Oolite Bulletins

It's probably just HDRR lighting (3D light, unlike Oolites fake lights done with glows) or perhaps just Bloom...
There's definatly some dynamic lighting going on there (plasma cannons lighting up the hull when hitting, etc)

None of which can be done in Oolite... it can be faked to a certain degree, but no where near as good as that.

As for smooth in Oolite, it could be better...
There's only 1 light source in Oolite at any time (the sun)
and no self-shadows or shadows at all...

Lighting and the suns/stars are my biggest gripe with Oolite, there's only so much you can do with effects maps.

ADCK wrote:

As for smooth in Oolite, it could be better...
There's only 1 light source in Oolite at any time (the sun)
and no self-shadows or shadows at all...

2 lights.-)

ADCK wrote:

Lighting and the suns/stars are my biggest gripe with Oolite, there's only so much you can do with effects maps.

I can understand the suns, but what is wrong with the stars?

another_commander wrote:

ADCK wrote:

Lighting and the suns/stars are my biggest gripe with Oolite, there's only so much you can do with effects maps.

I can understand the suns, but what is wrong with the stars?

technically suns are stars...
I didn't mean the background image, that's fine.
I say "suns/stars" cause some people call 'em suns, some call 'em stars, I call 'em big spheres of flaming gas!

ADCK wrote:

and no self-shadows or shadows at all...

I beg to differ!
If you'd like to try out a recent ( rev2964+ ) trunk build, you'll be able to notice shadows. Move behind any big enough object to blot the sun, and you should notice a remarkable lack of sunlight on your hull.

Self shadows & more than one light source (either another sun or enabling light emitting oxp models) are not likely to be implemented too quickly though.
On a positive note, we are considering the possibility of using 3d engine libraries instead of the home brewed one for after the (mythical) next stable release. That would definitely improve the shadows situation! (and definitely well within the decade! )

Any particular engine? Ogre perhaps?

Ogre is a nice engine. However, we haven't got to the next release yet, much less to the next stable release. Once we do have a stable release, we can start having a proper look at the various options.

If anyone wants to do a bit of research on the various 3D engines pros & cons, by all means!

Kaks wrote:

ADCK wrote:

and no self-shadows or shadows at all...

I beg to differ!
If you'd like to try out a recent ( rev2964+ ) trunk build, you'll be able to notice shadows. Move behind any big enough object to blot the sun, and you should notice a remarkable lack of sunlight on your hull.

I didn't expect that! Good to hear.

Kaks wrote:

Ogre is a nice engine. However, we haven't got to the next release yet, much less to the next stable release. Once we do have a stable release, we can start having a proper look at the various options.

If anyone wants to do a bit of research on the various 3D engines pros & cons, by all means!

Delta3D (supported by the US DoD and used in military spec training sims - effectively a collection of Open Source libraries brought under one banner)

http://www.delta3d.org/ - our PhD student has just built a driving sim with it and an entity generator (AI crowd output under DIS)

Kaks wrote:

ADCK wrote:

and no self-shadows or shadows at all...

I beg to differ!
If you'd like to try out a recent ( rev2964+ ) trunk build, you'll be able to notice shadows. Move behind any big enough object to blot the sun, and you should notice a remarkable lack of sunlight on your hull.

Self shadows & more than one light source (either another sun or enabling light emitting oxp models) are not likely to be implemented too quickly though.
On a positive note, we are considering the possibility of using 3d engine libraries instead of the home brewed one for after the (mythical) next stable release. That would definitely improve the shadows situation! (and definitely well within the decade! )

Finally got around to testing this out, not quite what i expected, the transition form shadowed to non-shdowed is instantaneous... Perhaps some sort of fade-in fade-out could be added? Otherwise, good job
Sure it's accurate, but since the engine doesn't support actual shadows (eg no half in half out of shadows. either all in our all out) it looks odd with no transition between them.

Apart from the amount of unavailable extra time it would require, providing per-fragment shadows (which is part of what is needed for 'actual' shadows) would very easily render all currently shaderified ships 'broken'. The way it was implemented was specifically to avoid any such breakage...

Ah OK. Well if that talk of getting the game switched over to a new graphics engine ever actually leads to a new engine (which likely wont happen for a long long time) I hope this gets revisited

Would I be right in thinking that for those of us running Oolite on hardware with precisely zero pixel shaders, the base game with OXPs such as System Redux, Sung's textures, the upcoming DeepSpace non-shady textures: the game looks about as good as it's going to get?

P.S. I'm not playing right now, but does the lighting shade the whole polygon, or does it shade per vertex? (Not referring to vertex shaders)

Poro wrote:

Would I be right in thinking that for those of us running Oolite on hardware with precisely zero pixel shaders, the base game with OXPs such as System Redux, Sung's textures, the upcoming DeepSpace non-shady textures: the game looks about as good as it's going to get?

There might be improvements to shaderless mode at some point, such as light maps.

Poro wrote:

P.S. I'm not playing right now, but does the lighting shade the whole polygon, or does it shade per vertex? (Not referring to vertex shaders)

Per-vertex, although most objects use per-polygon normals, so this makes little difference. (Objects with normal smoothing include asteroids and the “arc details” around the docking bay on the built-in Coriolis.)

a fab boiling sun shader spotted in you tubes 'you might also be interested in these videos' list whilst i was gawping at the Oolite vids linked to on the smashing new website:
http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~m ... rials&id=1