Oolite Bulletins

Idea for a mission-related use of a tetrascreen. Whoever is interested, feel free to use it:

There is a secret mission-relevant information written beneath an ad on a tetrascreen. The player has to shoot at the screen until the ad itself vanishes and the information underneath becomes visible. (Should be doable with shaders, shouldn't it?) He then also has to shoot at the new surface in order to destroy it, so that nobody else can read it. If he fails to do so, an opponent will be following him to wherever he has been sent to.

Commander McLane wrote:

Idea for a mission-related use of a tetrascreen. Whoever is interested, feel free to use it:

There is a secret mission-relevant information written beneath an ad on a tetrascreen. The player has to shoot at the screen until the ad itself vanishes and the information underneath becomes visible. (Should be doable with shaders, shouldn't it?) He then also has to shoot at the new surface in order to destroy it, so that nobody else can read it. If he fails to do so, an opponent will be following him to wherever he has been sent to.

Should be possible (Ahruman's Shady Billboard for example) but surely only people with shader capable gfx and/or shaders turned on in the game will be able to get the mission!

Some possible ads for the Constore boards ... not sure if these need to have a transparent background or not!



(OK, I'm lazy and I recycled a lot of previous adverts...)

I think they need a white or black background as (going back over the magic trickery in the Constore thread) Griff seems to do something to the alpha channel that makes the glow work. If Griff is reading this at some point he may explain...

I think Pangloss did lots of Ad recycling for some of the later sets so you're in good company!

Very cool work Disembodied!
D_H is right, the shader needs a greyscale image which it uses as an 'illumination' map which makes the textures appear to be glowing when seen ingame - i *think* how it works is after all the colour & lighting has been calculated for the polygon fragment, the shader then comes back and multiplies the colours in the glow ad texture by the level of grey in the greyscale illumination map and writes this back into the final colour value for the fragment, since this is done after the shadowing has been calculated it makes it look like the pixels are emitting their own light as they are written back in over the already shadowed colour value.
since we only need a 1 channel image as an illumination map it makes sense to stick it in the otherwise unused alpha channel of the colour texture image rather than supply a whole new image and take up twice as much video memory.

the illumination map:


the colour image with the illumination map in the alpha channel - ready for the shader:


It only takes a few minutes to merge the textures in paintshop so it's no problem for everyone to post their images here without an alpha, and i can merge one in and repost the image ready for the shader

Great, thanks, Griff!

Still haven't figured out the shader stuff ... but here's a possible roof billboard and/or a 256x128 animated ad:


















Or are these in poor taste? It's very late ...

Just for the record, in the glowad sets try avoiding ads that have a white background because in full shader mode they tend to glow too mach (to the extent that at the end you only see a flash!!). This is highly noticeable in the glowads of shainsboory’s in set_E. Disembodied’s glowads do also suffer from that effect (because there are a lot of them with white background) but they are acceptable so there in.

@Griff: Are you sure that all glowads in the set are used in the station because I am under the impression that the station carries only half of them!!! I suspect that your initial intention was to have a deferent glow ad in every side of the extention that the station has for them, but (with one exception) this extention has the same ad in both sides.. I have confirm that also with your original trade outpost so it is not something that i broke. It seems that i am the only one that actually test the wip

The skull ad as it is does not fit to the roof of the station because it does not have movement and it does not give you the impression of a neon billboard. Now as a 256x128 ad would be very nice (as long as someone can bind the 4 pngs into one)

I think you're right Ark, i just checked the model file and it was indeed only using half the ads, i think i was going to use the other ads on different versions of the station or something. anyway, i've uploaded a new version of the glowads object that uses all the ads in the texture map
http://www.box.net/shared/kyeu3574ro

Thanks, Ark. My apologies for not putting the four ads together into one! It was very late ...

Anyway, here's the one-piece PNG, with a slightly altered spelling of "gottem":



(Edit: new version uploaded minus irritating little white line)

Griff wrote:

I think you're right Ark, i just checked the model file and it was indeed only using half the ads, i think i was going to use the other ads on different versions of the station or something. anyway, i've uploaded a new version of the glowads object that uses all the ads in the texture map

Griff you are my hero!!!!! i can not believe that until now we actually could not see half of the glowads!!!!!
But there is a small issue with this new model. One of the glowad extensions is now too close to the upper 1x2 billboard (see the image), can you put it somewhere else (i mean somewhere else in the station )

@disempodied:Sorry about not applied sooner but with all this excitement with the missing glow ads ….(I still cannot believe it - such a loss of good ads) here your ad and your glow ads. There will be in the game (in a future set of your ad here – not sure about when since it is not up to me)



I also have to mention that this static image cannot include all the magnitude of the movement that this ad has with the smoke of the cigar

I notice that the Rizala glow ad in the top right hand corner is mirrored (or possibly flipped). It looks ok in the bottom left corner of Disembodied's glowad png and Griff's shader modification...


Can't believe you didn't notice with you being the only one testing this wip...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I notice that the Rizala glow ad in the top right hand corner is mirrored (or possibly flipped). It looks ok in the bottom left corner of Disembodied's glowad png and Griff's shader modification...


Can't believe you didn't notice with you being the only one testing this wip...

I am afraid that now that I can actually see all the glow ads there are more ads with words that have the same problem (do not worry not to many). Before today it was impossible to detect that bug simply because the ad was not there. But I am not complaining, because if we short this out constores will look even better with twice the amount of ads. Moreover the new griff model for the glowads corrects other imperfections in the glowads that I have noticed in the past.

Perhaps Griff can explain the inversion and then we can work out if it's easier to flip the incorrect ads in the diffuse map or whether griff can do it in his fragment code.

I should finish some ads off over the weekend - "ood\es" billboard (2-Frame "flasher") - 4 ads for the asteroid billboard and a new 256x256 2 frame ad - but won't have access to my oolite-capable machine until early next week - so will post but hope others can test on my behalf.

oops! I've fixed the mirrored ad texture and moved the billboard to the other side of the station to a less cluttered spot, same download link as above.
The flipped advert was completely my fault, i moved some of the billboard surfaces around in the texture map so they they didn't double up on ads and instead showed some of the new ones that weren't previously being displayed, i forgot to check for backwards writing and the image i was using to test had some Japanese text on it so i completely didn't notice it was back-to-front!
I had to make a new billboard as 1 of the ads didn't have a free slot, i forgot when i placed it on the model that it might be in a location near where an animated billboard might appear, hopefully it's in a safe spot now