Motion Blur tomfoolery

[BlazeHedgehog]

So I began thinking about if motion blur was feasible or not. It probably isn't, but that doesn't mean I didn't mess around.

The basic idea of this test is that motion blur has to render at a very fast framerate to look correct. So all I did was double the framerate in Sonic Worlds to 120fps. And apply the standard MMF motion blur hack, which is:

- Active Picture object stretched over the screen and set semitransparent

- Screen capture object

In order, these:

- Screen capture object captures the frame to "blur.bmp"

- Active picture object loads a blank file (to clear the file cache)

- Active picture object loads "blur.bmp"

The current setup I have here will increase blur the faster you move. The edit box in the bottom right corner can be used to set the blur level yourself; higher numbers mean more blur at higher speeds. I don't reccommend going over 10 (default is 5). There's probably a better way to calculate how much to blur, but I don't care. It's a quick test that took five minutes.

MFA: http://blazemp3.sepwich.com/SonicWorlds03RC3_b1_motionblur.mfa

EXE: http://blazemp3.sepwich.com/SonicWorlds03RC3_motionblur.exe

Why this probably isn't feasible: Higher framerates are more demanding on PCs. The Sonic Worlds test may run smoothly, but it also has relatively few objects compared to what a full-sized, fully-detailed level will contain.

[Epon]

Unavailable

[USC]

Apparently all of Sepwich is down right now.

[ShootingStar]

Nabbed it before Sep went down.

Then deleted it from my brother's harddrive minutes after playing it.

Anyways, I was able to get just under 60 FPS on my crappy 2-year old PC, so it really isn't THAT bad. It's very nice looking, and hard to notice. Which is good and bad, sure it doesn't mess with gameplay, but it might not be worth the drop in framerate that is bound to happen on even older computers.

[DragonXVI]

It ran ridiculously fast for me, about twice (Or maybe more) the speed of the usual Sonic Worlds beta. Made jumping a bugger...

Saw the effect ok (Is a little hard to notice though, although there was limited places to achieve decent speed and as I said, it was running fast for me), looked fairly impressive and the logic behind it seems solid enough...

One amusing question, would it be possible to scale up each Alpha Picture object depending on its transparency? Essentially a sort of mock Radial Blur effect.

Not particularly useful, but might be a fancy effect. This is what I'm kinda explaining.

[BlazeHedgehog]

Really? Seemed to run normal speed for me, except for the jumping, which was obviously accelerated. I thought Dami made the engine run framerate independent?

The Active Picture Object allows you to resize an image, but it's very, very slow. I was goofing around with that in TFH ages ago. Lets you do all sorts of nifty things like rotate the image, etc:

I forget what I did with the build for that, though.

Edit: Ah, here it is. Hit the number keys (don't think numpad will work) to switch between different effects. It's an old build, too, so ignore some of the stuff that's present in there, like the level-up system.

Edit 2: Oh yeah, and obviously, it would help to switch off of gamepad if you need to

[BlazeHedgehog]

As for the motion blur stuff in the OP:

http://www.mediafire.com/?ujdmb3j9ewe (EXE)

http://www.mediafire.com/?rv1rebdbrm5 (MFA)

It's weird, I can still access Sepwich just fine via FTP.

[Epon]

Ah, just like the good 'ol days of Sepwich.

It's not a Sandwhich.

[BlazeHedgehog]

That's what you meant by radial blur, right?

Edit: WHAT HAVE I DONE

[DragonXVI]

Pretty much, if it's good enough for the Final Fantasy PS2 games (Which abuse it horrendously ) it's good enough for anyone It might work well with things like Transformation Animations (Turning Super) and the like, probably works better when the camera is static but something is animated near the boundaries of the screen.

Oh and:

*Is sick*

[Sonic_Zero]

That's amazing stuff Blaze, is that how it is done in ET:CF?

[BlazeHedgehog]

I don't know. I don't work on ETCF.

[DimensionWarped]

... Why does it need to be set to 120 frames per second? I'd comment, but its too fast for me to make heads or tails of the effect.

[BlazeHedgehog]

Well, one way to get a true motion blur effect is to apply the standard motion blur, but at a very high framerate. In other words:

You render the image at 120fps with motion blur/after-images applied, but you only display at 60hz. I've done this before in video processing - make a video at 120fps, apply motion blur, render it out like that, and then re-render the video at 60fps again.

I had thought Dami made Sonic Worlds run the same speed independant of the framerate, but I guess not.

[DimensionWarped]

Nah, thats what he is doing with the 3D project.

[Epon]

I think that should be a powerup called "The Chronic"...

[DragonXVI]

"The Mushroom"

You could try using "Add" blending mode, might be interesting (Although possible very bright) and instead of scaling out, scale inwards

Although I'm now just entering the realm of really horrible effects rather than nifty useful things like mock motion blur

[Epon]

UBERBUMP

Blaze, adding onto Red's idea... perhaps a new Mario fangame with illicit shrooms as powerdowns, ala The Lost Levels. But this time, Mario's a pusherman for the Gambino Crime Family in New Jersey

[Numbuh 214]

WHAT HAVE I DONE

LOL tone that down and make it a power-down in the final game; bonus points if you make it mess with the music, too.

[LarkSS]

If you added a Sine curve to the nausiating rotating blur and made it a bit less extreme, it could make a good earthquaking effect.

Also, would it be possible to make a separate frame that only contains the BG's of the level that is loaded on top of the actual level as a subapp and made transparent to replicate motion blur? You'd think if you did that as well as make the objects in the frame have their own basic blurring, you'd be able to replicate the blur effect without the lag of rendering and loading image files.

[Epon]

LOL tone that down and make it a power-down in the final game; bonus points if you make it mess with the music, too.

Easy to do too... use DMC2 and constantly increase/decrease the sampling rate