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RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 2:32 am
by Uruboros

Brianetta wrote:
It would be nice to see smoke effects in the game (an atmospheric re-entry trail would get me all hot and excited). Perhaps it'll happen one day; until then, it's probably best not to try to fake it in a model.Besides, we'll be using clean energy by 3200, surely?
Magari..... (geotermica) pensate al centro dei pianeti...... sono palle infuocate. perciò calore, perciò energia naturale da trasformare. così in futuro le cittàdovranno fare i conti con il vapore h2o

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 4:41 am
by Potsmoke66
Qoy qeylIs puqloDQoy puqbe'pu'yoHbogh malthbogh je' SuvwI'Sey'moHchu' may' 'IwmaSuv manong 'ej maHoHchu'nI'be'yInmaj 'ach wovqu'batlh maH ghbej'jyoqIjDaqvavpu'ma' DImuvpa'reH maSuvtaHQu' 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.oggthe lyrics (translated):Hear! Sons of KahlessHear! Daughters tooThe blood of battle washes cleanThe Warrior brave and trueWe fight, we love, and then we killOur lives burn short and brightThen we die with honor and join our fathersin the Black Fleet where we battle foreverbattling on through the Eternal fightArtist/Composer: AsaguareDate: 2010Creative 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.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 6:23 am
by Brianetta
I don't know any Italian, so uruboros' replies are going unread.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 7:01 am
by SeanN
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 cittàdovranno fare i conti con il vapore h2oMaybe ..... (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 h2oIt's how I've been reading all of uruboros' comments. :)

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 7:04 am
by Potsmoke66
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.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 7:18 am
by Brianetta

SeanN wrote:
Google translate does a fair job
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.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 8:25 am
by Geraldine
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="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_lol.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':lol:' />Whats that strange beeping noise coming from the scanner? <img src="'[url]http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_confused.gif[/url] class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':?' />

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 12:28 pm
by Potsmoke66
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.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 4:17 pm
by Marcel

Quote:
Qoy qeylIs puqloD
I have a wav file of the original of that! :lol:

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012 3:05 pm
by Potsmoke66
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" ;) thanksthumbnail! click on it to get the full sized textureit'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.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2012 6:41 pm
by Potsmoke66
[attachment=1091:Bildschirmfoto 2012-03-08 um 00.34.59.png]

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2012 9:41 am
by Marcel
Hmm.. looks like you got Pioneer to run on your Mac quite well! Nice pic! :D

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 1:33 pm
by Potsmoke66
that was alpha19, now it looks fortunately the same :D[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".
Ross_154_(Arisata).zip
and a mistake, i should have linked the optimized "vlastans buildings" here, i do it now
vlastan.zip
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]
Quote:
Hmm.. looks like you got Pioneer to run on your Mac quite well!
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, BUTwhen it comes to scale and size i take myself a lot of time to be sure it's proper.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 3:19 pm
by Brianetta

potsmoke66 wrote:
the scale WAS compliant to FE2, why it had to be changed it's not to clear to me.
There's the beauty of Git. The rescale seems to have taken place in this commit:https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/commit/f69479a20cee280e7a62208df2b0574865466b0dThat was a month or so before I got involved with Pioneer, so I can't give you a reason. Perhaps you should ask John?

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 5:15 pm
by Potsmoke66
well, perhaps i should do soanyways 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.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 6:05 pm
by Brianetta
Get the book, Pro Git, buy Scott Chacon.http://progit.org/

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 11:23 pm
by Marcel
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.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 11:27 pm
by robn

Marcel wrote:
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.

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2012 9:10 am
by Marcel
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. :)

RE: Pioneer City Buildings Modeling

Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2012 11:41 am
by Potsmoke66
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...