Light sources and what they look like.

Light sources and what they look like.

Discuss the source code and development of Spring Engine in general from a technical point of view. Patches go here too.

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AF
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Light sources and what they look like.

Post by AF »

Image

See the moon there? When we look at the sun in spring the only thign that really changes is how bright and what colour. However what fiw e could change ti to become a moon, stars, another planet even?

Is this possile, what sort of effort would be needed, and is it at all feasible.
Warlord Zsinj
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Post by Warlord Zsinj »

Well, I think it would be possible for a player to recreate a moon by playing with the light settings, but I agree that I'd love to see an option letting the player set the sky and sun textures.

For example, I was intending on making a map that shrinks TA down, so that you fight on a ------- table, or across the stove (similar to the micro machines map made for OTA a little while back), but it would look strange to be battling in a house, and look up and find the sky.
I would like to instead have the massive walls and ceiling flying off into the distance in 3-point perspective, and have the light source as a lightbulb way off in the distance. I'd like to be able to do this simply by sticking a detailed bitmap or something in a folder, and have Spring load that as the sky texture.
Of course, giving players the ability to set a repeating animation would be great, so that player's can make stars that twinkle, or a planet off in the distance that slowly spins.
And on maps with meteor storms, people could add in little meteor shower animations...
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Buggi
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Post by Buggi »

Expecially with nighttime maps and lunar/space maps in the works or already made.

I wonder how much overhead it would be to paint a "background" to the sky. Whther that background was stars, another planet... galaxy?

Imagine getting THIS in spring:

Image

-Buggi
Gnomre
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Post by Gnomre »

Yes, it's pretty, but I'd hate for my galaxy to be that close to another :P

[edit] Just a quick thought: how hard would it be to put in a "NoClouds=1;" tag for .smd files to completely shut off clouds from rendering (for moon maps, for example)? And, for that matter, how hard would it be to make a "Stars=1;" tag? Just have an alpha image thing which is speckled like you'd expect the night sky to be, and have it interact with the colors of the map's fog/sky/etc in game. Something like a nighttime mars map... you'd still expect the sky to have a bit of a butterscotch tone rather than pitch black, much like the night sky is a deep blue rather than black here on Earth. Both would be steps forward, anyway...
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mother
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Post by mother »

Whoohoo look at all the trouble I can cause ;)

I was thinking about the same thing, and it would be great. I was thinking that perhaps we could, as a first step, put support for some finite number of additional lights in the .smd file... Would also be great if we could provide some more parametrs (light source radius, brightness, possibly even source type).

Another pair of related suggestions:
1)having more then one kind of bump/surface map applied- Everything has that dirt/mottled flat surface at the moment (save water)... Im not asking for total flexaility but some sorta diffusion/specularity control might be nice. Though if you wanna add subsurface stuff and material specifications, far be it for me to complain. Maybe including a few 'stock' materials would suffice (like a combination of soft/hard smooth/rough and shiny/flat, using a 16-color indexed image or some such)

2)And maybe allow a toggle for fog a 'participating' medium... (think atmospheric dust scattering the sunlight... I think it might be called aerosol scattering. As is if you have fog, it gets 'thick' based soly on distance, and can be quite a bit more luminous than the surrounding terrain.

Then again, this is all eye candy, none of it is even remotely important to gameplay!

But could someone really seriously explain to me the XYZ coords of the sun? Lol... whatever the heck it is it isn't intuitive, I just played and played until I was so confused I dunno why it did kinda what I wanted ;) It would make a lot more sense if it was specified as 2 'fractions of an arc' and maybe use the third axis as a brightness/intensity setting...
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RightField
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Post by RightField »

Just make sky texture replaceable and some bit more advanced light settings and it would all work out nicely.

Edit: Or even better! Skybox support! :P
Last edited by RightField on 12 Jun 2005, 14:13, edited 1 time in total.
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AF
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Post by AF »

And th ability to move th light source might be useful, or create cycles of waning and rising levels of light.

