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

[Mattn]

nevermind, found them in your previous post - but the whole geoscape now only renders white for me.

[arisian]

Are you sure that the new textures are being read rather than the old ones?  My guess would be that it's reading the old versions of the "season" textures, which would account for the all-white behavior.  Either download the full set of new textures from www.cs.jhu.edu/~ben/graphics/ufoai/ or make symlinks/copies from the season_00 texture from the forum post to all the other season_XX files.  Also, the game seems to prefer .PNG files over .JPG files; if there are files with the same name but different extensions, it loads the .PNG one and ignores the .JPG; if you've got versions of both, this might be why it's not loading the image you were expecting.

Honestly, though, you might not want to put that patch into the SVN; feel free to play with it, but there's still a bug in the way that specularities are calculated.  I'm still trying to figure out exactly what's going on with the view vector to get it "right"; it's close in that patch, but the specular highlights just aren't quite right.  I'll let you know when I get it fixed.

[MCR]

Thanx arisian for investing so much energy here.

So when this is finished we will have UFO-Fights over bump-mapped ever-changing territory with shining cities & glowing nation-borders & a glowing sun in the background to summarize this here a little bit 

I do not know ANY game with such features for the geoscape !!!    

&

because the patch-tracker will only accept 256k of attachments.

Had to smile here, because I had the same problem  ...
Great to see you achieving & optimizing your goals, I wonder what your next project regarding UFO:AI will be ?
I would have quite a few suggestions here, if you are interested... 

[freegamer]

I would consider having no bump map over the oceans as it looks wrong.  They should only change hue according to depth, not cast shadows.

[MCR]

I would consider having no bump map over the oceans as it looks wrong.  They should only change hue according to depth, not cast shadows.

You have seen the final version already ? 

[freegamer]

No, only the screenshots on the previous page.  There is bump mapping happening in the visible ocean.

[MCR]

Just wanted to tell you that there are still massive problems with this patch in current trunk !?
Tested v29210 & there are massive problems:

1. The textures still look ugly.

2. The sunspot is not moving over the earth when time goes on like it should, but is always centered in players view, so if you move the earth around you also move the sunspot.

3. No Glowing Borders

Will attach some screens so you can see what is going on - Watch the time !

[MCR]

Here some additional screens which describe maybe a bit better what is going on:

I will try to integrate the high-res textures from you arisian, maybe this is the fault why it is not working ?

[MCR]

But maybe this all is happening just because I am testing the version from April 1st 

[MCR]

I tested v29210 again, this time with arisian's new textures & IMHO we should really integrate the high-res versions. The details are just looking phantastic !

If it is important for us to keep the installer as small as possible we should rather lower the number of seasons & transitions. We could change the transition period from 1 to 2 months & save a lot of space, but still have the high-quality in-game.
I tested this on a really slow gfx-card (ATI Radeon 3400 Series with passive cooling even) & it worked with this low-end card, so performance cannot be the problem, the loading times might be, but I am sure there will be a way to solve this also, time will solve that problem for sure (with new generations of HDD & RAM & SSDs)

I made some screenshots to show the difference, unfortunately the problem with the code persists even with the new textures & IMHO the city-lights are still too strong & there are all the other lightning problems & problems with the quality of the bumpmapping & the glowing of the nation borders, but man, look @ the details !!! 
  We could even enhance the zoom with this & make the distances @ which airfights take place more realistic

[Muton]

> I tested this on a really slow gfx-card

please dont forget some people do use the onboard gfx-card

[MCR]

please dont forget some people do use the onboard gfx-card

Some people only use a cell-phone

I just do not want to read anymore that graphics in UFO:AI are oldschool & not up-to-date, based on the stone-old Quake II engine, because this tuned engine CAN make great graphics happen...
Do not misunderstand me here, I am all for more graphic-options being built in, to be able to play this great game on old laptops also, but I think we also should deliver for people with modern equipment & today you can get a gfx-card with 1 Gigabyte of RAM for 35 €, so I wonder what will be 'tomorrow', when UFO:AI finally comes out ?!?!?

Read my feature-request regarding this issue here:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2975351&group_id=157793&atid=805245

[Mattn]

we won't add the high res textures due to the reason muton rised above. we can offer another download of a pk3 file. and we will not remove the support for old cards

[DiDiT]

we can offer another download of a pk3 file.

what, like a downloadable high-res pack? that would be cool.

didn't they do that for half-life?

[bayo]

... for deus ex, duke nukem 3D... and many more games...