the chain when the goggles are used (most likely script syntax will be "camera.compositors.append("NightVision")") and not worry about it, then simply remove it when done ("camera.compositors.remove("NightVision")"), and know that HDR will be applied and the result will be fed into nightvision automatically.

[Jay]

Nice, that is quite flexible! Can't wait to try out!