stand clear. planets coming through

Thinking about improving the Artwork in Vega Strike, or making your own Mod? Submit your question and ideas in this forum.

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MamiyaOtaru
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Post by MamiyaOtaru »

well, in a .system file, clauds are indicated so:

Code: Select all

        <planet name="Burton" file="planets/agricultural.png" radius="1200" gravity="20" x="-11000"  y="-22000" day="300">
		<Atmosphere file="clouds.png" alpha="SRCALPHA INVSRCALPHA" radius="1211"/>

(notice the Atmosphere file entry, and how its radius is slightly larger than that of the planet)

As far as dynamically generated systems goes, well I imagine something has to be fed to the generator but I'm not up on that end. You can use the above for testing your art at least.

Animations are generally done with .ani files (look for some in your gamedata), which are text files specifying a list of images, framerate and the like. So you could animate with a bunch of pngs or whatever. Klauss, did anything ever come of mng?
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Post by Karnizero »

Ok, thanks for information.

I have some cool ideas for animated textures, clouds and so on. Hehehe, but now, I will not tell more, this is just a secret :twisted:

When I finish it, i will show ingame screenshots.

But I have a question:
I have readed the .ani file, and the first numbres, what are them exactly?
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Post by klauss »

mnglib is a bit cumbersome to use. The interface is simply awful for our purposes, probably requiring some form of multithreading to do properly.

That's why I just left it for later, and will try with an easier one: XVid.
I'll tell how it goes.
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Post by pyramid »

Karnizero,
I'd like to know which tools and techniques you are using to create your surface textures.

* I like keeping my wiki guide up-to-date.

Btw, your textures must be seemless, which is not easy to achieve.
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Post by Kangaroo »

Easy tiling (don't know about planets) textures can be made with Corel Texture tool. Unlimited dpi and easy to learn.
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Post by Karnizero »

pyramid wrote:Karnizero,
I'd like to know which tools and techniques you are using to create your surface textures.

* I like keeping my wiki guide up-to-date.

Btw, your textures must be seemless, which is not easy to achieve.
Yes, of course.
I use only The Gimp.

Just I search for real images of planetary surfaces (Earth, Moon, Saturn, Halley Commet and so on) and then i try to reproduce the effects that I need to do the texture, for example, i look a photo of a volcanic eruption, and then i try to reproduce the lava. I supose you undesrtand :D
Kangaroo22 wrote:Easy tiling (don't know about planets) textures can be made with Corel Texture tool. Unlimited dpi and easy to learn.
Yes, it can be a solution too, but i have a good knowledge about Gimp, and it's tools and extensions, so i dont need more programs, but thanks for the comment. : )
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Post by Oblivion »

Nice! :) The green mountains look abit blocky, but its looks great overall, kind of like a heavily terraformed agri planet. :)

Well, I based comments on planet textures on the current planet textures. They seem to be in the normal 1.333 ratio, so I assumed...

hehe. As they say in a local saying here "Many have died from wrong assumptions..."

Hehe.

As for distortion effects of spheres. Someone once suggested making uv coordinates of all planets into a square and two circles. The square as cylindrical map for sides and the circles for polar regions. Check if its still in the seamless flight thread.

For the "seam" in the texture, that's a big prob. Suggest making planet maps using planetary texture mapping functions of 3d programs not gimp. However, if you can make a horizonatally tileable map by hand, so much the better. :)
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Post by strangelet »

imho the only reliable way to create properly mapping spherical textures is to use a 3d program to procedurally generate them onto a sphere and then bake the texture to an image. this automatically deals with the problems you've encountered here.

the problems of polar distortion and the difficulties of correctly Tiling a planet tex proved insurmountable for me using any other method.

now come on, bitches. why arent my planets in game yet?

slackers :)
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Post by strangelet »

plus, all my planet tex were in 1024x2048 format from an original render res of 2000x4000. as far as im aware no graphics protocol will accept textures which are non-power-of-2.
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Post by Oblivion »

strangelet:
use a 3d program to procedurally generate them onto a sphere and then bake the texture to an image
Tried to do that with 3dsmax. But when I attempt to render the generated maps, they end up being broken up into smaller pieces. It seems totally inane, when it seems easier to generate sphere maps in squares. Tried setting angke threshold higher, tried applying it to flat surfaces, nothing works. I end up with a map that is usable only if the planet it is applied to is treated like a unit. :( Since planets are randomly generated, that IS a problem. However it may do for custom planets. :?: maybe.. :lol:

