[Omniscaper]

Alpha transparencies work, but the problem is that black also acts as a transparency, and the opaque areas designated by my alphas are black. I tried off black colors, but the value changes just affect level of black transparency.  Using Mr_All_xparent flag makes the black visible again, but nullifies the alpha channel. I'll try rearranging the subobject order, perhaps the transparent subobjects are not rendering behind it, but I isnt, mr_nocull suppose to take care of that?

[taylor]

Alpha transparencies work, but the problem is that black also acts as a transparency, and the opaque areas designated by my alphas are black. I tried off black colors, but the value changes just affect level of black transparency.  Using Mr_All_xparent flag makes the black visible again, but nullifies the alpha channel. I'll try rearranging the subobject order, perhaps the transparent subobjects are not rendering behind it, but I isnt, mr_nocull suppose to take care of that?

Which was always the problem when I was working on this for you guys.  Adding support for moving skyboxes took all of 30 minutes.  But after a week of playing around with everything I just couldn't get an acceptable resolution to the texture blending issue.  It is simply too constrictive to work, or at least it was the way I had coded it.  Hopefully Bobboau will have some better ideas than I did.

[Bobboau]

no cull allows polygons that are faceing away from you to be drawn, it doesn't effect draw order.

you need to set you subobjects so the furthest away draw first

no_zbuffer _might_ prove usefull at some point

it's up to the model maker to resolve texture sorting issues.

if you could give me your model, I might be able to figure out how to get it to work the way you want.

[Omniscaper]

I tried rearranging the subobject order so rendering order is correct. The the pof renders correctly as a ship.tbl entry. As a sky box with a color other than black, it renders correctly. The black level of the texture adjusts the level of transparency in ADDITION to the alpha channel.

On the plus side it does rotate and looks as good as my previous fake-skybox object approach. Now if only it can render the same way a normal ship.tbl pof does.
My next workaround for this transparency problem is to make asteroid shaped polygons instead of a cylinder with texture transparency of asteroid images. No doubt this will raise polygon numbers insanely, but its the only solution I can think of at.

On another topic, my reason for embracing this feature is for MP functionality. IIRC, subobject rotation only appears on the host machine, not the client. Does this skybox rotation work on the same rotation principal? I have yet to try this build with MP because of its debug build

[Bobboau]

looking at the pof ast1,2,and 3 are in reverse order than what they should be.

also ast_starfield.dds, and starfield0001.dds have no alpha layer.

[Bobboau]

also, the model options are MISSION options, they go in the mission file, it's text just like the tables. they don't go in the model anywere, so it's still drawing them like normal bgpofs, additive everything.

[Bobboau]

wait a sec, the subobjects are rendered in reverse order
ok, you should make everything into subobjects as to lessen the already confuseing situation.
then the order should be ast1,2,3, back, starfeild.

and add

+skybox_flags:   ("MR_NO_GLOWMAPS")
+dynamic_skybox

after the $Skybox Model: line in the mission.

[DaBrain]

I'd like to revive this topic, cause the feature doesn't work anymore.

These flags don't work anymore when you add them to your mission.
+skybox_flags:   ("MR_NO_GLOWMAPS")
+dynamic_skybox


Also it would be awesome, if the objects in the skybox could be lit by the sun/per-pixel light.

[karajorma]

As far as I can tell the code was never committed. Bobboau only appears to have a handful of commits to missionparse.cpp and none of them were connected to this.

[Bobboau]

I remember taylor not liking that I used the same spelling as the model rendering tags and respelling the some time after it was committed.(point here being it was commited) I believe CVS was still being used at the time, is it possible that reverted commits were not carried over when everything was converted to SVN?

[DaBrain]

Before more people look for a solution, I think den5 has already solved the issue.


http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,60514.msg1192591.htm

[taylor]

I remember taylor not liking that I used the same spelling as the model rendering tags and respelling the some time after it was committed.(point here being it was commited) I believe CVS was still being used at the time, is it possible that reverted commits were not carried over when everything was converted to SVN?

I thought that it was committed as well, but I don't see it anywhere.  I checked CVS, SVN, and all commit emails (since 2005) and don't see it ever having been committed.    I do have a patch from your stuff that got reverted though, and it is in there.  So I've got no clue why I can't find it anywhere else.  I did go through that patch of reverted stuff and recommit some of it, and I thought this was one of those things, but I certainly don't see it in SVN.

If anyone wants the patch to go through and pick that code out then let me know and I'll send it to you.

[DaBrain]

I have one question.

Would this work with lighting now as well?
It would be really nice if I could slap normal maps on the rotating layers.

[Bobboau]

I think maybe. I seem to recall working on a rotateing planet model that had dynamic lighting, but that was years ago.

[DaBrain]

Now I really can't wait to get this feature back.


I already wrote down some ideas what this could be used for. And some of that stuff will look amazing.