[redalbatross]

This is a great game. Some really nice models can come out of this; I remember the Halcyon Carrier being a really nice looking ship. This is an RTSish game, so Vengeance is right about the lower detail.

The Advent faction as a whole has some great aesthetics in their ship design. I always liked the Radiance and the Rapture.

As for the textures, judging by the Cobalt that Vengence converted, it looks like the frigates and cruisers will be fine without too much tweaking. The capital ship textures might need some work, but it'll probably still be better than having to create them from scratch. Supposedly the weapon assets are salvageable too, so this is mostly a matter of conversion and appropriation.

[Vengence]

Its more about the model actually. There are lots of hard unchamfered edges on some ships that though workable in an RTS are not suitable for a game of our perspective. The solution however is very simple and the only thing we need to do with textures are generally mild modifications and accepting that we are taking DDS files, editing them, and saving again as DDS. Prepare for a lessening of quality due to dual compression. It won't do us any good but we have no other choice. One thing I'm considering is actually just abandoning normal maps here, or doing a huge overhaul of them. Some of them are just too obnoxious and disturbing. It made the Kol go from a sleek machine of industrial destruction to crumbled aluminum that clashes with the very well done textures.

For ya FREDers, I was just playing through my game and came upon something I nearly forgot about:


For a time some green Advent were retreating from an attack on a fortress world I was defending, and they headed towards their entry point: A wormhole... that is till they realize that this once safe point of entry is now defended by an Argonev Starbase armed and armored to the max and fielding a maximum fighter/bomber garrison. The Advent had to run a gauntlet of missiles, lasers, and beam cannons from the station and the endless hordes of fighters and bombers. This would make for a nice eye candy mission if it were possible to somehow create a wormhole effect .

[The E]

Well.....

It should be possible with some heavy skybox trickery.

[starlord]

wow! sounds really cool!

[Vengence]

Well.....

It should be possible with some heavy skybox trickery.

Also some POF trickery too don't you think? Create a model of the wormhole, combine animated textures with rotating subsystems, lots and lots of alpha maps, also no collision. Granted this would be a ton easier if particle systems were a bit better supported.

Also an extremely important question before moving on... Ships in Sins have a sort of Star Wars entry and exit in that they enter ultra fast and suddenly decelerate. I -never- got this to work ever.... what must I do to achieve this effect?

FYI: Texture tutorial coming soon. Breakfast first.

[Vengence]

The textures in SOASE are already quite well done for our needs. All that needs to be done is to address what FSO can and cannot do and getting this to work ingame.



First off we need to slap on the house color. Open the DDS and go into the alpha channel. We're gonna copy and paste it into a new layer in photoshop.



Use the marquee tool and select the whole of the alpha map then press ctrl-c to copy it.



Paste the alpha channel over the diffuse map and apply a Layer Mask as circled. I have tried various layer styles and found Overlay to be the most aesthetically pleasing over Screen or Multiply. So be sure to apply that to the layer.



In the Channels tab, select the channel called layer 2 mask then paste the alpha map in there again. Layer Masks work a lot like the 'screen' layer effect by making black transparent and white opaque but allowing us to apply different layer effects such as overlay. Since we're using overlay this also gets rid of the pesky black!



Create a new blank layer under our new masked layer then merge the layer mask layer down onto the blank layer by pressing Ctrl E. It will set the layer blending style back to normal so change it back to overlay. What we did was simplify things. Having a layer mask on tends to make things a bit cluttered. Now we've basically used it to remove all the black on the former alpha map that we copied.



On our now clean and fun layer, go to Image/Adjustments/Hue & Saturation then check Colorize. Adjust the sliders to your liking but be sure to set brightness down so the colors actually show. I saw that -45 seems to be minimum to remove all white color. Our house color is basically done. Feel free to merge the completed layer down into the diffuse.



Next up is the -Shine and -Glow stuff. This is just copy paste work so don't sweat it.



Go into channels and select the red channel. Use the marquee tool and select the whole texture then copy it by pressing ctrl-C.



Make a new image by going to file new. Make sure it is the same size as the image you just copied then copy paste the shine map then merge it down into the background layer.



In the SOASE shine texture go to the blue channel then copy the texture.



In the channels tab in our new shine image, press new layer to create an alpha channel. Paste the SOASE blue channel into it. What we're doing is specifying an environment map for the model. This will specify the reflective bits. Feel free to save the texture as FrigateTechLight-Shine.DDS. Be sure to save as interpolated alpha if you use the NVidia plugin.



Head on into the SOASE texture's alpha channel and copy paste the texture out into a new image and save it out as FrigateTechLight-Glow.dds with no alpha map. HOWEVER... given how SOASE handles house colors and certain glow spots we MAY have to recolor some bits to match. The Green channel looks very much like this but includes the house color. Now we COULD use green for the glows and all that but that is up to you as I have NO idea what to use it for. Honestly I don't like the idea of glowy paint but that's up to you.



Normal Map is easy. Just black out the red and blue channels and poof, that's it. However we may need to study the maps to see if they match FS2's direction. I'm not sure as I cannot tell if some bits are in or out but for now that's it. Save it out as FrigateTechLoght-Normal.dds with Interpolated Alpha. Least that is what I do.

With some other steps with the model, DAE export, and importing with a shield into PCS2, here's the end result: