Oolite Bulletins

Maybe I’m just a grumpy old grump, but I like my suns so bright you can’t see any detail. Maybe some faint traces of sunspots, animated very slowly.

I'm often rendered in C4D some Planets for other projects. I have made some planet tiles like this:



after rendering it looks like this



is it planned to get some detailed planets with a small texture map?
Elite 4 become true?

Whoa, that planet render almost made me faint. If Oolite ever looks that beautiful, I'd spend all my time just looking at it

Well Dajits planets exe isnt far off, but this looks mega-cool!

Any chance you could post you new ship textures as one big OXP on Oosat2? Liked your new adder!

libnoise can make planets look every bit as good as that, including all the way down to the surface. But it is too slow to do that in-game.

The basic idea for well textured planets is simple - the planet just asks for its texture when it is being initialised, and something generates it.

The "something generates it" is the hard bit - getting speed and good quality is something I've not figured out yet.

It is not feasible to pre-generate textures for all the planets because there are 2048 of them. That is a lot of disk space wasted.

dajt wrote:

It is not feasible to pre-generate textures for all the planets because there are 2048 of them. That is a lot of disk space wasted.

Quite a many of those 2048 would end up looking a lot alike, I think... How about just making an experiment with a dozen or so different pre-generated textures...? How many different textures would one need to make it look cool from far away as well as from very close up? or does a single texture per planet do the trick just as well?

LittleBear wrote:

Well Dajits planets exe isnt far off, but this looks mega-cool!

Any chance you could post you new ship textures as one big OXP on Oosat2? Liked your new adder!

This is no problem, but i need some time to make all textures. When it is done I pack all in one file.

I see the problem of the planettextures too, when all textures are loaded at the start of the game. But is it possible to load the textures only when it is needed?

We can unload the textures and I did have code to try and do that for the planet textures, but my lack of Obj-C knowledge bit me and I couldn't make a simple LRU cache work! Pretty embarrasing.

If we pre-generate all textures for all planets we'll end up with 2048 images on disk which will take a lot of space.

Textures-planets generates the textures as they're needed, which takes a lot of time. I was going to then save them on disk for next time they're needed but then we'll still end up with lots of disk files unless they're all deleted when the game is quit.

If we can find a way to generate the textures when they're first referenced, but have it done both quickly and also get good quality, we'll have a great solution.

I'm open to suggestions, but I'd prefer they didn't involve OpenGL shaders because then I can't see them!

dajt wrote:

If we pre-generate all textures for all planets we'll end up with 2048 images on disk which will take a lot of space.

Would that involve a lot of work, and how much space would be needed.
Memory storage seems to get bigger and bigger every year, so is it a real constraint?

It would be really nice if models were only put into memory as they were needed. That and the ability to add subentities with roles would be the two things that I imagine making it possible to make some flavor expansions that really add a lot of visual variants without demanding too much from the hardware.

I guess one way of doing a more detailed planet texture would be to progressively generate detail of the texture in a separate thread after the planet is generated.

The first obvious downside to this is that a separate thread is a little more complex to implement, as is progressively adding detail.

The second downside is that whilst this could allow for fairly detailed planet textures to have been generated by the time a player has flown from the witchspace beacon to the planet, planet detail would be comparatively low for the first planet after launching the game.

The up-sides are that it would allow for fast initialising of the planet, and also allow more powerful computers to create more detailed planets.

I cannot find the read-me...?

Can somebody tell me how to adjust the setting so sun skimming becomes possible while running the TP branch?

In the planetinfo.plist there is a sun distance modifier:

dajt wrote:

If we pre-generate all textures for all planets we'll end up with 2048 images on disk which will take a lot of space.

How about just a dozen (or two) different ones to be used again and again? Compared to the plain Oolite, that would still be an astounding improvement.

Perhaps if you could even mix and match the planet surfaces (12 or 24 different ones) with different cloud covers (6 or 12 different)... That would increase the variety even more.

@reills: Thank you very much. I really like being able to sunskim. And I had to use the trunk exe to test the new commodities.plists for the commie sun stations.

@Wolfwood: That sounds like a good idea.