Improved 3D Geoscape Rendering [was: Nightime city lights in 3D geoscape]

[Mattn]

the decision is that we won't include such high res big images - because we want that older machines are still able to load them in acceptable times.

[arisian]

FYI, the "high-res" textures that I started with are, in fact, .pngs; with optimized lossless compression, the "season" images are ~20MB each at 8192x4096.  The gloss and night_lights maps can be losslessly compressed to 280Kb and 600Kb respectively.  The issue is less how much space they take up on disk, and more how much space they take up in system memory when the game is running.  The amount of compression doesn't affect runtime memory useage much; the only thing that's really important at runtime is the resolution.

Also, if you haven't yet downloaded the high-res textures from the link I posted, wait another 24 hours and I'll have replaced them with versions that are the exact same quality, but smaller on disk (fully optimizing PNGs takes a long time, but it's worth it for lossless compression; the season images are being reduced from ~30Mb each to ~20Mb each).

In terms of what winds up in the SVN trunk, I think it should be somewhere in the middle.  The versions that I attached to my post yesterday were *extremely* low quality because of the fact that I could only attach 1Mb total to the forum post.  I think we can probably afford more than 60Kb per globe image in the "final" version

Feel free to mess with the specularity; there's the specularExp variable that defines how "tight" the spot is, and then there's map_earth_gloss.jpg which defines how shiny different parts of the globe are.  Currently, water is maximally shiny, which should probably be tuned down.

[BTAxis]

So any thoughts about the nation overlay?

[arisian]

What about the nation overlay; has it stopped working?  I admit I haven't checked since a few versions back, but I thought that the new rendering system hadn't affected it.  If it's broken, I'll take a look at, though I probably won't have time to do anything about it until tomorrow.  It shouldn't be hard to fix, given that I know it was working with the new renderer just fine the other day.

[BTAxis]

I was referring to my earlier question.

[arisian]

Ah, sorry, I'd missed that post.  In any case, yes, it should be fairly straightforward.  Are you looking for edges that always glow, or only at night?  Also, do you just want the edges to glow, or the whole overlay? (the latter is actually easier to implement; I suspect the former will require either an extra texture or some real fancy GLSL).

[Mattn]

imo always glow would be cooler - and only the edges should glow.

[BTAxis]

Agreed.

[arisian]

Sounds good; I'll let you know when I've got something.  Incidentally, is it better to post such things here, or to the tracking system, or both?

[Mattn]

if you have a patch, please publish it on the tracker - discussion for features is better here. but if we are discussing about the patch => tracker please - complicated eh?

btw. attached is a patch of a water shader from nullad - would be cool if you could integrate something like that, too

[arisian]

Here's a screenshot of a first attempt at glowing nation-overlay borders; is this what you had in mind?  It requires all of about 3 lines of extra code, and an extra texture.  The texture I've used here could probably use some work, but I'd like feedback on what direction people want to go with it first (ie. should glowing borders be more/less bright? more/less wide? more/less opaque? etc.).

[Destructavator]

Looks nice IMO.

[Bartleby]

..., but I'd like feedback on what direction people want to go with it first (ie. should glowing borders be more/less bright? more/less wide? more/less opaque? etc.).

hm... u will be able to switch that feature off, right? than it would be cool. well. nice work anyway .
i would make it somewhat less bright and less wide. opaque seems ok.
is the texture near the pole still blurred?

[Mattn]

the borders could maybe be a little bit thinner imo. but it's looking already quite nice.

btw. if you could have a look at the specular light stuff again that would be sweet. playing with the specularExp value didn't turn out into reasonable results.

while you are on glsling the geoscape rendering, athmospheric scattering, glowing for the sun and other neat stuff would be damn sweet

[MCR]

I have to say it once again: Arisian, it is great to see all that stuff happening