[Zacam]

CaptJosh: Incorrect. Those are glowPOINTS not animated glow MAPS. And a glow point is a singular texture of any given color that is usually used by a significant number of ships.

The red pulsing on a Shivan ship on its main body, (like, the Mara) is a glow map and it can be anywhere from 15-150 images that are rotated through in a sequence to produce the "animated" effect. And each and every one of those images takes a slot from bmpman, regardless of what texture type it is (be is Diffuse, -Shine, -Glow or -Normal...or -Misc.)

[Nuke]

Nuke, you say animated glow maps are a waste of slots, but isn't an animated glow map how the lights on the "runway" of the Orion work? Also aren't there several other ships that look far better for having animated lights on them?

they are a waste, and while they are used for many effects, there are better ways to do those effects procedurally (shader magic) that demand less from bmpman. id like to see those at some point in the future, though i think the setup for those effects will require some form of materials system. probably a system where you define regions and colors for a number effects, these would be masked by another map (possibly glow alpha), and applied as if it were a glow map. these effects could also be linked to game events, such as having the pattern change depending on say, hitpoints, or shield strength to give visual indications of whats going on with it.

actually considering the number of things shaders bring to the game having another map sounds like a better idea, this thread has brought up a need for 2 channels for team colors, a gloss channel has been brought up, somone brought up anistrophic reflection, so in the end we will have a lot of maps and possibly the ability to have mods make their own shaders/maps. i really think its a bad idea to set map affix names and map channel allocation in stone, because once we have that materials system its more stuff to add reverse compatibility for later on.

[CaptJosh]

Ok. Thanks for the clarification, Zacam.

[Aesaar]

Not really related, but what is the actual program used for viewing ships like this?


Apologies for disrupting the thread, but I've looked around, and I can't find what it is.  I assume everyone knows, so this is probably among the most noobish question I can ask, but I'm at a loss.

[CommanderDJ]

It's the ship lab. When you get to the mainhall in FSO, press F3.

[Aesaar]

Thanks, much appreciated. 

I feel stupid now.

[chief1983]

Nothing stupid about having to ask how to access an undocumented (or at best poorly documented) interface.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

Yeah, it took me a couple of year before I found out how to access it.

[Dragon]

I guess this thread could use some feedback. I've used the feature since it was implemented and I didn't had any problems with it. Works both with tiles and UVmaps, fighters and destroyers, animated parts and everything I've tried it on so far.
It might be a good idea to start looking into making team colors carry on to ship debris. Big ship exploding and losing all paint in process looks weird.
Another thing I'd like to see in the future would be allowing external weapons to use the parent's colors. Would be mainly useful for guns, but could also look nice on big torpedoes (of course, they'd have to keep their colors after launch).

[chief1983]

Just don't have pieces of debris that came from colored parts of the ship.

[Dragon]

That's not an option, considering I'm adapted existing ships.

[Nuke]

i think the best way to use team colors is sparingly, enough to mark the ship as being on a specific team, and it should be visible from any angle, but i wouldnt paint the whole ship with it like in the example.

[The E]

Coloured debris pieces are going to happen. External weapons models, probably not.

[Dragon]

i think the best way to use team colors is sparingly, enough to mark the ship as being on a specific team, and it should be visible from any angle, but i wouldnt paint the whole ship with it like in the example.

Many ships are using something other than metal gray as their main hull color, and I'm converting this color to main one, and the "secondary" color (if present) to stripes.
Most of the ships converted to use team colors would have their whole hull covered with them, there's no real alternative.
Also, I'm not using them to represent any sort of "team". Instead, they could represent the fleet ship belongs in, or it's owner, or even pilot (Aces could have a distinctive scheme).

[MatthTheGeek]

Team colors are best used on non-tileraped ships, tbh. Wholy-colored ships don't usually look good. Trust my HW modding experience.

[Dragon]

Steve-O's ships look great with team colors (I'd show you a pic, but I've only made schemes that look like default colors anyway, as I'm making this mostly for BP).
Tilemapped ships look really good with it, though I can't show you these, because I've used classified Inferno ships for testing (due to well defined stripe/main areas).
I'll soon have pics of non-classified tiled models and Steve-O's ships in other than default schemes.

[Nuke]

for me i just need to open up my psd files and add a desaturation layer. just make a layer on time set blend mode to saturation and draw in white anywhere you want to grey out. you can also use it for one of your color masks. make a second saturation layer for your other channel. then export the red channel from one and the blue channel from the other.

[Enzo03]

If I decide to get back into modding again, I'll be sure to look into this because I was doing "color scheme tests" for the ships I made.  That is, there were certain parts which were a bright color just to see how it looked.  I had tried blue, red, and grey and they all turned out to look at least decent, for a completely undetailed texture on a subpar ship model.

It looked like this:

Hmm.  The colors on the monitor in my lab are much, much darker than the colors for my laptop monitor that I used while putting this together.
I was planning on using the colors in a more "realistic" approach such as stripes later on.  I stopped trying after slipping into depression last spring.

That ship does NOT use the stuff in the first post, it was just something I was messing around with some 10 months or so ago (actually almost exactly 10 months ago now that I think about it).

And yeah that ship is going really fast, FS2-wise.

[mjn.mixael]

I was kinda watching from the sidelines on this one as I didn't think I really had a use for it. However, we are now considering using this feature in BtA and so, I think it's time for me to really weigh in.

I don't know if a decision has been made, but here's my OCD modder's perspective... Basically, in our case we would have to take the normal maps from many of the MVPs ships and edit them if this were to use the normal map channel. This is time consuming in that not only do we have to work on where the colors go, but we have to try and manipulate the maps to eliminate as much quality loss as possible. That, to me, doesn't sound like a particularly productive use of my time, and as such I'm very much in favor of a -misc map.

[Nuke]

i figure the best way to avoid quality loss would be to avoid putting team colors on areas of the hull with a lot of surface variation. essentially try to limit coloration to mostly flat areas. trouble spots are abrupt changes in normal direction over an area only a few texels wide, where full range needs to go to the green channel. also one axis of the normal is completely isolated from the color data, and variation on that channel shouldn't matter (not sure if alpha is the vertical or horizontal though, i think its horizontal but im not completely sure). so you can color areas in places where you have a lot of variation on the alpha channel , but little or none on the green channel. another thing you can do when colorizing is try to put your contain edges to colored spots within a single 4x4 block (put up a 4x4 pixel grid to be able to identify where the blocks are). you can soften your edges, so long as the transition stay withing the edge blocks. you can probibly also have surface variation in colored areas if the color masks are fairly uniform and completely contain any abrupt seams.

still its a lot of trouble for a pixel monkey. red and blue normal map channels are ballast, and should be treated as such. so thats a vote for a -misc map from me. one thing i thought about (for my own game engine at least), is using the diffuse and specular maps' alpha channels for u and v normals, so that no ballast channels are required. which would give equal performance to bc5, without the need of hardware support. probibly not practical for freespace's established paradigm though. i kinda hope that in the future map channel allocation could be handled with a material system proper, but that may be out of the scope of such a system.