Animated planet files

Development of artwork, requests, suggestions, samples, or if you have artwork to offer. Primarily for the artists.
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pd
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#31 Post by pd »

eleazar wrote:
pd wrote:
eleazar wrote: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.
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.
Thanks. I'm not sure how things work around here. Is that enough of an endorsement to confidently proceed?
Yes, go for it. If you are done, open a new thread about this showing what you've done.
eleazar wrote:
pd wrote:
eleazar wrote: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 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 :)
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.
I invite you to do so! But keep in mind that some UI parts might change a lot in the future. So try to work out a general UI if possible. I think of a screen having many different ellements, like standard buttons, scolling bars, tabs, drop down menues, maybe a queue as on the tech screen, and so on. We need to find a general theme, which can then be applied to the other screens we (will) have.
eleazar wrote:
pd wrote:Btw, take a look at the tech icon thread if you are interested to help.
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. :wink:
Okay, take the time you need to get familiar with freeOrion.
eleazar wrote: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.
Sounds nice! I had a look at Battle fo Wesnoth and it looks really sweet.

Well, I hope you will stay a while :) If you have any questions, don't hesitate to shoot me a mail or pm.

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eleazar
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#32 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:I could create some separated cloud/planet files for testing purposes.
Please do.
Done.

Included are 3 levels of cloudcover, and an Ocean, Tundra, & Terrain map with clouds removed. Not my best work, but certainly good enough to test a concept. I'm guessing clouds will look best if they animate slightly slower than the planet underneath.

If atmospheres are implemented different colored clouds might work well for the more exotic planet types, dark grey for inferno, green for toxic etc. Alternatively if there are different types of atmospheres supported, (Air, Chlorine, etc.) This could be indicated by the color of the clouds, coordinating with the colored atmospheres already in place. This seems to be something the alien-race-designers want, but would make Planetology complicated.

tzlaine
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#33 Post by tzlaine »

Cool! I've been hopng we'd get to do this for a while. It will probably take me a little while to get to this, though, since my development machine is giving me trouble and I don't have that much free time these days, but I'll let you know as soon as I get a demo implemented.

Now, don't take this as a demand or anything, but here's what I'd like to see happen with the planets: The ideal set of graphics would include at least three cloudless planet textures per planet type (we have 3 each with clouds right now) several cloud textures (and an indication of which ones are approproate for which planet types), and at least three different sets of city lights textures per planet texture (one for low pop, one for medium and one for high). Note that the city lights need to line up with the continents, so at least for planet textures with water and land, we need 3 for each planet texture -- planets with all water or all land can have their cities pretty much anywhere. It would also be nice if desert planets had cities bunched up around the poles, and tundra planets had them bunched up around the equator. It would also be nice if we had a few ring textures for the gas giants.

There's one more consideration. I intend to use the exact same planet graphics to render the planets in the combat engine, which is why this matters to me so much. So you might want to look at these textures half-screen-sized and SidePanel-sized to make sure they appear reasonable at both sizes. If you feel the need to go from 256x512 up to 512x1024 textures, then by all means do so.

Thanks for all the work so far!

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pd
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#34 Post by pd »

I'm guessing clouds will look best if they animate slightly slower than the planet underneath.
I'm not sure about this. it looked terrible in MoO3. Clouds just don't move as a whole. But It's worth a try anyway, if we have seperate cloud layers.
Note that the city lights need to line up with the continents...
I would imagine, that an advanced civilisation is able to spread on the oceans as well.

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eleazar
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#35 Post by eleazar »

