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Thread: Projekt Weltherrscher - "Phase 2"

  1. #31
    Ok, I uploaded my report here.
    Although there is no GL_EXT_texture_compression, I see GL_ARB_texture_compression listed. So well, if you'd be able to get it to work, that'd be great. If not, I guess I'll have to wait a bit till I can get my hands on the game.

  2. #32
    Sadly GL_ARB_texture_compression is something different than GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc. The first one only "tells" that texture compression is supported when it's present and that compressed textures can be used. But all my textures are stored using DDS (DXT1, DXT3 and DXT5) and GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc is necessary to directly upload these compressed formats via OpenGL. And I thought this was an industry standard, as even valve's OpenGL games need this extension to run. So no, it's sadly not easily possible to move away from that extension.

  3. #33
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    Hi Sascha, if compressed textures are not supported on the card you can decompress the images system side before you upload them. The algorithms and various code examples are available if I remember correctly.

    I don't do this either at the moment as I'm GL3.2+ only and the only configurations I know of hardware/software that support GL3 that don't also have st3c are open source drivers on Linux (as the support is still an extension (not core) and patented etc so trouble for open source development)

    It should be quite easy to decompress however, the algorithm must only take a few short steps in silicon to return decompressed values, that means it's probably not going to be anything beefy or stream based.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  4. #34
    Just a quick heads-up :
    I got really annoyed of the old backdrops for the different nations that I made years ago when 4:3 and 5:4 displays where still the majority. So I finally decided to drop them and along also the odd water plane. Thoug the reflecting water plane was a nice shader showcase it always felt unnatrual and, depending on globe zoom and position, would obstruct the lower regions of the globe.

    So I decided to give the game's main view a complete visual overhaul and create a gorgeous looking space skybox (with this great tool from Alex Peterson), you can see the first screenshots of it in action here :



    Looks much better in my opionion and it also feels more natural to see the globe from space and to have a rotating backdrop. You may also notice that the globe looks a bit better now too, as I did some fine-tuning to the shaders and changed texture color and saturation levels to give it a more realistic look. The earth's shader now also (again) has a realisitc day/night transition and was enhanced to also render the clouds (that was a separate sphere up until now). So the shader now uses up to 6 different textures.

    Note that this is still work-in-progress and a new beta will be released soon (no ETA yet). I also plan to add some dynamic objects to the background like the glowing sun and and orbiting moon that may even get used for a global project, so stay tuned
    Last edited by Sascha Willems; 04-03-2013 at 09:47 PM.

  5. #35
    Wow it realy looks nice!
    Do you use some static textures for clouds or are they procedurally generated?

  6. #36
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    That's looking loads better now, the water shader was nice but this sets the right mood
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  7. #37
    Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
    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

    Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
    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.

  8. #38
    Sorry Sacha but I was refering to planetary clouds and not Space backdrop. So how are planetary clouds being done?

  9. #39
    Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
    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

  10. #40
    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.

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