New graphics: Space Anomalies and Nebulae

[digdug]

I'm testing some textures for nebulae, the original violet nebula is nice, but what about more colors ?


http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/407/test2yh6.jpg

I discovered 2 things: for seamless tiling images should be large at least 512x512, otherwise you will have black spacing.
Larger images are cropped automatically, but the original nebula.jpg image is 640x640, so I suppose George uses the rest of the image for details of the borders of the nebulae ingame.

[EDIT] I'm changing the title periodically to reflect the last discussed CG topic.

[Ttech]

I'm testing some textures for nebulae, the original violet nebula is nice, but what about more colors ?


http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/407/test2yh6.jpg

I discovered 2 things: for seamless tiling images should be large at least 512x512, otherwise you will have black spacing.
Larger images are cropped automatically, but the original nebula.jpg image is 640x640, so I suppose George uses the rest of the image for details of the borders of the nebulae ingame.

Nice job, though it look kina like an explosion.

[bimbel]

Nice job, though it look kina like an explosion.

You know that most of those nebulas out there are from explosions ?
And this one looks way more realistic than the ingame one!

[OddBob]

A "realistic nebula" would be one that you don't even notice - hundreds of times more dense than standard interstellar medium is still sparser than industrial-grade vacuum.

That said, they're a fun gameplay element, I'm not in favor of removing them. (after all consistency is more important than realism) Assuming you ignore the seams, I don't think that looks more "real" than the current - it's certainly a more convincing depiction of a nebula but it appears to be very far away - that nebula is several light years across at LEAST (I think it's the Carina nebula - taken form the endgame screen, right?) And while background nebulae are cool they don't interfere with sensors.

The current one does have quite a clouds filter feel to it though, doesn't it?

[digdug]

yep it's the carina nebula, I made a seamless tiling from a system image of the free Image Mod for Space Empires 4.

My idea was to add more variety to the nebulae ingame.
In particular having both sensor blocking nebulae and some semi-transparent colored backgrounds when you travel in a system (non sensor blocking), right now I'm playing with the masks, but it seems that the game accepts only white or black as nebulae masks, any shade of grey is considered as full white, so no semi-transparent nebulae.

moreover <ImageVariants> doesn't work inside a SpaceEnvironmentType, so if we want different colored "standard nebulae" we have to create different SpaceEnvironmentType and call them inside the SystemType we want.
Probably there is a better way to randomize the color, but I cannot figure it out.
(PS: just like the random colored ships, remember ?)


[EDIT] and what do you think about a new sun ?

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/380/test3ko7.jpg

[Xephyr]

Both the sun and nebulae look nice, but what if there was some sort of wind in the nebula that pushed the particles in an animation? and why not try an animated sun with occasional solar flares and promenades?

[Fossaman]

Just a little nitpick here; you mean promenances, not promenades. A promenade is a dance, a dance step, a parade, or an architectural feature.

I like the sun a lot, but I'd like it even better if you hue-shifted it towards yellow a little. It looks a touch bilious right now. The nebula looks flat out awesome, though.

[OddBob]

The sun looks odd to me - like it's dirty. I think it could lose the sunspots - you'd never see them anyway (as it's just an artifact of the photography anyway, there are no dark spots on the sun) - if you could everything else woudl be black (as every part of the sun is much brighter than your ship). However I suppose that bring up the photographic question - do you attempt to portray things as they are in real life or as they appear on film? (i.e. lens flare, diffraction spikes, exposure artifacts like above, etc).

[Betelgeuse]

sunspots are just spots that are a little less bright that's why they look dark. You compare the spot to what is around it and it appears dark. (kind of like with a bright light outside a room can look darker than it would without the light outside) There are ways of seeing sunspots without using photos.

But the star really needs to be animated for sunspots and the like would look good.

[Ttech]

sunspots are just spots that are a little less bright that's why they look dark. You compare the spot to what is around it and it appears dark. (kind of like with a bright light outside a room can look darker than it would without the light outside) There are ways of seeing sunspots without using photos.

But the star really needs to be animated for sunspots and the like would look good.

yeah, but I'd like them to be a little more scale.

[Betelgeuse]

you mean like a much lower temp like sunspots really are? You don't take brightness on a scale you do it by comparison of the things around it.

[OddBob]

Compared to the small amount of reflected light that you see your ship with, all parts of the sun are very bright. If you could see the sunspots as black, you wouldn't see anything but the sun as your ships is darker than the sunspots and darker than black = black.

Transcendence has a non-photorealistic look (that I like) - anything replaced should be drawn or rendered in a similar fashion to current iamges (look at the terrestrial planet for a perfect example I think.

[Betelgeuse]

hmm so what do you think would work best for stars? personally I would like to see them animated in some way. I know its not to scale but it would be more for creating a "active" system. (that does open the possibility of a dead system too )

[digdug]

well, I just tested a 2 frames star image, and it works. So animated stars are easily implemented.
Now we need a graphics artist. I'm not good, besides using a little the "seamless tiling" button and copy and paste a 1-Hydrogen spectrum of the Sun in false colors.

OddBob Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 4:08 am
Transcendence has a non-photorealistic look (that I like) - anything replaced should be drawn or rendered in a similar fashion to current iamges (look at the terrestrial planet for a perfect example I think.

yep, probably we should stick with something that gives the original feeling.

[digdug]

advanced texturing (for 1 of my mods)

ok, I was testing some 8-bit masks for advanced effects on the background of the starsystem.
As you can see the texture is indeed transparent (i marked with red arrows the stars behind), but there is no fading of the texture itself, the brightness of the texture is always the same.


http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/2255/test6cb2.jpg

to the left: ingame screenshot, to the right the mask of the texture