FreeOrion

Has somebody looked into MNG format? It has support in DevIL, delta compression, alpha channel and PNG or JPG compression. And of course, animation.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/

yes.

framesets are obsolate. We now using spheres with mapped textures.

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Can COWs fly?

What about for animated textures? Storms and lightning and such? (how is this normally done?)

Well, wouldn't bitmap animation be useful elsewhere? Like animated heads for leaders, explosions/smoke trails in battle viewer, etc. It could be an alternative to handcoding eyecandies.

Like Geoff suggested, it could be used to animate textures, with a much lighter memory footprint than framesets, if you can extract a frame from the mng directly to a texture (hence not having every frames loaded in memory, just the mng file).

XVID is completely open source. It is mpeg4 "compliant" not Mpeg4. If and when FO gets to the point where it needs to add video to put the polish on the game such as in high resolution fully rendered 3d and the like... PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE take the time to learn a proper video compression technique. Macroblocks are not necessary anymore!

Hehe... sorry bout my rant....

civ3 uses flc, or so-called flic files, which are compressed animation files. DirectX allows also for animation using sprites, or one can use simple bitmaps and flip them on screen, in 2D. These are quite good options.

Hi - just took a glimpse of the textures on the planetary spheres, just wanted to say they look really nice!

However, I noticed that it is all one texture envelope per planet. In the future, will there be a texture for the planet and perhaps an overlapping texture for the atmosphere?

great work!

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I asked tzlaine if he could do multitexturing, but he didn't reply.

(I was also thinking of having a texture for the night side lights, and perhaps texturing to show infrastructure levels...)

I asked Obiwan if he could make cloudless versions of the planet textures, and he said it's possible, but would be difficult and time consuming due to having lost the intermediate files with layers that he used to make the final clouded images.

All these things are possible, it's just a question of priorities at the moment.

There are other more important artwork matters at the moment than atmospheric textures, but it is certainly possible to do them later. Priorities in particular:
* Production UI beautification
* Tech icons

I made 6 new planet skins, including 3 gas giants.
you can get them here. (EDIT: link removed. decent skins added to trunk) It's a 1.4 MB download.

That sounds very cool!

The advantage of creating most planets from a separate planet and atmosphere layer is you get much more variety in appearance. You could have 2, or 3 densities of clouds. Desert planets would tend to have light cloud cover, while swamp, ocean planets would tend to have heavy cloud cover. I could create some separated cloud/planet files for testing purposes.

Edit:

This is verging on off-topic, but it is connected.
There are 3 ideas in the following graphic:


1) Currently there are "Gaian" planet graphics. In the description Gaian planets conform itselves to its inhabitants. So Gaian worlds might not be Terran at all. So let Gaian planets be indicated by something else, like a green halo. The planet graphic inside will be the same as whatever is ideal for the residents. Without such a halo, terran and Gaian planets look too similar anyway.

2) The Stars look odd jammed into the upper-right corner. Why not make a bigger star graphic centered like so. I can redo the graphics.

3) The sidebar could benefit from a line on the left edge to separate it from the starmap. Without a nebula underneath, everything tends to get jumbled together.

I haven't tried these in-game yet, but the PNGs themselves look pretty nice. One thing, though -- the inferno and barren planets are nearly identical. Was this a mistake? I think it would be pretty hard to tell them apart as-is.

Your Barren04.png and Inferno04.png look the same, aside from some blurring of the highlights on the inferno version. The image also doesn't look anything like the other barren planets, so I assume that was what you were intending it for...


Please do.


From the design document:

Terran - Earth-like. Normally holds an abundance of life.

Ocean - Covered with liquid water. Life abounds.

Swamp - Venus seen through the eyes of pulp science fiction writers. Humans would find the atmosphere unbreathable, the flora/fauna hostile and poisonous.

Toxic - The real life Venus. Sulfuric and harsh on humanity, paradise to certain strange breeds of life.

Inferno - Hell in Space. Much like Toxic, except hotter with a lot more lava. Carbon based life doesn’t thrive here.

Radiated - A barren world bombarded with Radiation from a nearby star or in some cases a planet with an independently radioactive surface. Life as we know it doesn’t exist, some wildly different species live here anyway.

Barren - Luna. A dead world by our standards, space-borne organisms often use these rocks as breeding grounds.

Tundra - Earth minus much of its water and heat. Staunch life can still thrive here.

Desert - Earth minus much of its water. Pulp science fiction ideal of Mars and Arrakis (Dune) are examples. Temperatures can vary wildly with the time of day, still within the range of liquid water. Terran life is mildly comfortable here.

Gaian - Gaia worlds are, despite the name, not exclusively paradise for Terran dwellers. They are sentient planets designed by long-forgotten ancient creators to reshape themselves to the whims of their inhabitants. Exceedingly rare, extremely valuable-- some cultures worship Gaian planets as gods.


Terraforming hasn't been designed or implemented yet. However, a reasonable assumption would be that any terraforming (or unintentional environment changes) will generally happen between adjacent environments on The Wheel of Environmental Preference:

I'm not sure what you mean by this... the graphics are just files... how are they "set up", and how does this imply anything about environment preferences of races?

Mistake. Looks like i saved the inferno over the barren. Will delete the extra from the .zip.

Thanks for the detailed answer Geoff. I guess we were out of sych. I edited out part of my post, after i found some answers, but the now gone part of my post is much of what you replied to. I might have more to say about that later.

I like this super sized star picture at the top. The reason why the sun was put into the upper right corner is that it fits the illumination of the planets - but it still looks nice with a much bigger and centered star picture.


I agree. Notice that the UI is anything but finished. In the future we are going to develop a less spartanic UI with cool looking buttons an other UI widgets :)

Btw, take a look at the tech icon thread if you are interested to help.

Thanks. I'm not sure how things work around here. Is that enough of an endorsement to confidently proceed?

Is anyone currently developing it? I saw a number of threads on the topic, but they seemed to die out. I could be interested in working on this.

Yes, i did see that is your main graphics need at the moment. But if you don't mind i'd rather introduce myself to these forums doing a few things, i'm more confident i can do well.

Perhaps a brief introduction would be appropriate here:
I've worked on the art for Battle for Wesnoth for several years, and have made minor contributions to a few other FOSS games, all under this name "eleazar." I tend to bounce around between different art projects, because i try to keep it fun for me. Though i usually will eventually finish what i start.

My skills are primarily Photoshop-centric, though i like to concept and brainstorm as well.

I've only every played Moo once, though i a big fan of TBS games, especially galactic conquest and RPG games.