FreeOrion

Here's a proof of concept: It's about what i'd like the "gaseous substance" to look like.
The same texture (nebula2.png) is centered over each star and randomly rotated. (of course for the real thing we would have multiple textures).
IMHO the way multiple layers overlap produces a very nicely irregular effect

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

You meant the big faint non-gameplay-nebulae, which - as I've said - has nothing to do with shaping the galaxy.




I don't want the nebulae to be perfectly circular or circular cropped. I might have gone a bit overboard with this, but it's pretty dark and hard to see anyway and has no gameplay value either. It's quite important when discussing about those things is to have the screen properly calibrated. A fairly easy way to do this - at least in terms of brightness/contrast/gamma is using a picture like this:

Could you please make sure that both rows of 1-8 are recognizable and that all nine tonal steps are evenly changing in brightness? The first 1(first row) and the last 8(second row) have to be equaly easy been seen.


It could also include some particles, or some kind of matter to avoid the too clean and cloudy looking mockup labeled "just gaseous substance". See how in the next mockup labeled "gaseous slightly toned down + toned down pixel stars", the "dust" nicely breaks up this too soft looking clouds? We can't go from fairly large sized stars to nothing IMO, there should be a step in between, hence the particles...


It just some pixels. They are mid grey in this mockup and will probably be even darker in-game. They really could be anything. If I would want them to be stars(gameplay stars) they would be shown like those.


Showing them at 100% when zoomed in is my intention. I don't see why they have to be high resolution though. They are gonna placed just like the gaseous, cloudy things, probably even in the same textures. I discarded the idea of using a single image for all pixel stars/clouds to shape the galaxy previously in the other thread. This thread is all about placing tiny sprites by code, as visualized on one of my first mockups here.


Just to be clear:
- It was my intention to do those gaseous, cloudy, galaxy shape following things using sprites from the beginning. Please see my mockup labeled "just gaseous substance:". Right above it I'm talking about 300 instances and I was assuming to use the same technique es shown in the mockup labeled "To visualize this, here is another mockup"
- There is one large faint nebula that colors those gaseous clouds. This is much easier than coloring by code and adds more variety as well.
- A layer based system is a beautiful thing.



So yeah, it's the same and it always was.


1)The large faint background nebula is without any definition. Bluring introduced by zooming is not really visible because everything is made of large single colored areas or falloffs anyway. See this old screenshot, when nebulae have been bigger than they are now. This is about how it should look when zoomed in. In addition there will be some more detailed cloud shapes, introduced by the sprites.
2)

Every further discussion about pixel stars/dust/particles/whatever is useless, because we are running in circles and I won't invest any further time in it until we have some code to play with.

Looks great eleazar. The halos/spikes could need some more work to avoid the regularity. And the stars should either get smaller, or the distances larger IMO. But that's another topic.

In my previous mockups I tried to avoid those holes between stars. it might look good with just a small part of an galaxy arm covered in sprites, but when filling the entire galaxy those holes look weird. We could avoid this by either using larger sprites or by filing the triangles in between as well.

Well, i think we've accomplished a good deal today.



It's obvious that in your mock-up they don't have anything to do with the shape of the galaxy. But the point i've made, and i think Geoff is making is: whatever nebulous-type-textures we use should follow (more or less) the shape of the galaxy.
... additionally it makes it easier to understand where you are in the galaxy if the nebula-texture-stuff more or corresponds to the part of the map where the game takes place.


I don't want the nebulae to be perfectly circular or circular cropped. I might have gone a bit overboard with this, but it's pretty dark and hard to see anyway and has no gameplay value either.[/quote]
I really don't think geoff want's a circle crop. I don't find that artistic choice very compelling, especially when it has a somewhat negative effect on ease of use. IMHO there's not a way (with your giant nebulae) to make them conform even as well as they do in the mock-up to the galaxy shape. In many instances they would probably end up placed in a much less galaxy-conforming location.


Yes, all steps are quite clear and close to being equal steps.


I see and understand your mockup, and what you intend all the different layers to be. And i still think it's too much. In your mock-up giant nebulae almost completely cover the "gaseous substance". Why do we need them both? They both provide basically the same visual effect, except the hundreds of sprites can be much more easily controlled.


