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[Art]

Hi all.
Sorry for may be lame question, i did not really researched this before posting this topic, hope you'll let me know if i really should or should not do it.

I'd like to make some post processing for the final picture, rendered by the engine.
I know there is a plugin system.
So can i using it post-process the picture of the game in hole as bitmap?
I need to add some special effect like white noise or may be degradation.

And if so, how much PC resources will it take?

May be you have any other (than using plugin system) sugessions?

[Mnemonic]

The plugins cannot access the composed image directly, they can only access sprite frames on pixel level. You could, in theory, access the underlying Direct3D object from within the plugin, which gives you access directly to the backbuffer, but generally modifying the backbuffer is very very slow.

[Art]

Hi Jan!

And don't you plan to implement such pretty feature into plugin system in future?
Something like virtual method to which bitmap is passed as argument or like this....

[Mnemonic]

I'm not sure I want to. There would be a huge performance hit, I'm afraid.. It would mean locking the backbuffer, moving it from video memory to system memory, converting it to some friendly format, modifying, converting back to native format, moving from system memory back to video memory. I can't imagine doing this in every frame.

[McCoy]

What about pixel shaders? Although that would need DirectX9 compatible cards.

[Art]

Sorry, i'm not yet very familiar with direct X programming.
Could you explain conceptualy what will it give?

[Mnemonic]

What about pixel shaders? Although that would need DirectX9 compatible cards.

Yes, depending on what post-processing would be required, pixel shader could be a way to go. But of course, only optional, because it would require a pixel-shader capable video card (i.e. GeForce3 or better, if I'm not mistaken).

[Art]

I think it won't be not a good way for me.

What about transperent bitmap with some effects, which i'll for example would periodically hide and show?
How can i get know about resources, which this decision would additionaly require for end user's hardware? Better CPU or GPU?

And what about sprite animation from several such fullscreen semitransperrent bitmaps? Here comes just more memory in comparison with one bitmap (how much then for example for 800x600x32 resolution). Is it video or pc memory?

[Mnemonic]

It will have some impact, but definitely much smaller than back-bufer modifications. One such texture may or may not affect the performance, it depends on the complexity of your scenes.