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Coding / Improved 3D Geoscape Rendering [was: Nightime city lights in 3D geoscape]
« on: March 18, 2010, 12:36:46 am »
So, the 2D geoscape has these nice lights that show up on the "night" portion of the globe. They're nice for several reasons, ranging from "it's pretty" to "it improves immersion" to "it marks the population centers" to "it helps you figure out where stuff is in the dark" (helping to counteract the issues with low ambient lighting).
The method used for the 2D geoscape isn't directly applicable to the 3D version, but I took a look at it this afternoon and it's fairly straightforward to render the lights as emissive sources, which makes them glow nicely at night. The only trouble with this is that they don't "turn off" during the day, though they're a lot less obvious during the day because of the lower contrast with the background.
I've attached a diff (based on the current trunk; it's the output of `svn diff` run in src/client/ ) of the simple changes I made; I make no claim that my little hack is the best way to implement this feature, but it was the quickest way for me to get nightlights. I've also attached the image that I used as an emissive light texture; it's basically just a thresholded version of the standard nightime geoscape texture.
If someone who's actually familiar with the overall code structure wants to add this feature properly (eg. as an option in the menu, or as a selectable "overlay" like the nation borders or radar overlays, etc.) feel free to use it; if the devs don't think this feature is something they want, that's fine too, I'll just keep it around for my personal use.
The method used for the 2D geoscape isn't directly applicable to the 3D version, but I took a look at it this afternoon and it's fairly straightforward to render the lights as emissive sources, which makes them glow nicely at night. The only trouble with this is that they don't "turn off" during the day, though they're a lot less obvious during the day because of the lower contrast with the background.
I've attached a diff (based on the current trunk; it's the output of `svn diff` run in src/client/ ) of the simple changes I made; I make no claim that my little hack is the best way to implement this feature, but it was the quickest way for me to get nightlights. I've also attached the image that I used as an emissive light texture; it's basically just a thresholded version of the standard nightime geoscape texture.
If someone who's actually familiar with the overall code structure wants to add this feature properly (eg. as an option in the menu, or as a selectable "overlay" like the nation borders or radar overlays, etc.) feel free to use it; if the devs don't think this feature is something they want, that's fine too, I'll just keep it around for my personal use.