[blowfish]

Sarcasm?

[Water]

So, he was serious, but it's an already existing feature... What about the tilemaps bit?

A second UV channel. Get that working and you could upgrade *any* tile mapped ship using a baked lightmap texture in the second slot. Where it would really shine is with BIG ships.    eg  Tiled mapped with Ambient occlusion.

[Aardwolf]

Ah... I had interpreted it as sarcasm, but it made me think about the possibility of using a second UV channel anyway. Only problem being you beat me to the punch. 

[Water]

It could also work with landscapes.

[DaBrain]

Yes, we could instantly create pretty nice lanscapes if we could bake lightmaps. And pretty big ones too.

Wait, what?

* Aardwolf can't tell if that was sarcasm or not, what with this being the Internet

Assuming you're SRS, tho... what feature are you saying is the most important, exactly? Do you mean baked lightmaps with separate uvcoords, or what?

Yes, that's what I ment...

The thing is, without a material system, it's probably not going to happen.

I wouldn't mind getting this feature without a proper material system though. We could start doing amzing thing with it now, which could be easily modified to work with a real material system later, once it's done.

[Aardwolf]

Is there any work being done on a materials system?
Is it even a definite step on the roadmap?
Are there plans for how it would work when we finally get to that step?

And what would it do exactly, anyway?

I was thinking, in some ways it might be better to just overhaul the in-game rendering code, get it working for the bare minimum case (i.e. so that FS2 retail runs properly), and see what else it broke, adjusting stuff as it is found. Possibly a code branch.

But I can't confidently say that that doing so would really get the improvements faster rather than slower.

[Nuke]

a second uv channel would open the door to many more cool features than just baked glowmaps. its something id like, a lot. question is how. something needs to happen at the pof level, add a second set of uv coords to each vertex in each polygon, requiring the object chunk to be upgraded. or you can stick it in another chunck all together, but that seems like a hack. youd also have to update all the convrters to handel it.

[chief1983]

If you're going to UV the ship, you can turn the tile mapped version into the UV mapped version just by putting the tiling on the new whole map.  Then bake lightmaps away.

[Aardwolf]

It's a matter of texture space. Having two separate sets of uv-coordinates per vertex would mean you could get the per-area detail provided by the tilemap in parts that are tiled, without having redundant stuff in the texture. Of course, it would depend on the modeler making competent use of the feature.

[chief1983]

I didn't think having redundant stuff in the texture mattered.  And having two maps instead of one takes up more memory and is less efficient then.  There's simply no reason for tile mapping that can't be better done with a good UV these days.

[DaBrain]

If you're going to UV the ship, you can turn the tile mapped version into the UV mapped version just by putting the tiling on the new whole map.  Then bake lightmaps away.

Oh no!

That would require a lot of way too big textures.
Remeber the huge asteroid in BtRL? While it looked like it was tile mapped, it wasn't.

It used a lot of 2048² textures. Still, on close-ups, it looked as sharp as a wall in Half-Life 1, when you got close to it.

You can't bake a lightmap on tile mapped ships unless you use a lot of gigantic textures. It's a waste of memory.
The textures need the sharpness (which they get from being tile mapped), while the lightmaps do not need a lot of texture res. One 1024²-2048² should be enough for all bigger ships.

That means 4-5 small tile maps and one 2048² map, opposed to the system without lightmap, which needs ten 2048² maps, to get a decent texture res.


To bake a light map, everything needs to be mapped unique(!) The light is different on each part of the ship.
On a symetric ship, you can bake it for one side though and mirror it on the other half.

[chief1983]

Hmm, I hadn't thought about using a smaller map in the second UV channel.  Guess that could help.

[Aardwolf]

Hmm, I hadn't thought about using a smaller map in the second UV channel.  Guess that could help.

I hate being inarticulate. 

[chief1983]

Hmm, I hadn't thought about using a smaller map in the second UV channel.  Guess that could help.

I hate being inarticulate. 

It's ok, it happens to the worst of us.

[KeldorKatarn]

If you consider lighting also be aware that right now only the first gun of each bank is a light source. If a ship has two guns in one bank, each on one side of the fighter, that is VERY obvious (think of an xwing for example). So adding light sources at least to the first TWO guns per bank would help to make things a little more symmetrical.

[chief1983]

For cycling firepoints we'd need every firepoint to be a light source.  Otherwise you'd only get a flash 1/4 of the time on the X-wing for instance.

[Aardwolf]

Are you talking about light-emitting muzzle-flashes, or the actual light source that moves along with the shots?

With either, if push came to shove, I imagine you could try to average the positions of the shots, and in the latter case, if one shot dies before the others (e.g. when it hits something that they manage to clear), the average would be recomputed.

I figured this was how it already worked, but it seems there are several discrepancies I was previously unaware of.

[Nuke]

it would also fix a slew of normal mapping issues. you would be able to uv map the diffuse texture to make much better use of pixel space, then youd have max or whatever moddeling program you use rearange your polygons on the uv map, then move the polyons around to squeeze more space out. you just create your normal maps with that chanel.

another idea i can think of, rtt decal (i like to call it scorch) mapping. every time your hull gets hit, draw a mark to it, whether it be a bullet hole or a massive burn. other mod ideas would use it for things like reentry glow, it would be applied to polygons in a particular direction and added to the glow map. would be awesome.

[Aardwolf]

Almost like something I'd considered for use in my own programming... basically, using the actual ship's vertices to avoid z-fighting, and picking the proper uv coords to make the texture show up in the right position. Except it sounds like you're talking about actually doing a sort of real-time bake-to-texture. If you could save on drawing passes that way without sacrificing much quality, then it seems like a good idea.

[Woolie Wool]

Just look at the high poly Iceni. See how the engines make the surrounding area glow blue? That.

He's talking about baked lightmaps like a new addition to the engine on top of the other features. The Iceni uses a glowmap for that.