Magari..... (geotermica)

pensate al centro dei pianeti...... sono palle infuocate. perciò calore, perciò energia naturale da trasformare. così in futuro le città dovranno fare i conti con il vapore h2o

Qoy qeylIs puqloD

Qoy puqbe'pu'

yoHbogh malthbogh je' SuvwI'

Sey'moHchu' may' 'Iw

maSuv manong 'ej maHoHchu'

nI'be'yInmaj 'ach wovqu'

batlh maH ghbej'jyoqIjDaq

vavpu'ma' DImuvpa'reH maSuvtaH

Qu' DamevQo' maSuvtaH, ma'ov

[/hr]

please, even if i due to my education as "stampante tessile" i understand a few words of italian, but this is a english forum (i guess) ;).

[/hr]

the song:

http://www.archive.org/download/Kling/KlingHiFi.ogg

the lyrics (translated):

Hear! Sons of Kahless

Hear! Daughters too

The blood of battle washes clean

The Warrior brave and true

We fight, we love, and then we kill

Our lives burn short and bright

Then we die with honor and join our fathers

in the Black Fleet where we battle forever

battling on through the Eternal fight

Artist/Composer: Asaguare

Date: 2010

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0

[/hr]

nah, if there would be a halfways good method to "cheat" smoke i would have done it, you can be sure.

yes, clouds and smoke is missing, but it has to me no priority, even if a youngster looking at the game will argue as first that the effects (smoke is missing, lasers look "clumsy") are weak.

well that's something one notices first, i know, a average gamer don't looks behind the scene.

I don't know any Italian, so uruboros' replies are going unread.

Google translate does a fair job:

Magari..... (geotermica)

pensate al centro dei pianeti...... sono palle infuocate. perciò calore, perciò energia naturale da trasformare. così in futuro le città dovranno fare i conti con il vapore h2o

Maybe ..... (geothermal)

think of the center of the planets ...... are fireballs. so warm, so natural energy to transform. so in the future the city will have to deal with steam h2o

It's how I've been reading all of uruboros' comments. 🙂

yeah, i start to post only in klingon language from now on...

i know it's perhaps not the best choice (english, perhaps a latin language would work better) but it happens to be widely spread (not most spoken, else we should use chinese).

i'm happy it's english, because at french lessons i was peeping out the classroom window and italian i only understand a tiny bit from work.

Perhaps he should use it, then. Better that one does, instead of everybody having to. It's far easier for me to just ignore his posts, and unfortunately for him I'm just lazy enough not to care.

As for a reason for smoke coming out of buildings, they could be atmospheric processors like in the film Aliens, "Shake n Bake" colonies. Would be nice if there were a few Xenomorphs running around too <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_lol.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

Whats that strange beeping noise coming from the scanner? <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_confused.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':?' />

but brians right it will get difficult if everybody posts in his own language,

perhaps in a few years we can do such and the text will appear in your OS's language, but until then we have to deal with english.

the worst thing is a machine don't understands (yet), the result will be sometimes something complete different as ment.

I have a wav file of the original of that! 😆

well, i just pointed my camera on a path covered with gravels, "click", "click" and so on.

(if can be revived) i have a lot of such pics with different "textures", gravel, overgrowth, grass, rough.... even the by me often used wtr.png for glowing parts is just a snapshot from lake zurich.

later imported to my favorite paint program and used a simple "make tile" function (mirrors the edges).

the results are sometimes good, sometimes they need a little extra work to produce no or little "checkerboard" effect.

another good "trick" to make a surface that gets a nice metal effect is to start a new empty picture in desired size (e.g.512x512),

perhaps color fill the whole thing with some blueish grey.

then put a noise function on the alpha channel with small grains (about 1-3 pixels) and a 30 - 50% treshold (amount of noise).

switch to the picture channel and spray ("dry") with a very (50 pixels wide) thick brush a lighter grey over it.

switch to alpha channel again and cutout the whole thing, move this new "layer" now about 1 pixel up and 1 pixel left (or 1 down, 1 right, whatever, just into either one corner).

switch back to picture channel and spray again with the thick brush a darker grey over it (i don't have to say that it doesnt have to be regular?).

finally smear all with again a thick brush, use a "dry" smear effect if possible.

remove the alpha channel and you got a nice metallic structure that breaks the light in the game just as it would be some corroded metal.

if it's needed to be seamless, use the "make tile" for it.

names of the tools will vary from program to program, but in general they should to be found in any paint program.

the result will look something like this (the picture is oversized to better show the "graining")

[attachment=1082:textest.png]

besides of the tiling i made, i added also a dk blue and rusty color with a new alpha channel, this time the "grains" was about 5-10 pixels and little treshold, it will end in a more "lake type" noise (bigger areas) that will look then like rusted areas on the final texture.

or in other words it gets then real chaotical.

that's just because of "textures.txt" 😉 thanks

thumbnail! click on it to get the full sized texture

it's a bit dark, but it's seamless and provides some "extra" details which can be used for different purposes.

you can of course cut parts out of which you think that they will fit for something.

it's quite large and dark, scale down or increase gamma as you like.

