Problems With Glow Textures

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FattyPants
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Problems With Glow Textures

Post by FattyPants »

Hi all,

Well, I managed to add a new ship model to the game. :wink: And after some doing, I was able to get a regular texture to show up (but with zero specularity, for some odd reason). Now, however, I'm stuck. No matter what I do, I can't seem to add glow maps to my ship. Every time I try, the texture turns into a flat gray--no image whatsoever. :(

I convert the texture to .dds format using Gimp. I set it to BC3/DXT5 compression (the only one I can seem to get to work right). I use Mesher to convert my .obj to .bfxm. Then I used it to convert to .xmesh. Every time I try to modify my texture settings in .xmesh and convert it back to .bfxm, I get the gray mesh of doom. :( What am I doing wrong? I followed what I could find in the wiki, but still nothing seems to work. I'd really like to have some lit windows on my ship--right now it looks like it's got nobody living there. Finally, I resorted to converting one of the Rllan ships to .xmesh and stealing its code for glow maps. From what I can tell, I wasn't doing anything differently, except I skipped directly to texture3, because I don't have a spec or damage map.

Code: Select all

<Mesh scale="1.000000" reverse="0" forcetexture="0" sharevert="1" polygonoffset="0.000000" blend="ONE ZERO" alphatest="0.000000"  texture="saladinDIFF.jpg"  texture1="saladinDIFF.jpg"  texture2="saladinDIFF.jpg"  texture3="saladinGLO.jpg" >
What am I doing wrong? Thanks for any help you can offer!

--FP
chuck_starchaser
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Assuming you renamed your .dds textures to .jpg, I see nothing wrong.

Rumors are that the latest mesher.exe is buggy. You might want to try with this very,
(and I mean VERY) old version I got, the last one I know of that really worked:
(To access it, enter "username" for username, and "password" for the password.)
https://svn.wcjunction.com/utils/mesher/
One thing about this ancient mesher.exe is that it required you to flip the textures vertically;
so keep that in mind.
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by FattyPants »

Thanks for the quick reply!

Problem is: I use Linux, and I ran mesher.exe with Wine, and no dice. Do you have a Linux version of the old Mesher?

--FP
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by chuck_starchaser »

No; I don't.
I'll be in the same boat, if I need to use it again; I'm on Ubuntu now.
But it should work under dosbox, I would imagine.
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by FattyPants »

All right, I'll give dosbox a try. Never used it, but there's a first time for everything! :wink:

Does everyone go through so much effort to get their ships to work in VS? =) I've got so many programs and folders open, I need to use both desktops to keep things straight!

--FP
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by FattyPants »

Code: Select all

This program cannot be run in DOS mode.
Well, that puts a crimp in my day. :lol:

--FP
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by chuck_starchaser »

The answer, unfortunately, is probably 'yes'.
Pyramid used to do all the ship integration, and he wrote a program in Python called
Unit Converter (UC) to serve as a front end to mesher; and somehow he knew how
to make it work; but since he left, I believe, nobody's been able to integrate any
ships into the game. And I have recently pledged to take on the integrator role, but
I haven't even tried yet. I only used UC to convert a bfxm back to .obj, and for that
UC worked for me; but I haven't tried a full integration.
You have to understand that these are trying times for Vegastrike. The main engine
developers moved over to another engine project; Sirikata.
At the same time, another two developers --Safemode and Klauss-- lost most of their
free time.
At the same time, the head of the game, --Vegastrike the Game (VSG)--, JackS, also
has no more free time.
At the same time, Pyramid, who used to do the integrations, disappeared...

When it rains it pours.

I can't imagine why mesher wouldn't work on either Wine or Dosbox. It's just a
command line little program... :-/
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by charlieg »

Free Gamer - free software games compendium and commentary!
FreeGameDev forum - open source game development community
FattyPants
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by FattyPants »

Unit Converter looks nice, but it seems to not like my computer. I try to compress my .png files to .dds, and it says something like nvcompress doesn't support .png files. And it seems to give me the same problem when I convert to .bxfm as if I convert from .xmesh -> .bfxm--gray hull of doom. :?

It's really a big pity that VS is hitting hard times. I really like it. :(

--FP
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by chuck_starchaser »

I assume you installed nvcompress?
That's odd; I've used nvcompress with png's a lot. Manually, though; not through UC.
But that's really odd.
What do you mean by "something like..."?
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by FattyPants »

Whenever I try, nvcompress says:

Code: Select all

Reading units.csv =  /home/dan/Desktop/vegastrike-0.5.0/units/units.csv
Configuration file updated
Workspace file updated
Image =  /home/dan/Desktop/saladin/saladinDIFF.png
Workspace file updated
Image =  /home/dan/Desktop/saladin/saladinGLO.png
Workspace file updated
Image =  /home/dan/Desktop/saladin/saladinGLO.png
Workspace file updated
Directory =  /home/dan/Desktop/saladin
Command =  /usr/local/bin/nvcompress -bc1 saladinDIFF.png tex_000.texture
NVIDIA Texture Tools 2.0 - Copyright NVIDIA Corporation 2007

The file 'saladinDIFF.png' is not a supported image type.
Command =  /usr/local/bin/nvcompress -bc2 saladinGLO.png tex_003.texture
NVIDIA Texture Tools 2.0 - Copyright NVIDIA Corporation 2007

The file 'saladinGLO.png' is not a supported image type.
Model textures have been compressed
I have no idea why it does this to me. :?
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Did you try doing the conversions manually with nvcompress?

Found someone by googling who had the same problem when he tried using wild cards with nvcompress...
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=110
Maybe UC is calling nvcompress with bad syntax.
nvcompress seems to spit out the "not supported image type" message for just about anything that goes wrong, such as not finding the file.
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by FattyPants »

Well, I had a busy couple of days, so I couldn't do much. But this afternoon I tried my hand at a little nvcompress manual command line stuff. I'm not entirely sure if I'm doing it right, but here is what I put in:

Code: Select all

blah@blah-desktop:~/Desktop/saladin$ nvcompress saladinDIFF.png saladinDIFF.texture
OR this:

Code: Select all

blah@blah-desktop:~/Desktop/saladin$ nvcompress saladinDIFF.png saladinDIFF.dds
Either way, this is what comes out:

Code: Select all


NVIDIA Texture Tools 2.0 - Copyright NVIDIA Corporation 2007

The file 'saladinDIFF.png' is not a supported image type.
blah@blah-desktop:~/Desktop/saladin$ 

I can't seem to find a direct answer to what's wrong. I'm not sure if I'm missing some necessary libraries. Or maybe it's just my syntax that's wrong. Or, it could be that the compression on my .png isn't supported. How did you get nvcompress to work? Can you see if I'm doing anything wrong?

FP
Last edited by FattyPants on Wed Dec 30, 2009 12:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
chuck_starchaser
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Re: Problems With Glow Textures

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Hmmm....
Frankly, I'm stunned. Well, where's the switches there?, like for type of compression?
But anyhow; I only used nvcompress in Windows; and I only installed it in Ubuntu
recently and haven't even tried it yet. You could ask at Nvidia's texture tools forum:
http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/inde ... howforum=9
Okay, I just tried and it works for me:

foo@bar:~/Desktop$ nvcompress -nocuda -bc1 Screenshot.png
NVIDIA Texture Tools 2.0 - Copyright NVIDIA Corporation 2007

CUDA acceleration DISABLED

time taken: 13.580 seconds
foo@bar:~/Desktop$
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