[Herra Tohtori]

I think this picture pretty much embodies the concept of Beam Spam.

How's the frame rate?

[Commander Zane]

I think this picture pretty much embodies the concept of Beam Spam.

At least they don't Robotech.

[DaBrain]

A lot of space shots...


Time to post  some SoL shots again.

[Snail]

Srs tiling on the water, but there's no escaping that...

Other than that minor gripe, SRSLY COOL.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

... ... ... ...



DO A BARREL ROLL! DO A BARREL ROLL! DO A BARREL ROLL! DO A-...

[General Battuta]

Those are gorgeous, DaBrain.

[Droid803]

Is that water crash-into-able?

[Snail]

Is that water crash-into-able?

Being FreeSpace you'd probably bounce off it. Then flaming particles would come off it.

[Commander Zane]

Is that water crash-into-able?

Being FreeSpace you'd probably bounce off it. Then flaming particles would come off it.

Ignited fuel.

[DaBrain]

Is that water crash-into-able?

The water is solid as a wall, but at least the damage effects can be disabled.
In SF64, you could loose your wings by crashing into the water too often... so I think we're on the save side.

[Woolie Wool]

Does it actually ripple? It's so realistic looking that I wonder if you're using some sort of fork of FS2_Open with per-pixel lighting or something.

[Herra Tohtori]

Does it actually ripple? It's so realistic looking that I wonder if you're using some sort of fork of FS2_Open with per-pixel lighting or something.

You mean the shaders? Normal maps and such? Because, you know, that's what they are. Per-pixel lighting. Or pixel shaders, which are what graphics cards use for creating real-time per-pixel lighting effects.

I think it is possible to use animated normal maps which means you could simulate a group of waves interfering with each other, then create normal maps from the water's surface elevation map and voilà you get pretty realistic looking waves. I think that's how it's done in IL-2 Sturmovik, incidentally. You just need a good wave texture with not too obvious tiling and high enough resolution (the tiling is visible in some cases on IL-2 but most of the time it's bloody awesome looking).

Then you could of course add a semi-transparent water diffuse texture and a bottom to the body of water, and craft the bottom texture so that on shallow water you would see the bottom...

[ShadowGorrath]

Animated normal maps are possible.

[Mongoose]

If I didn't know any better, there's no way I'd believe that those shots are using this game engine.

[DaBrain]

Does it actually ripple? It's so realistic looking that I wonder if you're using some sort of fork of FS2_Open with per-pixel lighting or something.

I think I should should capture a short clip...

Well, yeah we asked blackhole to enhance the shaders a bit a few months ago.


Making normal map animations is painful though.
Tiling, looping graphics, that need to run through a normal map tool and need to be very limited in size and frame count = no fun

Keep in mind that DXT5 needs twice as much memory as DXT1, so normal map animations really feed on your gfx memory.
My first approach needed 40MB just for a crappy water animation...

[Woolie Wool]

Since the lighting of the stock mediavps seemed somewhat dull, I set -no_emissive_light on and tripled the intensity of suns. The result?  AWESOME.

[Droid803]

Wait wait...is that an actual shadow going on there on the GTF Angel's right wing?

[Woolie Wool]

I think it's a lighting quirk caused by a kink in the Angel's wing geometry.

[Woolie Wool]

[Androgeos Exeunt]

That Angel Valkyrie is making me envious!