[attachment=1091:Bildschirmfoto 2012-03-08 um 00.34.59.png]

Hmm.. looks like you got Pioneer to run on your Mac quite well! Nice pic! 😀

that was alpha19, now it looks fortunately the same 😀

[attachment=1103:Bildschirmfoto 2012-03-12 um 17.33.15.png]

interesting, the wings and engine wasn't cut off in the game, but are missing on the screenshot, no big thing i noticed such often before.

that's the custom-system file for "Ross 154" (Arisata mod), it changes also local_systems.lua to disable the existing "Ross 154".

[attachment=0]Ross_154_(Arisata).zip[/attachment]

and a mistake, i should have linked the optimized "vlastans buildings" here, i do it now

[attachment=1]vlastan.zip[/attachment]

ahh, what it does...

it lowers all buildings by 15meters, to let the basements vanish (like in the prev. posted picture).

it scales them a bit down, to 0.75, which looks much better imo.

it restricts textures from lowest lod (collision mesh) for a slight better performance.

it has a 8bit greyscale glow-map, like it should be.

what it not does,

it performs no magic 😉

didn't serves you coffee,

can't make a meal,

didn't removes or adds anything else then vlastans buildings

[/hr]

it runs if i disable sounds in the config.ini (DisableSound=1)

the sound won't get loaded and the game runs.

[/hr]

don't take the eagle as "template" it's far to big, original scale is .26 = 17m width, no joke, now we have .45 (almost doubled!), the pilot is unchanged and about 4m tall now!

to me that's unacceptable!

i did a compromise and scaled it .4 thats still to big compared to FE2, imo .3 would be far better.

if i liked to have a Lockheed SR-71 i would have made one 😉

try to scale the pilot to the size we have now and you will see a ant is sitting in the cockpit.

i will post some screenshots on "completed models", so you can see yourself how stupid the small pilot will look in the oversized ship.

i hope we can make use of the "wavefront" pilots soon in all ships, because it's scaled 1:1 and if you multiply 1 with whatever scale the ship has the pilot will have always the proper size (~2m, if stood up, ~1.50m sitting).

this will give you a idea how big a ship is (if a pilot is used at all) and additionally helps to determine the size/scale of the buildings when you compare a ship to a building.

of course you can depend also on your CAD (blender units = meters), a common (residential/commercial bld) floor is about 2.5m - 3.5m.

except you like to make monumental buildings... 😉

perhaps some people could be added to the spaceport, just to give people a idea how big or tall something looks in the game.

the same has happened to the shuttle and it's completely oversized now, imo it should have the size of a large van.

the scale WAS compliant to FE2, why it had to be changed it's not to clear to me.

i don't go and calculate the scale according to the original with a lot of work that someones comes along and changed it to it's suggestions.

that the FE2 ships have such a "weird" scale is based on the fact that they are transscriptions of the original data, which has to be kept in integer vector values, to match a certain size a ship is usually "modelled" much bigger as it appears in the game.

but anyway you can take FFED3D's model export, to compare the size of the ships, there are some leaks but in general they are proper (dynamic scaled models don't get scaled in FFED3D, as a result the courier is sized the same as the trader, which isn't true in the original game).

i always assumed that this will give us a basic template how big a ship can be with a certain tonnage, but now they are changed to "gusto" and are no longer reliable, imo.

i know some ships are scaled wrong in FE2, but usually already to big compared to the rest rather to small.

mainly the Viper and the Constrictor are far to large if you compare them to the CobraIII and the ASP (in FE2).

my models are maybe not the best looking ones and sometimes i'm a real lazy modeler, BUT

when it comes to scale and size i take myself a lot of time to be sure it's proper.

