Oolite Bulletins

Griff wrote:

it'll be cool if they could spawn in clusters of the same type, I'll have to ask the scripting wizards if this is possible, oo,

Maybe its possible. At least I did something similar with the asteroids in asteroid storm. All asteroids are defined with a plain texture in shipdata without any material. The materials are than selectively added by a shipScript. And I see that you also can set a shader directory in the same way. You could take a look in it.
And I remember the material, so I can paste that same material on the boulders it is generating.

Griff wrote:

What do you think about the glow colours? should they cycle through the whole spectrum, or should they just pick one shade and stick to that, getting brighter and fainter?

Personally... one colour, or two or three shades of one colour.

Eric Walch wrote:

Griff wrote:

been mucking about with some dry cracked earth textures and the parallax shader, .... although once again i've UV unwrapped these really badly - some clearly visible and horrible seams in the texture which the parallax makes even worse !

Its not the problem that you wrapped it wrong. The problem is that it will never be possible to UV wrap a seamless tiled map fully around an object.

This is, of course, correct. It is also an old problem with many tricks to fix it. Mostly this involves taking special care over the placement and treatment of the edges of the uv map in the various textures. Sometimes a tool has something special to deal with the problem ... it can get as fancy as "airbrushing" the model in 3D and having the computer work out what the 2D texture is supposed to do. Its not unlike having to deal with the seams in airfix models ;)

I also noticed that oolites <smooth> characteristic seems to add an artifact to asteroids. The neolite asteroids are not smoothed, because of this.

One way to deal with the "mirror" method, is to use two textures - one for each side. Initially the second texture is a mirror of the first, but you only need the edge information, so you can paint all the middle up to the outermost few pixels as something different, and also make a different normalmap.

Another method is to use a fancy projection - spherical or cylindrical. This can be trickier to set up depending on the actual shapes involved, however it will create seams that are easier to handle. There is a big general discussion on mapping spheres around here someplace, as well as notes specific to mapping planets. I have used a spherical map to a square texture for a sphere - there is a big longitudinal seam which is hidden by making the texture itself seamless - there are also pinches at the poles which I hid by cutting discs in the poles and hiding the resulting circle-seam in a line on the surface texture. The polar pinch in the planetary textures is handled by brushing it out in a polar projection.

For the neolite asteroids I just used a blind unfolding and the burned-metal textures (which are fairly undemanding). You have to sit and watch one for a while to spot the seams - go try - no attempt has been made to hide them. So the simplest solution is not to try anything really fancy.


@Griff: heat-glow would be neat on boulders and splinters - since we'd mostly see them after blowing up an asteroid. Glow from asteroids may be due to the presence of radioactive or phosphorescent materials. I'd second the notion that some splinters turn out to be something special - isn't there an oxp like that? Perhaps it turns out to be rich in gold or radioactives? I had a notion awhile-back to have some boulders appear as menger sponges, blowing them up gets lots of little ones which scoop to give alien items. The sponge models have lots and lots of polys for quite small iterations - but I'm trying to get a workable cheat by putting a lot of the small detail in the shader with mixed results. How-ever - it may be simpler to have some splinters actually be bits of old bases and wreckage and so on.

Griff wrote:

proof that not all experiments work out well, the 'iceteroid' :-

http://www.box.net/shared/apoq0kl2oi

Don't think these are going to make the oxp, i'm aiming for reflective ice boulders with frosty patches on them, i've hacked a horribly mangled version of the glitter shader from rendermonkey into it (without the random noise texture it uses to help randomise the glitter effect - so you will see the sparkles form odd symmetrical patterns at some angles)

Griff, try using negative image on the original lava texture then add extra contrast, this produces quite a reasonable ice world.

Thanks for the UVing and texturing tips guys, these rocks have been a bit of a pain to unwrap without getting horrible distortion, i've settled on an approach that results in a UV map that looks sort of like what would happen to the peel on a satsuma if you placed it on a table then dropped a really really heavy book on it, about 20 times, it means the texture isn't so distorted as it might be with a cylindrical unwrap but there are more seams to deal with!

I've thought of another approach to get sparkling ice, i could put random patterns of tiny dots in each channel of a texture, then fade each channel in and out with a sine wave at different rates adding the resultant pattern to the specularity on the model, i guess this would produce a sort of 'twinkling' effect as the dots fade in and out, might look ok, frame demo'ed a tiled normal map on his battle cruiser model with awesome results, so i could tile the spec texture so it stays really sharp and high res on the model without needing a massive texture.

It'd be kind of interesting if you mine one of those and after processing a shard you find that you've got.. Water.

Griff wrote:

Thanks for the UVing and texturing tips guys, these rocks have been a bit of a pain to unwrap without getting horrible distortion, i've settled on an approach that results in a UV map that looks sort of like what would happen to the peel on a satsuma if you placed it on a table then dropped a really really heavy book on it, about 20 times, it means the texture isn't so distorted as it might be with a cylindrical unwrap but there are more seams to deal with!

Should be quite similar to how they produce globes out of pieces of carefully cut pieces of paper.

Ummmmmmmm...

Deep Horizon Industries site is down?

????

Anywhere else I can get the complete package? and is Dizzy's all in 1 still up to date?

I think this link is working.

Site is working for me currently. Can someone confirm either way? And if it is down, what is the error code? 404, 403, 503?

No problems here... came up real fast.

Service Unavailable

HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

Is it something on my end? All other websites seem to work fine.

*EDIT* Using firefox if that makes a diff. Ive visted the site before, so I'm not sure what the issue is.

I've tested it via FF3.6.10, IE8, and Safari 5.0.2 all with positive results.

EDIT: Could an admin please split this off and toss the resultant thread over into Outworld?

I get the same error in I.E. and Firefox.

Must be on my end. Been having other weird issues as well, websites wasn't one of them until now.

Thanks for your help!

OneoftheLost wrote:

..and is Dizzy's all in 1 still up to date?

The all-in-1 oxp hosted at deephorizons is the up to date one, it's got all the ships apart from the rock hermit which will probably only ever be available as a standalone since it's been dragging down frame rates for a lot of players, it's easier to dump it from your game as a standalone oxp rather than having to faff about editing it out of the bundle