Oolite Bulletins

Just a quickie.
I thought I'd try applying bump mapping filters to the ship textures
and a little colour/lightness changes too.
Gotta say, I feel a full cutomisation coming on...

'If you're gonna pimp. Use the GIMP !'

Sounds a good way of increasing the percieved object complexity without taxing either the engine or the computer...

Are these filters visible on the final texture?

I just ask because I know that Oolite does not support bump maps (yet).

Selezen wrote:

Are these filters visible on the final texture?

I just ask because I know that Oolite does not support bump maps (yet).

Yes. I simply opened the Cobra mk3 textures with GIMP and applied the bump map filter. This simply changes the visual appearance (more gnarly/pitted) and does not effect texture functionality s far as I can see..

I guess you could experiment with many other filters too and see how it goes.

Hmmm, my understanding of bump mapping was that the 2d texture would act like a 3d one with the lighting... So if you had an image of a tower (top view) then it's "shadow" would move around as if you were looking down on a 3d object...

Bump mapping affects the way light is reflected from a flat surface by altering the angle at which the surface reflects/diffuses the light across a texture according to the colours of the texture.

One example might be to take the red, blue and green values of a point on the texture and interpret them as x, y and z values of the normal vector to the surface at that point for the purpose of calculating lighting.

For Oolite to add bump mapping I'd have to rewrite the engine to consider two textures for each surface and to use an OpenGL extension to apply the texture to the lighting calculations. It'd look good on high end machines, but for the moment it's not one of my priorities.


You can 'fake' bump mapping by applying bas-relief style shadowing to an existing texture. This won't look so good as 'real bump mapping' but it's a good way to improve a texture's quality.

Ah kewl. So I am not going potty. And yes, would look good - looking forward to seeing what it does end up like.

The relief effect can be seen on most of Draco's work and on the Oresrian Cruiser that's in my S-Ships 1 OXP.

It looks good, but it only looks right from most angles, not all angles.