There's the beauty of Git. The rescale seems to have taken place in this commit:

https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pion ... 4865466b0d

That was a month or so before I got involved with Pioneer, so I can't give you a reason. Perhaps you should ask John?

well, perhaps i should do so

anyways i will put the screenshots on "completed models", just to give everybody a idea.

in general when you size a ship up that contains sub-models with a given size (pilot 2m, missiles 4m), the sub-models must be scaled down (logically).

if you don't do so you won't notice the wrong scale, if you do you can see when it's to much.

even when the old (scripted geometry) pilot hasn't a reliable scale, how i scaled it in the "eagle" and the "ip shuttle" is (was) confirmed by model output of the modelviewer with OGLE respectively GLextractor.

of course we can go along and scale everything 2:1, but why? scale is 1:1 in pioneer not 2:1.

[/hr]

actually i have "massive" problems with git 😕

can't run "github for mac" ("wrong machine"), i have to run everything via the console, which isn't very comfortable and the help isn't helpful for a beginner imo. it's badly explained what you have to do (and should be for beginners?).

usually a help written by one experienced can't help a beginner in most cases, to many things the experienced user takes as understood by itself which aren't clear to a novice. writing good helps/guides needs to be learned imo, it was one of the tasks of my education, seems easy for you, a riddle for someone else. to write a good help or introduction you have to get into "someone elses" mind and you see. just think you know nothing, neither where the keys on the keyboard are, then you made the match.

Get the book, Pro Git, buy Scott Chacon.

http://progit.org/

I think the building's scale looks much better. I could never see the 24 bit glow-map on my computer. I was hoping to be able to see the 8 bit one, but unfortunately, no. I still can't see shaders in the legacy renderer either. Oh well, I'll get a better machine someday.

The legacy renderer is shader-free by design. Glowmaps require shaders.

Isn't it supposed to produce the effect of shaders without using them? I still see the buildings in their entirety without the ground covering part of the bottom and no shadows on planetary rings. I don't play many games anymore so I don't have many examples for comparison, but I can see heat shimmers and effects in Doom 3 so I know my card can display shaders. I don't think it's worth anyone's effort to get Pioneer to work with my old Radeon 9550, however. 🙂

compatibility problems i guess.

i assume your card is using natively OpenGL 1 drivers, no matter what version of DX you install this will stay (because of whats in the cards rom, this limits the upgrade compatibility for the drivers you install).

Pioneer needs as far as i know at least OpenGL 2.0.

downgrading a program so that it's able to support shading in older OGL isn't a good idea i guess (from my far pov), if it's possible at all.

at somepoint you have to make a decision, it's not wise to carry all the old stuff around (likewise when you move your home).

already keeping track of old OGL or DX versions, limits the evolving of it because of all the old you still have to respect then.

developers have to find a mediacre way, something that suits users with brand new machines as well as "overaged" OS's or peripherals.

at a certain point old must be disrespected to get new advantages.

but marcel you can be happy, mine is still broken and i have bought me such a recent new gfx-card that it seems it's not compatible with my "old" motherboard (still i think the "Kentsfield" (quad core, dual channel) is a very trustable board and i don't like to exchange it), it should work according to manufacturers specs, but it doesn't do it proper. 🙁

PCIexpress, is upwards compatible (should be), but well you can never know...

There's different kinds of shaders. Your card may support ARB shaders, but to use them we'd pretty much have to learn GPU assembly language. Nobody uses them anymore. We use GLSL shaders, which are typically only available since OpenGL 2.0. Pioneer does some basic feature tests on start up so the fact that you got the legacy renderer suggests that your card probably can't support it (its not just shaders either).

We don't try to make Pioneer produce the effect of shaders without them unless its trivially easy to do. Worst-case we'd end up maintaining two codepaths. The philosophy for shaderless hardware is that the game should be playable without them, but not necessarily pretty. That's exactly why the things you mention (glows and ring shadows) aren't available - they're 100% implemented in shaders. The ground covering the buildings is another, more complex part of using shaders - we do different depth calculations in the shaders that simply cannot be supported without them.

i made some models, some buidings and a few ships that won't use textures

the result is mixed,

for the buidings it's ok and they have a slight better performance as the "standart" buidings, plus that you won't see no ugly basements with the legacy renderer.

but i encountered some problems with the ships, resp. the materials when run in legacy mode, some became wrong shaded or the rand. (and other) material loses it's specularity.

sometimes i could help with moveng the affected parts to a submodel, sometimes i can't find any reason or help.

if some are interested in, here are the models, they will simply replace ALL sub-models and submodels.

only a few simple buidings and a few ships.

all are untextured.

but to get some extra FPS or run the game with the legacy renderer it's enough to replace only the buildings.

don't expect to much, in general they are the default buildings from the very beginning.

since that glitch only appears in legacy renderer mode i didn't pay to much attention to it.

but it's sad for some that can't have shaders on.

i still have a problem with the scale (not me, not my models)

[attachment=1231:Bildschirmfoto 2012-06-02 um 22.11.jpg]

the cuboid you see in red is 1x1x2...