tzlaine wrote:Cool! I've been hopng we'd get to do this for a while. It will probably take me a little while to get to this, though, since my development machine is giving me trouble and I don't have that much free time these days, but I'll let you know as soon as I get a demo implemented.
Great! I understand that coding takes time, and most people have other lives.
I especially like the exploration aspect of these sorts of games, which is enhanced if you keep finding new things. So i'm willing to put in the work to make nearly every world look unique.
tzlaine wrote:Now, don't take this as a demand or anything, but here's what I'd like to see happen with the planets: The ideal set of graphics would include at least three cloudless planet textures per planet type (we have 3 each with clouds right now) several cloud textures (and an indication of which ones are approproate for which planet types), and at least three different sets of city lights textures per planet texture (one for low pop, one for medium and one for high).
I'd like to see at least 5 graphics for each planet type, but 3 could be a workable minimum. :) I agree about the clouds. For the city lights, i think it would be cool to have different light pattern/colors for each alien race. But for now, 3 (or 5) lights for levels of populations. A small planet filled to capacity would use the same graphic as an equally suitable large planet also at capacity, but with a much larger population.
tzlaine wrote:Note that the city lights need to line up with the continents, so at least for planet textures with water and land, we need 3 for each planet texture -- planets with all water or all land can have their cities pretty much anywhere. It would also be nice if desert planets had cities bunched up around the poles, and tundra planets had them bunched up around the equator. It would also be nice if we had a few ring textures for the gas giants.
I agree with pd here, it's probably not neccesary to line up the lights with the features of the planet. There's some anthropomorphic assumptions there anyway. Some species may prefer the equator of a desert, or the ocean part of a terran world. It sounds a little crazy (at least for now) to make a species specific version of city-lights for each (or many) planet graphics. It's hard to make out the details in the dark side anyway.

Rings? That will be easy, i'll do it first. I'd like to see rings on planets other than gas giants too, though perhaps with less frequency
tzlaine wrote:There's one more consideration. I intend to use the exact same planet graphics to render the planets in the combat engine, which is why this matters to me so much. So you might want to look at these textures half-screen-sized and SidePanel-sized to make sure they appear reasonable at both sizes. If you feel the need to go from 256x512 up to 512x1024 textures, then by all means do so.
How big is half-screen-sized? I'm pretty sure that once the planet gets 256 pix tall you'll start to see pixielation especially around the equator, but i don't have a way to test that. A 512x1024 texture should hold up to roughly 512x512 sized planet.
tzlaine wrote:Thanks for all the work so far!

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eleazar
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#36 Post by eleazar »

Rings are easy.
Here's 7. ;) EDIT: added to trunk

Each ring has a a whole in the middle that is minimum 128pixels wide. That's for the planet, duh. This means the ring texture will be enlarged more than the planet texture, but i think it will hold up fine because of the angle of view and the natural grainyness of such things. If not, the size can be changed.
Last edited by eleazar on Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

tzlaine
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#37 Post by tzlaine »

eleazar wrote:
tzlaine wrote:Cool! I've been hopng we'd get to do this for a while. It will probably take me a little while to get to this, though, since my development machine is giving me trouble and I don't have that much free time these days, but I'll let you know as soon as I get a demo implemented.
Great! I understand that coding takes time, and most people have other lives.
I especially like the exploration aspect of these sorts of games, which is enhanced if you keep finding new things. So i'm willing to put in the work to make nearly every world look unique.
Me too. I'd really like the planets to look fairly realistic, and to be unique as possible. There's actually a fairly involved system for setting the parameters of planet generation. It can be found in default/data/art/planets/planets.xml. I don't remember where the documentation is for it, perhaps it's in the Wiki. Anyway, the idea is to allow the relationships between the planet graphics and their various settings to be modifiable by modders, artists, etc. So if you have more ideas on how to make the planets look unique that you think could be added to the XML format, let me know.
tzlaine wrote:Note that the city lights need to line up with the continents, so at least for planet textures with water and land, we need 3 for each planet texture -- planets with all water or all land can have their cities pretty much anywhere. It would also be nice if desert planets had cities bunched up around the poles, and tundra planets had them bunched up around the equator. It would also be nice if we had a few ring textures for the gas giants.
I agree with pd here, it's probably not neccesary to line up the lights with the features of the planet. There's some anthropomorphic assumptions there anyway. Some species may prefer the equator of a desert, or the ocean part of a terran world. It sounds a little crazy (at least for now) to make a species specific version of city-lights for each (or many) planet graphics. It's hard to make out the details in the dark side anyway.
Well, I think it's safe to say that, while a spacefaring civilization can probably built cities on or under the oceans, it would probably only do so for a really large planet that's running out of easier-to-use space. So for all non-aquatic species, the lights should be over the continents, at least for the younger/lower-pop colonies. In keeping with our pay-as-you-go design and implementation philosophy, I think we should do this for the first versions of the city-light textures; if we add aquatic species later, we can always add more textures, if that's deemed necessary.
tzlaine wrote:There's one more consideration. I intend to use the exact same planet graphics to render the planets in the combat engine, which is why this matters to me so much. So you might want to look at these textures half-screen-sized and SidePanel-sized to make sure they appear reasonable at both sizes. If you feel the need to go from 256x512 up to 512x1024 textures, then by all means do so.
How big is half-screen-sized? I'm pretty sure that once the planet gets 256 pix tall you'll start to see pixielation especially around the equator, but i don't have a way to test that. A 512x1024 texture should hold up to roughly 512x512 sized planet.
I realized after I said this that you probably have no way of looking at the sphere-mapped planet, including GL's interpolation, etc., at the sizes they'll be in the combat system, so I'll have to make a tech demo at some point when we're looking to tune graphics for combat.

