Oolite Bulletins

CaptKev wrote:

Some great textures being created here!

It must be time to touch-up the polar regions on the textures within System Redux following Ahruman's tutorial.

Your texture on page 1 is also very good. You are still a master at creating planetary textures

I thought png was the best for compression?
Go into Photoshop's File section, down the list it says 'Save for web'
Try different combinations, you may only need 256 colours, maybe less.
That will be under png 8bit,
but there's also png 24bit if this leaves visible steps in the colour changes, but you should be fine if you choose maximum dither.

Besides JPG's are a very 'lossy' format, the more you copy it, the more it loses or misplaces information, dropping the quality each time.

Hmmm my post was ignored, not that I'm bothered if I'm wrong, but I would like to know why out of interest, is there a better way?
I'm aware that png at 256 would leave dither spots in the texture, but that wouldn't matter for a planet, right?
What is ST3C, for us unknowledgeable boys and girls out there?

S3 Texture Compression
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3TC

ZygoUgo wrote:

I thought png was the best for compression?
Go into Photoshop's File section, down the list it says 'Save for web'
Try different combinations, you may only need 256 colours, maybe less.
That will be under png 8bit,
but there's also png 24bit if this leaves visible steps in the colour changes, but you should be fine if you choose maximum dither.

Besides JPG's are a very 'lossy' format, the more you copy it, the more it loses or misplaces information, dropping the quality each time.

Hmmm my post was ignored, not that I'm bothered if I'm wrong, but I would like to know why out of interest, is there a better way?
I'm aware that png at 256 would leave dither spots in the texture, but that wouldn't matter for a planet, right?
What is ST3C, for us unknowledgeable boys and girls out there?

I did not ignore purposely but Arhuman came with the answer on your questions. Now I know why jpg's are not good.

Thanks guys, I wasn't saying I was ignored on purpose I was just bumping the question.
I wanted to know if optimising png's was outdated, essentially. Atleast for bigger images, I suppose with small ones you can't beat bumping something down to five colours?

I'll have a look at that S3 Texture Compression link,
cheers!

EDIT So Ahruman means DXT1 as it holds no alpha? (just out of interest)

Because of the gradual gradients of the sea on many planets, I've been doing things at 24-bit (and let PhotoShop take the burden where it may).

I'm currently rendering a planet at 4096 by 2048. Don't ask: I just want to know what it's like. And it's taking forever!

@Pangloss
I built my texture for Anarlaqu in the up-coming Famous Planets release at 8K x 4K... I feel your pain. I'm buying another 4GB of ram to help.

In the meantime a little tutorial on what you can do with the Hue/saturation sliders. You can quickly give your planet a whole different style. Ideal for making some extreme planets.

First this is the original texture. It's quite extreme.

Next we choose from the menu image> adjustments> Hue/saturation

And by moving the slider you can quickly change the colour
You see. I've taken the extreme planet and made it less extreme. But it can also apply the other way round.

Nice and easy, PAGroove... just the way we like it!

I put the hi-res planet in as Lave, and this is what you see leaving the station.



So I flew around a bit, took in the sights. This is it from behind the station (external view of my sweet little Cobra -- thanks Simon for the Neo models!).



The plug-in for Photoshop / GIMP gives you the option to have cities. Can we integrate that into a later version, so the city lights shine when you look at the dark-side of the planet? This is my planet with cities turned on (rendered in the LunarCellplug-in).

YEah!

I can put it in the FP set if you like although not as Lave but somewhere in the central world in the neighborhood of Zadies

Ice planet Xeer

ZygoUgo wrote:

Hmmm my post was ignored, not that I'm bothered if I'm wrong, but I would like to know why out of interest, is there a better way?
I'm aware that png at 256 would leave dither spots in the texture, but that wouldn't matter for a planet, right?

Using 256 colours can reduce disk space, although it’s not guaranteed to, but it does not affect the amount of memory used in-game. (Graphics cards generally don’t support indexed colour, so neither does Oolite.)

Pangloss wrote:

Nice and easy, PAGroove... just the way we like it!

I put the hi-res planet in as Lave, and this is what you see leaving the station.

Ouch. Think about those of us who prefer portrait-mode browser windows when embedding such large screenshots…! Ctrl-‘-’ only helps so much before the text becomes unreadable…

Those are awesome screenshots!

When & how are you going to release these?