OK, i grant you #1.
But now that we (probably) have a ready means to make pretty good looking nebula-like-textures, i see no compelling reason to put up with "galaxy boundary trespass."



It's a lot easier to avoid things like "holes" when your doing things by hand. Well, yes technically i made that mock-up by hand, but i just dropped the same graphic over and over, to replicate the process. Holes will happen, especially in irregular galaxies. But i do agree that the sprites should probably be larger than in my example. I just didn't want to change all those graphics.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

I think we do agree about the major points.
We both want to shape the galaxy using hundreds of sprites, located at stars or in between them.
Whether those include pixel stars is not important for now. That's the one thing.

Additionally, unrelated to shaping the galaxy, I want to unify the appearance of the galaxy in terms of nebulae, which are just randomly colored blobs now. This is done by using a fairly consistent color scheme and having a huge FAINT nebulae connecting them. The main purpose of this is, to still have small distinct areas, so that certain stars could be effected in a certain way. Additionally it comes in handy with coloring the sprites.

Obviously there has to be some logic in placing(and scaling) the large nebula, so that is occupies a major part of the galaxy.


That's just a nebula we are already using - placed not quite in the center of the map. There is nothing masked out and retrospective I should have probably been more careful with placing it, because we could have avoided a lot of this discussion.

You want to abstain from the nebula and color the sprites instead by code. That's the point where we differ. I believe we have more control about how to color the sprites using a single large picture, instead of tweaking certain numeric values. We could for example easily have all kind of different patterns with a picture overlay. Wanna play in a smiley galaxy? No problem, create a smiley nebula. I don't say we should do this, I just say we could. Doing something like this by code is quite hard I imagine(not the smiley alone, but the whole palette of possibilities).



Hell yes, we have

I really like the global effect (besides intensity of the color, "background nebula" should be a little less evident in order to make "game nebula" easy to recognize).

About multiple textures: it is ok, but they should all have almost the same colour (honestly in some previous posts I've seen a merge of red and blue "gaseous substance" which I didn't really like), but whe could choose randomly which one they have at game start (and the nebula png could just be a b&w alpha which we colorize by software).

_________________
The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom is press coverage.
- Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

Ubuntu 7.10/Windows Vista/Windows XP (VMWare)/Windows NT 4 (VMWare) on Intel Centrino Duo T5500@1.66GHz with NVidia GeForce GO 7600

• Yeah, as Silent mentioned earlier the scaling factor of a nebula should be linked to the size of the galaxy. This would of course apply to your "huge faint" nebulae or small ones.

• Additionally to keep them within the galaxy, a simple (but not foolproof) method would be to place nebulae centered only at the coordinates of a star-system. This would provide better results than we now get, but maybe somebody could come up with something even smarter.



No, you only would have postponed the discussion. If you had carefully hand-placed the nebula to conform to the galaxy shape, and/or masked out unwanted bits, it would have simply hidden something i consider a problem until i thought it through or saw it actually working.



No, you misunderstand. I don't want FO to colorize the graphics— that's control i too would rather exercise myself. I suggested that if we wanted multi-color galaxies (not something i'm entirely sold on, but it seems to be important to you) we could code the universe generator to usually choose sprites of a similar/same color to adjacent sprites... thus if color changes would generally cover large portions of the galaxy rather than be patchwork.

Here's the process i see:

1) implement gaseous substance with a single set of similarly colored graphics. (i'll probably make some working graphics today)
2) implement multiple sets of graphics, but only use one per galaxy
3) ? consider ways to use multiple colors without it looking bad

If we only get to #2 we've still improved things quite a bit.



I realize you are joking about the smily face, but i don't understand what these possibilities are. I don't see why we would want to add a giant graphic to the galaxy which had nothing to do with the shape... or what do you mean?



It's important to remember that there are no "game nebulae". Some people would like to add that concept to the game, but i'm not going to spend much sweat trying to support an indefinite feature which hasn't undergone any serious discussion.