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Geoff the Medio
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#38 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:Is anyone currently developing [the UI]?
Redoing the UI is on my "TO DO (eventually)" list. I spent a good amount of time reworking the production screen UI, which sort of includes the sidepanel, last year, but haven't gotten around to actually coding it yet. See here. If you're just going to design some new UI widgets, then it probably doesn't matter, but if you want to work at the actual functional layout, then you might want to review that stuff.
tzlaine wrote:There's actually a fairly involved system for setting the parameters of planet generation. It can be found in default/data/art/planets/planets.xml. I don't remember where the documentation is for it, perhaps it's in the Wiki. Anyway, the idea is to allow the relationships between the planet graphics and their various settings to be modifiable by modders, artists, etc. So if you have more ideas on how to make the planets look unique that you think could be added to the XML format, let me know.
I don't think there was any written documentation for that file, but it's a fairly simple file layout that should be self-explanitory. It's also not really as powerful as you might infer from tzlaine's comment, in that you can't presently alter planets' appearance by any in-game conditions besides what environment a planet is. That is, no infrastructure / development level, no specials, no buildings, etc. can alter a planet's appearance. I'd especially like to be able to have specials have some effect on planet appearance, as presently the only way to show them I've thought of has been to put little icons next to the planet pic... but some planet specials might be particularly well-suited to appearance alterations, including fast/slow rotations, big axis tilt, and perhaps ancient ruins or mineral rich or something like "meteorologically unstable" if clouds get done.

For what's possible now, I would suggest looking at what I've already done for this before starting from scratch though. I think the only reason this hasn't already been put into the SVN version is that tzlaine didn't like the angle of the sun that I changed it to. IMO it looks better with the shadow at 90 degrees rather than the current tilted angle. pd's theory about the angle matching the position of the star on the sidepanel doesn't really work because the angle is the same for all planets in a system, but the line from the planet to the star is different for each planet and changes as the planets are scrolled anyway. I suspect others might disagree, though since I'm always right about everything, that's clearly just because they're afraid of change / set in their ways. Also, a 90 degree shadow tilt makes it clearer / easier to see the different axis angles of rotation (distinct form shadow angle) that are configured in that "mod".

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eleazar
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#39 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:For what's possible now, I would suggest looking at what I've already done
This is identical to what came with the demo i downloaded. (i diffed it) Since it doesn't contain the promised variety of rotational angles etc. I assume you pasted the wrong file there. :wink:

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#40 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:This is identical to what came with the demo i downloaded. (i diffed it) Since it doesn't contain the promised variety of rotational angles etc. I assume you pasted the wrong file there. :wink:
Uhm... yeah... How did I do that...? ... Anyway, try again, I updated it.

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#41 Post by eleazar »

About the Planets.xml...
It seems that using it as it is would be a very cumbersome way to create variety. Take the terran worlds. We have 3 base graphics. We have 3 Cloud-maps. We want 5 angles of rotation, and 5 speeds of rotation. That would require 225 entried in the Planets.xml file. I don't see why there shouldn't be more than 5 different angles/speeds of rotation. The engine doesn't care.

The planets.xml set up as-is works well— if there were a reason to particularly associate a particular planet graphic with a particular rotation speed etc, but i can't think of a reason why that would be desirable. Wouldn't the angle/speed of rotation be more related to the size of the planet and/or distance to the sun, rather than the planet type?

I think it would much more simply produce variety to set up the different elements of each planet type separately, maybe even assign a probability of occurance. It would be nice to make some special graphics unusually rare, like a gas giant with a really big spot.

Of course, i have no idea if the XML can already do this, or if making a few thousand entries for planet specs is the easiest way to do this...

