Projekt Weltherrscher - "Phase 2"

[SilverWarior]

Wow it realy looks nice!
Do you use some static textures for clouds or are they procedurally generated?

[phibermon]

That's looking loads better now, the water shader was nice but this sets the right mood

[Sascha Willems]

Wow it realy looks nice!
Do you use some static textures for clouds or are they procedurally generated?

No, the backdrop is static. It's generated with this nice tool and post processed in Photoshop (the tool sadly generates some errors when creating the textures). Having a complete dynamic space backdrop with moving clouds and pulsating nebulaes sure would be nice, but that'd take a lot of time. So maybe (or maybe not) sometime in the future

That's looking loads better now, the water shader was nice but this sets the right mood

Thanks It completly changes the feel of the game. I played a bit yesterday (late at night) with some ambient space drone music in the background and boy, what a difference to the mood of the old backdrops. Right now I'm even thinking about changing the soundtrack to some ambient space drone music.

[SilverWarior]

Sorry Sacha but I was refering to planetary clouds and not Space backdrop. So how are planetary clouds being done?

[Sascha Willems]

Sorry Sacha but I was refering to planetary clouds and not Space backdrop. So how are planetary clouds being done?

Ah, didn't realize you were talking about the globe's clouds

And no, they're not procedurally generated. Just a simple texture with cloud information in one texture channgel and specular information in another color channel, which is then just moving around the globe. So no procedurally generated stuff here, though that may be a great idea. Since it's a shader anyway I could do something with noise I guess. Maybe I'll take a look into this

[SilverWarior]

When developing my entry to 2nd PGD mini competiotion (which was never finished) I have been fidling with procedural content generation quite a lot.
Amongst other things I tried generating clouds using "Perlin noise" and even got some nice results. But the problem was that then I tried rendering that texture to sphere it got disturbed due the way how spherical texture projection works so in the end it almost looked ugly.
I should probably have used several smaller textures and then projecting each of them to the sphere so the distorition would me much lower.
Anywhay procedural texture generation development is currently on hold as I first need to design a way to make nice game GUI in an easy manner.

[Sascha Willems]

It took me much longer than expected, but I just uploaded a new release of the open beta for windows and linux :

(Windows) Projekt “W” – Phase 2 – Open Beta rev. #170 (~74 MBytes)
(Linux, i386) Projekt “W” – Phase 2 – Open Beta rev. #170 (~78 MBytes)

Screenshots :



This release includes the new 360° space backdrops for the main view as well as the main menu, and the extensive ingame tutorial (70 chapters, over 25,000 words in two languages) that should help starters get a grip of the game but also includes information that experienced users may be interested in. Other than that there were some small bugfixes and changes that can be found in the changelog.