[attachment=1230:Bildschirmfoto 2012-06-02 um 22.12.jpg]

...either the people who live in this building are 6m tall or the scale is wrong...

[/hr]

i know when you start a model it's not easy to know what is 1 meter, but you can depend on most of my models especially the pilot or the missile.

the pilot will give you the right scale, you will know then which grid is 1m x 1m, or you can take the missile which has a radius of 0.5m and a length of 4m.

besides, the standard size for blenders cube primitive is 2x2x2 meters, that's a good help to (this because of a radius of 1m for a sphere).

for building it's acceptable to have slight differences but a floor height of 8m is out of scale for sure (4m you can tolerate), except it would be a hangar or a similar large industrial building.

i know the "Arco" is very large, but all buildings & trees are in proper scale to a human (~2m).

please keep the scale and don't "invent" a own one, i would appreciate it much.

---

measured by the floors this building is at least 2times oversized, if not 3 times.

while, i know it looks funny scaled down that much, so i suggest more floors.

[/hr]

i changed the texture somewhat, making it possible to repeat it seamless...

[attachment=1232:Bildschirmfoto 2012-06-02 um 23.38.jpg]

the building is 230m high, we have now ~40 floors, which still results in a average floor height of 5.8m which is still to high, but acceptable (i scaled the the uv more then double therefore, i guess a floor was >12m before ?).

[/hr]

also the second building set (kbuildings) needs a review, the residential building is far to big, while the hangar like industrial one is to small.

i scaled them already for myself to somewhat more reasonable, the "round" commercial bld is almost the same, scaled the residential down, but it would be as small as my "combo" bldg, if you respect the floor height of max. 4m (maximum maximum, better would be 3m for res.), but i liked it to have it slightly bigger (small differences you won't recognize).

the industrial bldg. i scaled up more as twice to let it look like a big storage, what it should be in my eyes.

a monument might have a floor height of 6m and more, but else...

and keep the collision mesh free from tetxures, this will help performance, more as many other things.

you can forget all LOD's, but this helps much as double.

i know that some feel i'm wrong or whatever with that, but it's true, try to compare before you say "theoretically..."

oh, and i forgot, this is not of interest at all... 🙄 (like all of my suggestions 😆 )

nonetheless 😉 i post two screenshot which let's you compare and you can see the difference of the final retextured "vbuildings" (i hope vlastan feels ok with it).

but if you look at the scenery they fit much better now imho.

first the original buildings

[attachment=1234:o_vbldg.jpg]

now the "retextured" ones, i only changed the texture a little bit to make it seamless, glowmap has been vertically flipped to fit and edited in the same way as the diffuse map (further i reduced the bitdepth of the glowmap from 24 to 8 = 256 palettized, which is far enough for a glowmap imo, and saves at least a little space if not more).

the "uv scale" has been almost doubled (sometimes a little more sometimes a little less) and i reached a average floor height of 5m, which is still very high but ok.

that has also ment a rework for the lod2 and lod1 bldgs, further i removed the textures from the collision mesh to save a little bandwith.

[attachment=1235:n_vbldg.jpg]

the vertical mirrored glowmap is best to recognize at the small windows on the low floors of the buildings, if you take a close look you can see on the original blds. the glowing of the windows is under the windows, respectively flipped.

further i sunk the blds. in until the groundfloor is now 5m above level, that means that they will sink in on one side sometimes on steep terrains, but steep terrains are anyway gone (to sad, imho)

and a screenshot with marcels "worksuit" which is finally a good thing to have as comparison model

[attachment=1236:vbld_withzerun.jpg]

[/hr]

i rember this problem even from old SC3K, it took me a long time to find a set of buildings which has fitted to mine, that's because i kept the scale (a "block" in the "BAT" was 3x3x3m, which shows that the devs of the "BAT" had the right idea, each block fits to a average floor height of 3m), many buildings was nicely made but completely out of scale which is annoying then in a completed city.

but i also know that even some draughtsmen have problem with the scale, which i really can't imagine...

but maybe i'm handicapped because of 25 years of construction working 😉

and i know how high (or big) a residential, commercial, industrial or a stadium had to be, i worked on all construction sites (and often, due to my work, right under or on the ceiling, i can tell you how high 12meters are, damned high if you walk over a strut 12m above the ground, loaded with one or two tubes on the back 😉 .