Oolite Bulletins

Due to the amazing power of my giant brain additive blending, the galaxy/nebula/space blob texture has been reduced to one channel instead of four. This means we can put four textures in the same amount of video memory, for a more variegated sky. Mmm, variegation. Because I don’t feel like drawing four textures (well, two more, but hey) I’m going to make you lot do it give you the opportunity to contribute. (Bah. I wonder if there’s a phpBB mod to enable strike-through text?)

Rules:

• All entries must be accompanied by a statement permitting distribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license and the GNU General Public License version 2.
• Entries must be greyscale images, 256 by 256 pixels.
• Entries must be pure black around the edges.
• The content of the image shall be an approximation of a galaxy or nebula, taking up a reasonable proportion of the interior of the image.
• The Oolite team reserves the right to modify or merge winning entries.
• Entries shall be posted in this thread before the next full release (i.e., not test release) of Oolite, whenever that happens. (It won’t be this month.)
• The judges reserve the right to laugh at anyone taking this too seriously or treating it as a formal competition.

My intention is to have the multi-blob-texture sky implemented by Oolite version 1.70 (possibly 1.69). In the event that more than two entries are submitted, winners will be picked at the arbitrary decision of the judges, i.e. me and any other developer who happens to voice an opinion. Discussion of entries in this thread is encouraged and likely to influence the outcome. The governing criterion is that the selected four textures look good together in the game. Winners have the option of having their name mentioned in Oolite documentation.

Here are two initial entries. The first is a slightly adjusted version of the texture being used at the moment. The second is one I threw together in about the same amount of time it took to write this post.

Oh, yeah… the initial change leading up to this may solve the stars-visible-through-plants issue that has occasionally been reported.

Ahruman wrote:

Oh, yeah… the initial change leading up to this may solve the stars-visible-through-plants issue that has occasionally been reported.

stars-visible-through-plants? Is interstellar flora available in an OXP then?

Any good to you?

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I hereby permit distribution under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license and the
GNU General Public License version 2.

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These are extensive redo's of photo's off the 'net ( execpt
the BH - obviously ) but had no copyright notices attached...

Do the images have to be 100% original?

P.S.
Could do you a nice milkyway if you like.
( Odd fluffy filling not included )

Nice idea! Here's my entry:



(Original image by NASA.)

And I forgot: Distribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license and the GNU General Public License version 2 permitted.

Charlie wrote:

Any good to you?

Mostly not. Take a look at the nebulae/blobs in game. Each one consist of several versions of my first example layered on top of each other. It’s necessary that there’s no clear square border and no background stars. The first one might do with a bit of editing, the second too one if it weren’t for the truncated pillary bits.

Because there are dozens to hundreds of the things in the game’s sky, they shouldn’t be too recognizable. The original one is very good in this respect. My spiral is less so, so it’d have to occur with a lower frequency.

I’d have provided a better explanation to start with, but quantifying exactly what’s needed is hard. :-)

Incidentally, if you want to test a texture in the game, the process is:

• Use the picture as the alpha channel of a texture. (The whiter bits should be more opaque; in some graphics programs, you’ll have to invert it.)
• Leave the colour channels of the texture white.
• Call it “galaxy256.png” and put it in an OXP’s Textures folder.

This one worked better than I expected, but the second one shows how recognizability combined with repetition are problematic. (This is the new additive blending galaxy stuff; the old version won’t have quite the same glow as in the top pic.)

A secondary problem is JPEG artifacts. Never use JPEG compression for textures, or the texture trolls will come and gobble you up.

Edit: As for photos… well, a lot of people will recognize the Sombrero Galaxy. But NASA photos (including all Hubble photos) are in the public domain, so using them as a base is perfectly acceptable. Commander McLane’s entry shows promise.

And another one (original again by NASA).



And I forgot: Distribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license and the GNU General Public License version 2 permitted.

That last one would be better if it weren’t cut so close, though. It’s too obvious that it’s been trimmed to a square. An elliptical vignette might help. (I probably shouldn’t have included the “reasonable proportion” thing. I suspect it’s easier to trim off too much than too little. Besides, if you’re working at a higher resolution – as you should be – cropping it tighter, if needed, is not a problem; cropping it less tightly is impossible.)

I’m liking the in-game look of Commander McLane’s first entry:

Nice!

Is this still controlled by the sky_blur values?

Ahruman wrote:

That last one would be better if it weren’t cut so close, though. It’s too obvious that it’s been trimmed to a square. An elliptical vignette might help.

Actually it's a picture of a star-cluster, not an elliptic galaxy (the original is here), and it's not trimmed at all. The original was 349x350. The only things I did (apart from adjusting the size of course) was adding a black frame, which also makes some lone stars at the border invisible, and soften the whole thing.

Ahruman wrote:

I’m liking the in-game look of Commander McLane’s first entry:

Looks good, the only thing that I would say is that the colours are too bright IMO.

Is this the sort of view you would get all the time, and is this suggesting what travel through "real" space would be like.

Here's another version of my second entry. It's not as softened as the first version and it has a bigger black "frame":

Perhaps as it is a cluster rather than a galaxy it won't be that distinctive and recognizable, like the original one in Ahruman's first post.

And I forgot: Distribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license and the GNU General Public License version 2 permitted.

my first entry

http://home20.inet.tele.dk/dp1974/Frame_Galaxy1.png

done in photoshop

edit

missed the fact about the repeatetive thing

withdrawn