FreeOrion

Planets picts end of page

Hmm, pinky!
A little bit too pinky, for my taste.

Is there any chance we can animate some of this stuff? IMO the main title screen would look fabulous with a slowly swirling storm on a planet with intermittant lightning flashes, some twinkling/pulsing stars and a ever-so-slowly wafting plume of a comet in view... (We could add some 3D ship models flying by later, as well)

For the planet screens, a bit of shimmer on the water and some motion of clouds would be similarly good.

no - at least at this stage. this is not a definite 'no', but almost.

it's simply too much work, partially because i've used techniques that aren't suited for animation. i would have to redo some parts completely with other techniques. my schedule simply doesn't allow this and there are still other things much more important.

once i create another splash(i have no idea when) i'll keep in mind to animate it.

i aggree with the ships, once we have some, those can be added.

pulsing stars in the bg are not a problem at all. i'm thinking of simply putting an animated .png on top, but again this is really low priority - it's v0.3 polishing.

Maybe (to contradict pd)

I made a modification to the code where I had a planet rendered with opengl, mapped with a texture of mars, and gave it a "glow". It was rotating slowly. Imagine pd's background in 0.2, the planet rotating, but looking a little less nice. Unfortunately I lost the code by accident since I didn't commit it.

So it is possible, but I think it should be done through OpenGL. Animations with textures the size we need would take up a lot of hard disk and memory.

Presumably the video would need to be treated as such, and compressed using an open-source / free equivalent of divX (which I assume there is...). This wouldn't end up taking that much space really, since there's not that much change between consecutive frames for a slowly rotating fixed-location (on screen) planet and a basically static background image...

All very low-priority though, obviously.

Doing it with OpenGL would be possible too, but couldn't possibly look as good as prerendered video... which for the opening title screen might be a significant consideration...

Though, actually, since we'll want different resolutions of opening title screens, doing it with 3D models and texturing might actually work better, as bitmap scaling is rarely satisfactory for high res detailed images / video such as we would want...

About videos: As far as i know we haven't any support at fo yet. If i remember correctly, zach found some lib, but we couldn't use it because of licence concerns. (lib and video files).

For now, IMO we should leave animations out, until we found an final solution.

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Can COWs fly?

just a small note: the current splash is a scalled down version. the original is in 1600x1200 and it scales pretty well upwards(2048x1536 for example) - i doubt though, that many people are using this resolution - even in the future.

Mojoworlds sequence

oh yeah, mojoworld rocks. well done obiwan.
while i like your other planet surface pics, those are so much better - very very moody.

i like the first one most. the third is kinda interesting, but it looks like there is some strange overlapping going on.

Personally I prefer the earlier sequences you did, Obiwan. These ones look a little emptier and less interesting. Mojoworld definitely does some very nice worlds, but I'm not sure these suit as well for this specific use.

It is different isnt it. Strange sort of software MJW.

Easy to make a detailed epic scene, but hard to put in the extra details. Thats where Vue excells.

If I keep the MJ worlds seperate from the Vue sequences? What do you think, too much of a difference or ok.

There is something strange going on the green toxic world (is that the one you mean pd). Near the sun. Dont know what it is, ment to be just a straight render with colors enhansed in PS.

you could try combining both worlds.

- render out the mojoworld scene(if possible in layers - especially the distance fog must be seperated)
- import the landscape into vue(a lower res mesh would be recommended)
- use the new eco system to place flora on it
- render out(without the scenery, just the plants and stuff)
- compose in photoshop, after effects or something

Interesting idea.
Although MJW doesnt export a layered render and a lot of the detail in MJW os displacement and thus will be lost. Its still something worth exploring.

Heres the desert version

definitely, in professional business compositing is always half of the battle.

i would like to put my fingers on this too, if you don't mind (and manage to provide the needed renderings).