Generally i'd like to see things harmoniously colored... but we can't go too monochrome. The only gameplay function the nebulae currently serve is as "landmarks" to help distinguish different parts of our unusually-large-for-a-game galaxies. If all the non-star graphics are pretty much the same color, the "landmark" function will be impaired. I'm assuming that the "small" nebulae will serve most of the "landmark" function.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

I've added some graphics to test with in art/galaxy_decorations/...

I recommend starting at 30% opacity, and scaling so that at max zoom the sprite width/hight is at 500%.

I'm curious as to how much color variation we can include in the graphics. From my mock-ups it looks like the variation i've included in the files is barely noticeable.



EDIT:
I think i figured a more reliable way to identify the "middle" of an arbitrarily shaped galaxy, for purposes of making the "middle" brighter (as in a normal galaxy) than the "edges".
Assuming the game can identify stars on the "outside edge" of the starlane system:
1) find the shortest number of jumps from every star to the nearest "outside edge" star. Remember that number (SNJ#) for each star.
2) The highest SNJ# found is used to calibrate the series.
3) each star is assigned it's "gaseous substance" image transparency, or the the image from a continuum is chosen based on where the star's SNJ# is between 0 and the max found in #2.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

That's definitely possible. In this case you would have multiple sets of those gaseous sprites, right? And you will need some code to choose from those appropriately. That's IMO loss of some control.

While my proposed system uses just one greyscale set of gaseous sprites and one huge faint nebula kind of thing, placed in the middle(yes, in the middle) of the galaxy and scaled to fit the galaxy size to color the sprites. The nebula is so faint, that it is barely visible on black background, but adds up nicely when occupying underlying sprites. This nebula is roughly circular shaped - this way it works with adequate scaling for all galaxy shapes. In a rectangular galaxy just scale it bigger or leave the edges uncolored or take a rectangular shaped nebula. I believe this approach is easier to implement, less work for the graphics people and it provides more control at the same time.


I quote this just to emphasize it. Should we create a sourceforge feature request or is this done internally?



I don't know what to do with in terms of game play, but I like the idea of having full control over the color of a galaxy. I can easily determine which part has what color, just by creating an image. Colors can change from the inside to the outside, from top to bottom, in a checkerboard pattern or everything you can think of. It's really just about not limiting ourselves.


That's right and perfectly reasonable, but if I've learned one thing from this project, it is to work with solutions that are easily to change later. We have to think about what could happen later most of the time.


We really can't consider personal color preferences. From an artistic point of view red and blue work well together, if one is kept superior and the other one is used as an accent. This has to do with the concept of unity and variance, which aplies to many things in art(color, proportion, shape language, line weight,...)


Exactly.

Thanks, this should get the coders started. It's perhaps a bit to detailed, which might make repetition obvious. Fortunately, creating or changing those is a no-brainer and I think, we can achieve some interesting effects with just using different kinds of cloudy structures


I'm sure the exact center of a galaxy is either clear from the beginning or can easily determined at the beginning, even before the creation of stars and star lanes start. I mean, there have to be some coordinates and dimensions the algorithms start working with, right?

See attached.

The yellow tiny star texture seems to be lacking transparency.

Note the FPS... Apparently 500 textures per frame at that size does add up.

Also, I had to reduce the alpha of the gassy texture to 50 / 255 to get this look. Higher alphas were more opaque.

FWIW, we can probably beat this FPS figure by quite a lot by rewriting the starmap rendering code. We currenty don't batch anything, but we could batch everything. This would probably have been needed for large maps even without these new decorations.

Well, if we can take care of the FPS issue, i think this demonstrates we can get what we want with this method.

that's a remarkable uglification from only 4 pixels per star.
fixed.


I knocked them back to 128x128. And that's 5 fps without any rotation of the texture, if i'm not mistaken.
If that's not enough, you might want to try using only one of the gaseous textures.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

Cluster galaxy, with fixed yellow tinies.

Sorry, I didn't mean that I didn't like the two colours used... I meant that I like more a "monochromatic" galaxy

_________________
The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom is press coverage.
- Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

Ubuntu 7.10/Windows Vista/Windows XP (VMWare)/Windows NT 4 (VMWare) on Intel Centrino Duo T5500@1.66GHz with NVidia GeForce GO 7600