Oolite Bulletins

The artwork for the player ship decals and the NPC ship decals have been seperated out now, the player gets to have a full colour decal on their ship whilst the NPCs get a much simpler randomly re-coloured greyscale decal.
In the dizzy-all-in-1 oxp the player decal artwork is called "griff_player_decal.png", just replace this png with your own artwork to change the decal, the NPC decals come from "griff_decals_set1.png" & "griff_decals_set1_flipped_V.png" - one of which is just a vertically flipped version of the other, due to some UV layout bungles i did when making the ships some of the decals don't work properly unless they've been flipped, hopefully with some further tweaking of the rotation & placement options in Ahrumas decal doce in the shaders i can do away with the need for the flipped texture eventually.

in the Standalone ship downloads, the decal artwork has been split into it's own OXP ("griff_normalmapped_ship_decals.oxp") which needs to be installed along with the ship(s) you've downloaded, this is just to save repeating the same decal png's in all the ship oxps, the oxp is really nothing more than a "Textures" folder with the decal pns from the dizzy all-in-1 in it.

uploaded alloys & wreckage (not yet included in the dizzy all-in-1 bundle oxp)
The objects use Ahrumans cooling metal shader effect, and a bit of clipmapping on some fragments for crinkly edges

Cool... or should that be hot!

And they look great in-game.

damn, what, clipmapping? what?
how does that work on models and what's the limitations?

It doesn't actually work that great to be honest KW, so i've limited it to just a few pieces of junk, wouldn't be a great way to cut out windows or anything in a ship model.

it's fairly simple to set up, there's a clip map texture supplied to the shader, this is just a very simple image, looks a bit like this:

for this example pic above i've left the colour texture poking through in the background and the UV map layout guide lines visible so it's easier to see what's going on in the image, this is the bit of the texture for the crinky junk piece in the pic in the post above, the actual clip map is just black and white and is stored in the colourmap alpha channel, the white bits get cut out of the polygon and not rendered, this is done in the fragment shader with this test: so as the shader runs through all the polygon fragments getting them ready to go onto the players screen, it checks the alpha level of the relevant pixel in the clipmap texture, if it's higher than 0.9 (which pure white is as it's value is 1.0) it immediately discards that polygon fragment and starts processing the next one, as a result the polygon fragment never appears on screen and there's a 'hole' in the polygon instead - massive drawbacks with this though, the polygons have to be 'double sided' so players don't accidentally see through into the non existant interior of the model, and also wings3d really hates double sided polygons, something odd happens to their normals which means the lighting seems to mess up on them sometimes, plus they are wafer thin, literally having no thickness at all so if you see them 'edge on' they disappear from view, a bit like obi wans lightsaber in the original starwars film when he's dueling darth vader, why on earth was that not fixed when they redid the special effects a few years ago?

cheers for that Griff, i was wondering how it would affect being able to see into part of the model etc. Never tried double-sided stuff before either, sounds a bit more trouble than it's worth for where the game is at the mo (that's not a criticism of either).

"why on earth was that not fixed when they redid the special effects a few years ago?"
so they could fix it in anotehr edition and screw more cash out the fans, presumably

Looks like pieces of burnt toast!

Griff wrote:

It doesn't actually work that great to be honest KW, so i've limited it to just a few pieces of junk, wouldn't be a great way to cut out windows or anything in a ship model.

it's fairly simple to set up, there's a clip map texture supplied to the shader, this is just a very simple image, looks a bit like this:

for this example pic above i've left the colour texture poking through in the background and the UV map layout guide lines visible so it's easier to see what's going on in the image, this is the bit of the texture for the crinky junk piece in the pic in the post above, the actual clip map is just black and white and is stored in the colourmap alpha channel, the white bits get cut out of the polygon and not rendered, this is done in the fragment shader with this test:

Code: Select all

   if (colorMap.a > 0.9)  discard; 

so as the shader runs through all the polygon fragments getting them ready to go onto the players screen, it checks the alpha level of the relevant pixel in the clipmap texture, if it's higher than 0.9 (which pure white is as it's value is 1.0) it immediately discards that polygon fragment and starts processing the next one, as a result the polygon fragment never appears on screen and there's a 'hole' in the polygon instead - massive drawbacks with this though, the polygons have to be 'double sided' so players don't accidentally see through into the non existant interior of the model, and also wings3d really hates double sided polygons, something odd happens to their normals which means the lighting seems to mess up on them sometimes, plus they are wafer thin, literally having no thickness at all so if you see them 'edge on' they disappear from view, a bit like obi wans lightsaber in the original starwars film when he's dueling darth vader, why on earth was that not fixed when they redid the special effects a few years ago?

