More pretty stuff: atmospheres and planet surfaces

Shadowstar · Post by **Shadowstar** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 4:14 am

On the subject of generating cities, perhaps a bunch of organized boxes with appropriate textures would do the trick.

After all, one of the trade items in the game is prefabbed buildings. This seems to indicate architecture in Vega Strike is very duplicated.

Although I think it would be cool to have interesting things like overpasses and stuff, you could fly a small craft under and around.

pincushionman · Post by **pincushionman** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 5:03 am

At really long distances, would using sprites improve performance at all? I'm talking like horizon-kinda distance.

-pincushionman

mikeeusa2 · Post by **mikeeusa2** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 5:36 am

Yes, that's a pretty good idea acually. The engine could render the city once when at uber long distances and then save that image as a sprite and use that sprite for awhile, then render the city again and take another capture etc. This way we won't waste the time rendering it over and over again. Ofcourse if the city got hit with a weapon the engine would have to render it again as that weapon might take down a building or the whole city... and then we'd need a new sprite

.

The dev's might find a better way of long-distance rendering though.

dfryer · Post by **dfryer** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 6:21 pm

It sounds like you guys are describing "impostors", where you render part of a scene to a single polygon and then use that in the distance. This can be very effective, especially when also combined with good LOD-reducing techniques. As long as the aspect/size isn't changing too rapidly, you don't have to re-render for a while.

pincushionman · Post by **pincushionman** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 10:40 pm

Actually, what I was trying to describe was using a collection of various size meshes for the buildings, and use a sprite for the lowest LOD. I was thinking:

really far: single impostor image.

medium-far: collection of sprites. city is close enough that a single bitmap (impostor) might appear a little awkward, but far enough away that drawing all the poly buildings is inefficient.

any closer: LOD mesh buildings.

One could envision that in a really large city, you might be flying around mesh buildings, but all the ones far from you are sprites.

That's what I was thinking.

-pincushionman

dfryer · Post by **dfryer** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 10:11 pm

If you're going to use sprites, you might as well generate them dynamically based on their current aspect to the player. More realistic, and then the artists don't have to go through the extra step of making the sprites.

pincushionman · Post by **pincushionman** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 10:14 pm

so kinda like what we were discussing higher in this thread, just on an individual building basis rather than the whole city? Works for me.

-pincushionman

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 10:55 pm

There is many city generators for modeler progs, there is a good one for blender, written all in python so easy to read. It use list of pregenated buildings, so it should fit nice with the fact that the architecture will not be the same on an human planet than on an ET one. You can find infos and source here,
http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=155205

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 10:59 pm

browse all the topic, there is some nice imgs, and you will see that thi script use uvmaps too

dfryer · Post by **dfryer** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 11:21 pm

Might be a handy tool for artists creating cities, although there would still be too many to individually create (although if most cities are generic enough, perhaps they could be modularised/recombined to make different & larger cities)

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 11:25 pm

look at M$ flight sim, there is no more than 30 buildings randomly reapeteted on the ground, and it look good
look here
http://www.alexmole.co.uk/pcd/

Shadowstar · Post by **Shadowstar** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 2:59 am

Cool... Sounds like some good ideas are coming up here. Hopefully we will see some fruition from all of this in the not-too-distant future?

mikeeusa2 · Post by **mikeeusa2** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 4:02 am

etheral walker that http://www.alexmole.co.uk/pcd/ thing is very nice. It could easily be motified to generate interiors in addition to the window and door cutouts it allready makes.

Can't wait for VS to decimate the entire videogame industry! (and you know it can do it, we've got time on our side

)

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 5:11 am

yes, it the guy who made the blender plugin

Shadowstar · Post by **Shadowstar** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 11:26 pm

mikeeusa2 wrote:Can't wait for VS to decimate the entire videogame industry! (and you know it can do it, we've got time on our side )

That is if Entropy or (dare i say) Elite 4 doesn't do it first?

g3ysst · Post by **g3ysst** » Thu Jul 22, 2004 2:12 am

Pretty stuff. Can't wait for the pretty stuff

. Will add lots to the game.

g3ysst · Post by **g3ysst** » Thu Jul 22, 2004 2:13 am

I can imagine destroying underwater cities... hopefully It won't stay in my imagination

mikeeusa2 · Post by **mikeeusa2** » Sat Jul 24, 2004 3:22 pm

"That is if Entropy or (dare i say) Elite 4 doesn't do it first?"

If scheherazade gets the code out we should have it before them. We, being an opensource project with no deadlines, can also add things commercial companies can only dream of (interiors, huge generated cities etc etc etc)... first we need the planet code though.

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 2:35 am

mikeeusa2 wrote:"That is if Entropy or (dare i say) Elite 4 doesn't do it first?"

If scheherazade gets the code out we should have it before them. We, being an opensource project with no deadlines, can also add things commercial companies can only dream of (interiors, huge generated cities etc etc etc)... first we need the planet code though.

You're getting a bit ahead of yourself there... by all accounts there's a long way to go before even schez's work is ready, and that's only the planet stuff, not cityscapes or interiors. What you want is probably years away.

"Being open source" means VS has less programmers and less artists... VS is incredibly lucky to have attracted artists of Stranj's calibre and would only be dreaming of commercial-like art (quality and moreso quantity) without him. Open source games are notorious for their lack of resources, and the contributors usually only contribute in their spare time. A commercial project can easily have 10-20 programmers working full time. I'd be surprised if there are more than 5 part-time coders working on VS.

The only advantage of "open source" is that there are no deadlines and that the code can never be lost and the game never die (except maybe a death of neglect).

mikeeusa2 · Post by **mikeeusa2** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 2:45 am

But we will have it. I doubt any commercial games will have what VS will have. Not having deadlines and being able to continually build upon what we have forever is a good advantage. Slow and steady wins the race

... well it accually gets to the end.

If you want textures and maby a model https://cat2.ath.cx/cat2/media.html
gpl'd and such.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun Aug 01, 2004 4:42 pm

Any progress?

richard · Post by **richard** » Sun Aug 01, 2004 11:14 pm

Anonymous wrote:Any progress?

Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure there'll be an announcement when it's done.

:)

mike3 · Post by **mike3** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 5:32 pm

Anyone been in contact with him? Updates

Post by **hurleybird** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 7:14 pm

Unfortunantly, wishing it will be done, or harrasing the poor guy wont get it done any faster. Dont worry mike, It'll get done, and I'm sure that we will be able to see some progress once theres actually something to see.

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Sun Aug 22, 2004 8:34 pm

hurleybird wrote:Unfortunantly, wishing it will be done, or harrasing the poor guy wont get it done any faster. Dont worry mike, It'll get done, and I'm sure that we will be able to see some progress once theres actually something to see.

Is the code being kept in a branch on CVS or somewhere else or anywhere? On the off-chance that somebody wants to help or check out the current state of this, it would be useful if it were accessible. It may, or may not, help things to move forward more quickly even if there's only extra feedback being given to schez.