And maybe optional lense flare if the light is above a certain intensity and the cameras pointed at the light source.
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Redfish
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Post by Redfish »

Would be nice to have some variation available to give us the real fight over a galaxy feel when playing spring.

On a side note, if our skies were perfectly dark, our nearest galaxy neighbour M31 or Andromeda would look about just as big. About 6 moon diameters. But because of light pollution we don't see shit.
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zwzsg
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Post by zwzsg »

Like I already said, if someone has time, I'd like to have a choice of atmospherical effects, such as thunderstorm, aurora borealis, etc... to use instead of the clouds, to give planets a more alien feelings. But that's really not a urgent features, as anyway once in game I just go in TA style view.

Adding a tag to allow changing the dark blue under the horizon is probably much quicker and would be more noticeable in TA style view.
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Min3mat
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Post by Min3mat »

"aurora borealis" i thought it was corealis :P
Gnomre
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Post by Gnomre »

Eh, Redfish, the stars in our own galaxy between us and the Magellan Clouds and Andromeda would distort the light from them with their gravity, regardless of atmosphere. Surely the men on the moon would have noticed "OMG GIANT GALAXY IN THE SKY!!" while they were there if it were only the atmosphere causing the distortion :)
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AF
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Post by AF »

Also the fact that andromeda is an insane distance away ti wouldnt be that big in the sky, already it shows up as a star unless looked at closely, infact for long time people thought the crab nebula was bigger than the andromeda galaxy and thought andromeda itself was a star untill the 1800's
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[K.B.] Napalm Cobra
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Post by [K.B.] Napalm Cobra »

Oh do shut up alantai, does it matter if its realistic to see a galaxy like that? You have to admit it is rather pretty.
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Buggi
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Post by Buggi »

And TA is realistic how?

-Buggi
el_muchacho
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Post by el_muchacho »

Gnome wrote:Yes, it's pretty, but I'd hate for my galaxy to be that close to another :P
Even if they were that close, the two galaxies probably would take a few tens of million years before the clash, so no worries. 8)
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AF
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Post by AF »

pfft I was mearly spouting trivia. Although if you where somewhere like the magellan cloud then the milkyway would fill the sky
Warlord Zsinj
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Post by Warlord Zsinj »

If you were somewhere like the Magellanic cloud, then the other Magellanic cloud would fill the sky :P

And yeah, stuff realism, I want to see three suns over a desert planet, and the gas giant which my moon is revolving around.

I'm confidant Weather effects will make an appearance in Spring, I believe, but not for a little while. However, putting your own sky with your map is something which can be done rather easily, and would really have a great effect on maps.
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AF
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Post by AF »

Actually it depends on where you are in the cloud. *put an end to cloud thing*
shnorb
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Post by shnorb »

i dont see why the sky or night/day shouldnt have an effect on gameplay. night could cause reduced los, as could mist. electrical storms could have strange effects on your units. ie causing planes to randomly drop outa the sky, fusion reactors to stop and start, weapons to malfunction.

but what i really want to see is all this stuff come together. imagine having a gas giant looming over the planet, surrounded by a multitude of moons that have been melted and twisted by its gravitational forces. there could be a few suns, one blue, one a apricot orange (as in pitch black). they could cross each others paths, creating momentary darkness, or a lower light intensity, and then finally night. during the day there could be heat wave effects, at night a rolling fog that consumes everything, making your own units hard to see let alone your enemies'. and you could look at the sky and see the outline of the gas giant and it slowly spinning satelites.

*drools all over keyboard*

would be cool, but i love romanticising about that sorta stuff.
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AF
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Post by AF »

Yes but that would also place the minimum requirements of spring at something like deep blue supercomputer and masses of high speed ram.

I propose this for aesthetic reasons, to make maps more atmospheric and encourage th user to use alternate view modes than simply TA style.
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