Anyway, does anyone know how to generate a square map from procedurally generated materials? :? I use 3dsmax. unnh.. don't think anyone does. hehe

Here are the planets I created with 3dsmax's material editors. I used a lot of materials: mix, perlin marble, cellular, planet, etc. And it ends up quite nice. Plus I recolored or integrated the wraparound maps of mars and the moon which came free with 3dsmax. :wink:

If Vega Strike wishes to retain the random/procedural generation of planets, I would vote for creating a way for the engine to generate the planetary textures themselves. Since I'm hopelessly ignorant, :wink: , could GIMP's fractal and perlin generators be used? There could be a database of standard bitmaps that will be mixed and matched using the engine itself. Sorry, I really don;t know if that's even possible. :roll:

Here are planets I created and intended to submit, prior to the render-to-texture problems. :wink:

Image

Rocky with oceans of some sort of liquid, shallow continental shelves with massive orange reef-building lifeforms. ( :wink: Actually just my interpretation.hehe) Outpost status (No large colonies).

Image

Oceanic. Outpost status.

Image

Young molten planet with thick atmosphere. Uninhabited of course. :D

Image

Archipelagic. Or as VS would say, Caribbean. Shallow planetary seas dotted with small islands. Inhabited, minor colony status.

PS...and a problem with the VS engine generating random textures for planets is: how would we classify a planet then? The textures should match planetary type and description. So we could do it by:

...Creating a separate database for each planetary type which holds the textures that could be used when generating random versions of the planet. For example Oceanic planets (I think that name is wrong. :) If oceanic means water-rich, why not say ummm.. Hydropelagic. haha) would have one database containing maps with Watery tileable textures, that could be used in combination with other textures inside the Oceanic planet folder to generate a planet's texture...

which leads to another problem:
How do we texture data from generated planets? Because if the info is not saved, each planet will look different everytime you lose sight of it... so Atlantis could be deep blue a moment before docking, then swirly cyan on time of departure. :roll:

..hehe. long post. Just ravings really.
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Post by pyramid »

Truly nice textures, Oblivion.

I am using PovRay to create procedural textures and export them to flattened uv bitmaps. Not yet committed though.

In 3DMax there is an unwrap feature which might be able to help you come to a good solution, however I am not sure how to use it.

I like your proposal to have a better convention for texture/planet types. Just actually working on it. For now, please see the task list in the wiki:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... t_Surfaces

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Post by strangelet »

3dmax has had this feature since version 4. read your manuals boys.
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Post by strangelet »

on generating planets.

1 - you use fibonacci sequences so the planet is always generated the same

2 - to make generated planet texture, you have the engine composite "sets" of bitmap continent shapes onto a background and lay down lights where the cities are.

3 - the texture is then cached to disk. a cache of only 50mb would be enough for at least 30 planets with compression.
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Post by klauss »

Strangelet, Hi. Your textures are ready to be put ingame, AFAIK - from what dandan said - but since they're lonely among the ugly ones they totally break uniformity, so they're waiting to be paired with equally better ones. I think.

About planet generation, I kind of like the idea of using those random generators like planetgen and stuff to create base masks from which to edit by hand, by copypasting pieces of actual satellite/telescope pictures.

The technique worked pretty well here without the generated base map, so I bet with the map it would be much better. (was going to link but I lost track of those files - old files - anyway... anyone remember the reason I first logged in, the hand-drawn planet textures?)
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Post by Oblivion »

3dmax has had this feature since version 4. read your manuals boys.
okey dokey. :wink: i figure I'll eventually get something right. hehe
3 - the texture is then cached to disk. a cache of only 50mb would be enough for at least 30 planets with compression.
how would you cache umm about 7000 planets? :? As again, VegaStrike's system generator defies attempts to tame it. hehe. But if you would mean a cache of 30 planetary textures that would be re-used again and again, then it would look a little better but would still be, to put it bluntly, repetitive. Not at all justifying the use of random planetary texture generators. Random planetary generators would only work if, each and every planet gets its own unique texture. Finding ways to save it is one big problem, tho.
lonely among the ugly ones they totally break uniformity
:wink: hehe. quite true. But then again, why would it be a problem? There are dozens of cases in VS where the sleek and beautiful is sitting right next to a WIP and unmentionable. :D Anyway, seeing it ingame would raise other artist's interest and wrath (i.e."What the hell is such a beaut doing here, mixed with all these other junk?! Let's see if I can make other's like it.."). :wink: But mostly, I just want to see it beneath my llama. :D
The technique worked pretty well here without the generated base map, so I bet with the map it would be much better. (was going to link but I lost track of those files - old files - anyway... anyone remember the reason I first logged in, the hand-drawn planet textures?)
You mean, it was done somewhere, once upon a time? It would be nice if you could provide an overview of how it worked. :P
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Post by Oblivion »