You could use the billboard technique so the alloy could be seen at all times...

http://www.vterrain.org/Plants/Modelling/

since the details in plants and the details in these alloys with transparent holes shares the similarities in regard to the edge on viewing..

However, it would require a new opaque map/clip map, since it will look sort of stupid if some of the edges where aligned..

You could even add more and more to make a little ball of a mess of melted alloys, and use a script to random orientate them, so that each alloy in theory would look different. You could even expand on that to award more than 1 ton of alloys or even some gems. Allow my to suggest it to spawn short life time bright sparks(modeld) as molten metal falls off and vanishes...

Another approach would be to make some of it look like a steel girder that naturally obscures the edges from two directions so you would need to be very edge on to not see it, not so fancy solution but it works.

Cheers Frame...

Griff wrote:

uploaded alloys & wreckage (not yet included in the dizzy all-in-1 bundle oxp)
The objects use Ahrumans cooling metal shader effect, and a bit of clipmapping on some fragments for crinkly edges

OK, so I downloaded it. Hypothetically speaking, what does a pilot have to ram to be able to see these fragments in play? Whenever I shoot a ship, it just explodes (stupid powerful military laser!).

Killer Wolf wrote:

"why on earth was that not fixed when they redid the special effects a few years ago?"
so they could fix it in anotehr edition and screw more cash out the fans, presumably

This reminds me: have you seen Adrian "adywan" Sayre's Revisited version of Star Wars Episodes IV (2007) and V (2010)?

Here's a video for comparison, and yes that IS The Imerial March three years before it was actually released.

And here's Part 1 of 13, so you can watch the whole films in 10 minute segments.

He's working on Episode VI now, but the Blu-Rays will probably be released first.

The glowy alloy should pop up in game every now and again when a ship explodes (ha, yes it does look like burnt toast ), the wreckage though is a bit harder to spot, a piece doesn't always get generated by the explosion and when it does appear, it only has a short lifespan before it explodes itself, 1 or 2 seconds at most i think.

Now you mention it i think i might have seen a clip or two from those reworked Starwars films, an extended Alderaan explosion from the first film when peter cushing tries out the death star gun for the first time, if i remember correctly isn't there a new scene with Jar Jar binks looking out at a rapidly approaching tidal wave!

Griff wrote:

The glowy alloy should pop up in game every now and again when a ship explodes (ha, yes it does look like burnt toast ), the wreckage though is a bit harder to spot, a piece doesn't always get generated by the explosion and when it does appear, it only has a short lifespan before it explodes itself, 1 or 2 seconds at most i think.

Now you mention it i think i might have seen a clip or two from those reworked Starwars films, an extended Alderaan explosion from the first film when peter cushing tries out the death star gun for the first time, if i remember correctly isn't there a new scene with Jar Jar binks looking out at a rapidly approaching tidal wave!

Oh yes!

Pangloss wrote:

Killer Wolf wrote:

"why on earth was that not fixed when they redid the special effects a few years ago?"
so they could fix it in anotehr edition and screw more cash out the fans, presumably

This reminds me: have you seen Adrian "adywan" Sayre's Revisited version of Star Wars Episodes IV (2007) and V (2010)?

Here's a video for comparison, and yes that IS The Imerial March three years before it was actually released.

And here's Part 1 of 13, so you can watch the whole films in 10 minute segments.

He's working on Episode VI now, but the Blu-Rays will probably be released first.

nope, loathe star wars. it was good enough film when i was like 8, but everything went downhill after Empire, and when i watched starwars when i was rereleased i spent most of the time cringing at the pure awfulness of the script. i'll stick w/ Snatch Wars

Strange isn't it the Star Wars thing - I guess it was so in to my psyche when I was growing up (I was 6 in 1977), that I can still watch the original trilogy over and over again (though I still frown at the reworked Han/Greedo/who-fired-first-scene) and yet I bought episodes I-III on DVD when they came out and have never watched them, since I saw them in the cinema.

(When Star Wars:New Hope Special Edition came out a group of us went to the cinema, watched it, went to Toys R Us, bought light sabres, went to the pub, got drunk and in the pub's garden, in the dark had a mass light sabre fight - now that was a silly, silly night!)

I’ve only ever seen the three original Star Wars movies, and only the first one really did it for me. Back in 1977, that opening scene was jaw-droppingly amazing… I can still recall the frisson that went round the cinema, and how it increased when the second, much larger ship appeared. That was worth the admission money all on its own.