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#42 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:The planets.xml set up as-is works well— if there were a reason to particularly associate a particular planet graphic with a particular rotation speed etc, but i can't think of a reason why that would be desirable. Wouldn't the angle/speed of rotation be more related to the size of the planet and/or distance to the sun, rather than the planet type?
Associating planet types with different axis angles does make sense. Scientifically, very fast spinning worlds are more likely to be inferno due to tidal forces heating them. Gas giants look better rotating slowly because it gives them a better sense of bigness... even though realistically they should rotate faster (Neptune: 16 hours, Jupiter: 10 hours). I made the one of the toxic planets rotate backwards to make it feel "weird". I made some of the barren planets have weird axis angles just because it looks less weird for them than other environments that have more obvioius equtorially-aligned features.
Of course, i have no idea if the XML can already do this, or if making a few thousand entries for planet specs is the easiest way to do this...
The XML can do what I've done, and not much more. There's no way to separately list axis angles, rotation speeds and textures at the moment. However, you could make lots of copies of entries for texture you want to be common, and just one for rare ones.

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#43 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:Rings are easy.
Here's 7. ;)

Each ring has a a whole in the middle that is minimum 128pixels wide. That's for the planet, duh. This means the ring texture will be enlarged more than the planet texture, but i think it will hold up fine because of the angle of view and the natural grainyness of such things. If not, the size can be changed.
I'm not really a fan of these rings. You seem to have intended them to be placed around the planet image, facing the player. This doesn't really work, since rings will need to look like this, tilted on an angle. In particular, they need to be tilted and aligned to the planet rotation axis... which means they need to be rotatable since planet rotation axes aren't all co-aligned. So a fixed image such as you've provided isn't going to work. They'll more likely need to be rendered as a disc, just like the planet sphere is rendered, with the ring art as a texture, which probably just needs to be a long, thin rectangle that loops back on itself nicely, with the renderer doing the necessary rectangular to ring-with-different-radii-in-and-out distortion.

Also, all your rings are rather thick and Saturn-like. IMO we should also have some thinner, fainter ones like an exaggerated Neptune and Uranus. Also, you've got quite a variety of colours, particularly in Rings04.png which appears to have a whole rainbow of speckled pixels... Something a bit more understated might be better.

Also on the subject of understatedness, some gas giant textures that were more like Neptune and Uranus would be good as well. All the ones we have now are rather glaringly coloured and very noisy / busy images. Neptune and Uranus are much more monotonous. Uranus nearly devoid of visible features, and Neptune with a bit of banding and a few darkish spots for storms.

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eleazar
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#44 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:Rings are easy.
Here's 7. ;)....
I'm not really a fan of these rings. You seem to have intended them to be placed around the planet image, facing the player. This doesn't really work, since rings will need to look like this, tilted on an angle...
Erm no, you mistake my intention. I'm not an expert on 3D, but i believe files like this are the most straight-forward (for the artist & coder) way to do rings. The graphics engine should be able to display these from the proper perspective based on whatever the viewpoint and angle of rotation is.
Geoff the Medio wrote:Also, all your rings are rather thick and Saturn-like. IMO we should also have some thinner, fainter ones like an exaggerated Neptune and Uranus. Also, you've got quite a variety of colours, particularly in Rings04.png which appears to have a whole rainbow of speckled pixels... Something a bit more understated might be better.
I'm all for having more varieties of rings. The files are small, why not dozens? But i'd like to see how they look in game before i bother fine tuning them.
Geoff the Medio wrote:Also on the subject of understatedness, some gas giant textures that were more like Neptune and Uranus would be good as well. All the ones we have now are rather glaringly coloured and very noisy / busy images. Neptune and Uranus are much more monotonous. Uranus nearly devoid of visible features, and Neptune with a bit of banding and a few darkish spots for storms.
Have you viewed these in-game? The colors appear more muted than in Photoshop.
Howbeit, the planet types are currently depicted in a stylized manner, i.e. all planets of a type are basicly the same color(s). Gas giants are the except, having many different colors, but can be distinguished only by their Saturn/Jupeter-type pattern. If we made Neptune/Uranus type graphics they would look very much like tundra worlds.

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#45 Post by eleazar »

Ok, i did some city light images (EDIT: link removed graphics added to trunk) for Terran02. Included are 3 levels of population. I'm not sure how well the dot size will hold up while crushed near the poles— we'll see.

i'm not convinced maping lights to land is neccesary, but it won't hurt to test it that way.
Last edited by eleazar on Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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