oh yeah, I forgot. :wink:

pyramid:
I like your proposal to have a better convention for texture/planet types. Just actually working on it. For now, please see the task list in the wiki:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... t_Surfaces
Thanks. :) But until I find 3dsmax's secret to unwrapping in squares, they're lost. Whaddaya mean with "convention"? You mean calling caribbean, archipelagic? hehe. :wink: Great work on the wiki pages btw. :) That thing about Power-Of-Two's in the orbital planets how to was funny. :lol:

I ask this question also to Klauss, and how he did the earth with the cloud map on the shady planet thread. Using that technique, what kind of maps would be required when making planetary textures?

I mean, should the cloud map be separated from the diffuse, and the glowmaps of cities? bump maps, etc?
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Post by klauss »

Planet texture requirements:
Nothing special.
Colormap as usual.
Specmap as usual.
Normalmap as usual (though normalmaps are presently not required, they aren't any different from unit normalmaps: RGB with normal data, Alpha with height data).
Nightmap as usual.
Cloudmap... not so usual. The cloudmap contains color in the color data - but base, unlit color. Until now, I couldn't find a case where the color portion of the texture wasn't uniform, so I might drop color "texture" for a uniform color "parameter" - but in any case, the texture contains the cloud's basic color in the color portion (fully white for earthish textures), and "thickness" in the alpha channel. What I did to create the current cloudmaps: transfer the color (grayscale) channel to the alpha channel, adjust its "dynamic distribution", kind-of gamma correction, to avoid saturation of the alpha channel as much as possible (it looks bad), and filled the color channel with white.
Thickness means that - the thickness of clouds. It indirectly translates to their height. All clouds are based on the same level (they usually are in reality, minus some exceptions), and grow upwards as much as the alpha channel tells it to.

I'd upload samples, but they're HUGE (26MB). Rather, I'll post here when they get commited and link to them.

BTW: I still have the originals, so I made some new screenshots (with the new shady stuff ;) ) of the caribean textures. [master index]
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Post by rigelan »

klauss: I get the link to the index.html just fine. But I cannot browse directly to the image from your index.html page.
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Post by klauss »

How odd. I can't seem to fix it - I tried renaming files and all.
I'll have to ask Chuck (it's his FTP), perhaps he can shed some light on the subject.
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Post by Halleck »

Maybe you should just use the VS gallery for the time being.

The thumbnails look great, btw...

As for the "holding back" of nice looking textures- I get the reasoning, but as oblivion mentioned, this kind of thing happens all the time in VS. People probably even have a bit of an expectation for such things in SVN... I really see no reason not to commit it and have it be used in-game, unless there are technical issues.
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Post by klauss »

I too think it's probably best to put them in no matter how misfitting they might be, mostly since they're in league with the target quality level, so it's a step forwards, rather than backwards or sideways.

But... even if Dan must have had his reasons, you might try convincing him otherwise ;)
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Post by dandandaman »

klauss wrote:But... even if Dan must have had his reasons, you might try convincing him otherwise ;)
To be truthful, I think I'll be rather easy to convince, as long as the argument contains, at some stage, the phrase "I'll do it if you don't want to Dan... " :-P Only because I will be shortly duplicating the work anyhow, (this is *real* shortly rather than "on the list" shortly), so can't see the point putting them in now. If someone else can see a reason, then I won't stop them :-)

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Post by klauss »

So volunteers can come forward: what would "do it" entail?
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Post by dandandaman »

Adding/replacing textures, changing the few static systems we have to use them, and altering milky_way.xml to link the planet types to teh textures (most likely the types will need some twiddling). If the types were twiddled, you may then need to change the production info for each that was changed (for cargo purchasing .. I'm not 100% sure where that info is atm).

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Post by pyramid »

I'd like to volunteer, however cannot commit to svn.
What do I require?
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