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Author Topic: Improved 3D Geoscape Rendering [was: Nightime city lights in 3D geoscape]  (Read 70597 times)

Offline arisian

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Yeah, in those screenshots I agree; it looks less bright in mine.  I guess maybe I should hard-code a value instead of using the standard "ambient" light as a baseline.  I'll add a patch to the SVN in just a minute.

Offline MCR

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Hey, arisian !
Maybe you could manage to integrate another option:
A possibility to turn off the text-overlay that covers that beautiful earth so superficial...
That would be nice. We could place the button for that right there where the button for the nations-borders-overlay also is. There is even some place left there, like designed for this idea ;)
If you make the code I would volunteer in making the button ;)

Offline BTAxis

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I rather think that space is used.

Offline MCR

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Sorry, I did not know that.
But don't you also think that the player should have the ability to turn off the nation-text-overlay ?

Offline BTAxis

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Maybe it should be turned off by default and shown only when the nation overlay is toggled?

Offline MCR

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Also a good idea.

Offline Kildor

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I like this idea. And turn this overlay on at campaign start..

Offline MCR

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btw, does someone else have problems with the latest version of this ?
I just started dev29353 & the globe is transparent again ?!

Sorry, wrong alarm. I somehow f**k*d up the installer, because I was doing too much stuff @ the same time during compilation yesterday (was creating a normalmap of the earth's landmasses with 7 Overlays @ the same time ;)), the computer was slowing down to a crawl & the installer somehow made a 0pics.pk3 with errors hidden inside.
The funny thing is that the installer did not warn me that something was wrong when installing, but when I tried on another computer it began having write errors...
Sorry again for raising the alarm here...   :-[
« Last Edit: April 12, 2010, 11:19:55 am by MCR »

Offline BTAxis

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Works fine here.

Offline MCR

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Just a thought:
Maybe we could combine our nation flags somehow with the text overlay, this plain text just looks to 'simple' IMHO  ::)

Offline MCR

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 :-[ Sorry, wrong topic, I did not want to post this here.
Did I really post this here ?!
It was a mistake. This was supposed to be in UFO Animations. If administrators like they can delete this here & Mattn's response also, I got the answer now ;)

@Mattn: Could you help me in telling me in which limit I ran to when I change just a few more buttons (=load more textures) & the battlescape won't start anymore (I get thrown back to Skirmish Level Selection) ?!
I can imagine this being this nasty '1024 texture slots' limit you were writing about...
Because normally, when something is set up the wrong way in the material file, the level will start anyway.
If I touched one of these limits, is there a way of upgrading those or is there no other way out, than to use less different textures ?
« Last Edit: April 12, 2010, 10:57:18 pm by MCR »

Offline Mattn

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If I touched one of these limits, is there a way of upgrading those or is there no other way out, than to use less different textures ?

exactly - use less different textures, try to combine them or reduce the animation frames - often the animations are already looking good with only 4 frames and some color effect or scretching.

Offline MCR

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Hey,
I made a ultra-high-quality normalmap of the earth's landmasses using the 'multiple-overlay' technique & 8 layers, which could be used for the high quality version of this, as arisian's normalmap included in the 'high' version has 'just' 4096x2048 resolution. So if someone wants to try this, feel free to shout out, then I can prepare a ultra.pk3 to test  ;)

Offline MXcom

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I'll go ahead and disable specularity for now; to be honest, I don't really like the way it currently looks either.  I think it looks nice from an oblique angle, but when the specularity is right in the middle of the view it looks wrong.

In terms of "earth from space has no specularity," it depends on the images you look at.  For some examples of earth from space with specular reflection:
[...]


Dropping in to give my 2 cents to that topic one page back...

I also thought that the sun reflection on the earth was looking wrong, so I'm glad you decided to remove it - but looking at the pictures you linked to in the quoted post, I had an idea how you could maybe - instead of removing it - improve it (so it does not look wrong anymore).
My idea is: let the reflection only alter the brightness (aka intensity or value or lightness in various colour spaces), not the colour.
Actually, this made me think further - maybe the real cause is that the sun is much too yellow? Looking at your third link (and also other space images), the sun seems to be much much more white when viewed from space.
Maybe the real solution is not making the reflection only apply to brightness, but making the sun much less yellow in the first place?


Just some thoughts...

Offline Mattn

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