New Feature: "Glow" textures

[MCR]

Alien Panel & Seat:

[arisian]

Personally, I think that some of those textures may still be too bright, while others are looking good.  The "seats" looks like a nice subtle effect from the screenshot; the ship exteriors are probably still a bit too bright (the fighter in particular).  The issue is not so much what the maximum intensity is, but that the intensity is so uniform across the ship.  I think it would be more interesting to have, for example, the engines be fairly bright, with the rest of the green parts having a more subtle, dull glow; maybe weapons could be intermediate, or something.  But this is all really just a matter of aesthetics and personal opinion.  As you said, anyone can edit the textures to change brightness, distribution, etc.  In fact, I may poke at some of the textures myself at some point; just not tonight.

[Kildor]

May be we should pause feature-additions? We *must* release 2.3 in near future. May be mattn has other opinion, but I guess we need branch 2-3-stable and only after that add this major functional to the trunk.

[bayo]

It is only textures, right? then its only a polishing. Designers can validate it easily.

[Kildor]

not only textures but also renderer itself. And whole GLSL system.

PS: btw, I`ve got an repeated error in console when start a mission (2010/04/21 15:20:27 R_ProgramVariable: "GLOWMAP" - No program bound.
)

[Mattn]

May be we should pause feature-additions? We *must* release 2.3 in near future. May be mattn has other opinion, but I guess we need branch 2-3-stable and only after that add this major functional to the trunk.

/offtopic on

there are still texts missing for the ufopedia - i've asked for them a few weeks now but got no feedback from Winter or BTAxis, as long as they aren't there we can't release 2.3. And adding some eye-candy features that can be deactivated by cvar is a good thing imo. Also due to the new features (glow) some shader bugs were fixed. I don't like the idea to branch until we are feature complete (in terms of missing content/ufopedia articles) - because time is already something i don't have much of in the last few weeks, i don't want to waste even more for merging in-between branches.

and new textures are not really new features. once we have the content we have to give the translators a few weeks to finish the translations, but i will create the branch once this is done. merging the translations back into a branch is an acceptable "waste" of time.

@kildor, this is something we should discuss on the mailinglist and not here by hijacking other threads imo.

/offtopic off

[Hertzila]

@bayo: The aliens only turn the lights on when landing somewhere & turn them off while flying  

That would actually be against what I'm guessing they are (and what is the most logical conclusion for what they are IMO): heat radiators, designed to keep the ships critical parts (engines, weapons, cockpit) from overheating. In other words, they have to keep them on while flying, otherwise their ships would just melt. On ground they don't have to glow but you can easily say that they keep the ships electric systems online (engines need cooling then) and radiators are also precooling everything to lessen the load on take-off. Crashed ships on the other hand shouldn't have them on or have them very dim.

And as arisian said, have the engines and their immediate radiators shine brightly and the further you go from there, the dimmer the color will be. Weapons should have fairly bright radiators too, as melting particle beam cannons can be rather dangerous and, at the very least, inaccurate.

PS. They look great!  

[MCR]

/offtopic on

Have you ever seen thiz before ? 

There were some errors regarding filenames & also errors in the ufo scripts, I will correct this & prepare a patch 

/offtopic off

The glowing eyes are for this topic   

[Bartleby]

are those glowing eyes a bug? i like them =).

btw. i like all your new textures and "glow"textures. good work mcr and arisian.

[MCR]

One who already glows & another one who could need some (very decent  ) glowing...

[Borsti67]

I agree with Bayo - I like these glowing effects very much, as long as they're cool "accents", so please don't misuse (overuse) it!
Glowing engines - great, may be additional some small (!) spots related to the weapon systems, but that should be mostly all for the UFOs.

[Bartleby]

hm... until now i like all glow-effects (as i said). just some are maybe a bit too bright, but mcr is getting better with that.
there are many things that can use glow even police cars. there can hardly be too much glow - i think only the brightness makes a glow "bad" or "good" (the game tron is an very very good example of bad =)).
to be safe a slider like gamma-correction would be great but not really a must have.

edit: the idea to make the barrel glow is more than great btw. - makes "the other" textures look really old =).

[MCR]

Thanks, bartleby.

/offtopic on

Has someone of you ever seen Ortnoks in light or medium armor in-game like in those posts above, or has someone ever seen one-eyed Ortnoks in-game ?

/offtopic off

[MCR]

I am currently preparing a (very decent & subtle  ) weapons glow update patch & wanted to share some impressions with you folks...

Comments are very welcome !
Please do not forget to also answer my question if you have ever seen Ortnoks with light & medium armor or one-eyed Ortnoks in-game !?

I will post a pk3 for the weapons-update as it will be easier for Mattn to integrate the files

I will also try my best to look @ all the suggestions presented here to make v3 of the U.F.O.-models-glow perfectly (less uniform & generally more decent glow) & will prepare a patch for those also, but this might take some time...

Here some screens of actual glow-textures-work:

[MCR]

Ammunition, MedKit, IR-Googles & some more weapons...