[jr2]

 
So much to learn... thx takashi... make it easier on yourself next time and just ask; I think I will follow you around the forums and absorb info from the replies you get.  I suppose I could have just asked myself, but that would require knowing what to ask.    Very cool information here.
Oh,

In all honesty, it could benefit from being half the size, but that's really down to personal taste

make a poll.  I think you'll find more people than you think agree with you.  (Myself being one of them.)  They look a bit ridiculously large.

[CP5670]

DaBrain once said something about it being a bad idea to make the shinemap smaller than the base texture. I'm not sure why though.

[Bobboau]

it's lack of detail will wash out the base texture's detail.

[Flipside]

Ah, that explains it. To be honest, I'm probably being over-protective of video ram, since modern cards have around half a gig, but it's force of habit

[jr2]

Mine's only got 256... isn't there a way to detect the amount of RAM, and then compress the textures and / or advise the user to turn off some options as needed?

[Flipside]

Simply adjusting your graphics settings would probably be the best bet, though that tends to take some level of control out of your hands.

This is why .dds format is so important. As a TGA, that shinemap, with the environment map on the Alpha channel takes up 4 Megs. As a dds with the same info, it takes up 1 meg

[jr2]

Nice.. but what about the poor soul who's using a donated comp with 128 megs?  Or, horrors, an on-board with 256 total mem, 64 of it shared?    the ppl who make those comps should be tried for C.&U.P.

[TrenchardsLoveSock]

Nice.. but what about the poor soul who's using a donated comp with 128 megs? 

Oi!!!  I resemble that remark!  I've got an Nvidia 6800LE with 128 megs (all pipes unlocked with RivaTuner) and I get a great framerate with everything on max (including AA).  FPS drops to about 40 with those 3d shockwaves when a cap ship goes up.

Nothing wrong with 128 Mb gfx cards.

[jr2]

Ah, sorry, didn't mean to offend... 128 Meg cards are alright, but you do realize that when Flipside says:

Ah, that explains it. To be honest, I'm probably being over-protective of video ram, since modern cards have around half a gig, but it's force of habit

he's saying "ah, well, most people have 512 Megs of RAM!!!  I have 256.  You have 128.  Some have 64.  Poor us. 

EDIT:  I do have a few old 3DFX cards that have 16 Megs...     But the least you'll see on a halfway decent system is 64.

[Flipside]

I started out with a 512k 256 Colour VGA card

Heh, either way, adjusting the detail settings should help. I suppose if someone had the time and the webspace, they could simply go through everything in the .VPs and half the size of them, maybe call it the mid-res pack or something, but I have neither alas.

Edit : In fact, I seem to recall something to this effect existed once?

[takashi]

so how do you make something black shine?

[Flipside]

Use a dark grey-ish colour is your best bet.

Remember environment mapping is also an option, which is a 'reflection' type effect, that IS greyscale based but has to be done in the Alpha channel. I'd suggest getting comfortable with the basic stuff first, you can always add Alpha maps to the Shine map later

[takashi]

thanks! bobs kato will be fso ready in no time!

[Snail]

Will you pump the texture (make it better-looking)?


Liking the new attitude, taka. Gaining some respect [from me anyway]

[Herra Tohtori]

Question.

How can I make a shinemap that only affects the specular lighting and no (alpha) env mapping at all?

If the shinemap has no alpha, the environment mapping system reads the RGB value and uses it instead (from what I can gather anyway...). If there's alpha channel (and if alpha env mapping is checked), it uses it instead... But i'd like to know how do I alter the alpha values without changing the RGB values? I'd love to have a shinemap that doesn't reflect the background at all, but has a strong specular reflection, and I would think it would require an RGBA shinemap with alpha values of zero everywhere, but RGB values of something, depending on the reflectiveness at that spot.

So how do I make a texture like that on GIMP? With grayscale textures it's simple enough to turn both black and white to transparent, and the alpha channel does go to zero on the whole image... but what if there's colour in the map? Do you have to turn every colour to transparent one by one - red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white? ff0000, 00ff00, 0000ff, ffff00, ff00ff, 00ffff, 00000 and ffffff? Or does that even work either?

Or is there a simple button or plugin that changes the existing alpha channel's values to zero globally in the texture?

[Flipside]

I'm not a Gimp user unfortunately, as I use photoshop, I'll have to check up on that, it's been a while since I did a shine-map without any e-mapping. I'll try and take a look on Photoshop tonight and see what happens with a few settings.

[Herra Tohtori]

Much appreciated.

[Flipside]

It seems that saving as a DXT1 type dds, i.e. RGB - No Alpha, seems to do the job.

[Herra Tohtori]

I've tried that, but then the env mapping system simply seems to  use the RGB intensity instead of nonexistant alpha channel. The background stars definitely shine out if I simply save a grayscale image in RGB file (DXT1a or 24-bit TGA) and use it as shine map.

I did test what happened when I played around with the transparency of a gray scale image (well, not true gray scale but gray anyway, with saturation of zero): I made first black and then white transparent. The whole grayscale image became transparent (Alpha values were zero everywhere) but the pixels remained their RGB value - exactly what I was looking for.

It also worked in-game. There was no stars reflecting from that shine map, but specular reflection was there. Also, it seems that I had the right idea about the colour pictures too - I did the same thing to red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white: changed every one of those colours to transparent, one by one, and the whole colour picture became transparent with alpha channel zero, but pixels retained their original RGB value. So, the problem seems to be solved.

...that is, as long as the most complex thing you want is to disable env mapping entirely for a shine map by making a global alpha channel of zero value. But I guess that you could paste differently transparent stuff on top of this basic layer with zero alpha value.

I stumbled upon this problem when I tried to make shine maps for a planet model. Water doesn't actually reflect like a mirror when you look at it from space so I was a bit frustrated when the RGB-shinemaps reflected the background stars, but this method seems to actually work. Yay.

[Flipside]

Hmmm.. that sounds like the problem there is that Gimp is a lot more specialised for this kind of thing than Photoshop is to be honest. I tend to just create an Alpha channel on the shine map and then select all and fill with Black, but the thing with Photoshop, I think, is that you can choose whether the Alpha Map affects the transparency of the image while working on it or not, so you can just work on the alpha as a seperate greyscale map and ignore the image unless you need to see it

I certainly can see the difference between the Ursa and, say, the Medusa, which seems to be incredibly shiny compared to many of the other ships, I might take a look at that at some point...