Spring RTS Engine

As you might have seen in the screenshots section I recently added support for shiny/reflective surfaces on the units. This work via the alpha channel in the texture (higher alpha -> more reflective). So now we would need someone to redo the current textures into a format that supports alpha channel (.tga preferably) and give them fitting alpha values.

To be able to do this you have to have a graphic card that supports shadows since reflectivness is only supported in that mode. It would also be usefull it you understand which textures are used on which units etc to help test that the units look good afterward (remember that each texture can be used on many units so its probably better to give it too low than too high alpha). Since there is a lot of textures some patience might also be required.

Also since the reflective surfaces look best on high poly units it would be nice if someone could assemble high polygon units with good aimpoints etc and in XTA size.

Would be nice to have an RGB texture for this, though i suppose the 2048x2048 texture space limits this, anyways, this is he most awesome feature i could want, and what would i be if i didn't support it.. so i'm on it!

To be able to do this you have to have a graphic card that supports shadows since reflectivness is only supported in that mode.

Why is that, are you not using standard environment mapping?
Just wondering...

and also, what's the best way to replace textures? just ut the new ones in TAspring/tatex?

And how many bits per pixel should these be?

Also, where can i get this build? it's hard to judge hw shiny things will be otherwise..

also, what's with the diferent darkness versions of lots of textures?

I uploaded a version to http://taspring.clan-sy.com/temp/spring.exe that you can test with (remember to remove it before running multiplayer though).

Yes place the .tga files in unittextures\tatex I have made is so tga files get priority over bmp so no need to remove the old ones. They should be 32 bits per pixel.

A rough estimate of shininess is that 255 is a perfect mirror while 0 has no shininess at all. Generally you should use values below 130 which look like very shiny metal. The default values that i assign to stuff missing alpha channel is 30 (for now at least, in those two screenshots i used a value of 127).

The different darkness version was used by TA to simulate lighting. All models in XTA have had Benitos texture cleanup program runned on them which mean they use only one version but different models might still use different levels.[/url]

What exactly do you mean by reflectiveness? So you mean you compare teh angle between the polygon, light source and camera, and based on this you brighten it a certain amount?

There is two bits of it doomweaver, one bit the specular one works pretty much like you said, the other one which is mostly visible at higher reflection values is that it starts reflecting the sky and ground around the unit.

Edit: like this

Wow omg shock horror! REAL reflections? That's phenomenal! How many additional images need to be rendered for that? I'd imagine it would absolute wreck even the best video cards!

Its not exactly real reflections and it only requires one extra 128*128 image per frame to be rendered. Works out to about 30 fps in the test script on my 6600gt (~200 units, about 1/3 having 1000+ polygons).

If I understand well, it doesn't reflect unit, it just reflect landscape emptied of all units? Still looks nicely impressive. Too bad that I just play zoomed out far above, and that my GFX card doesn't support such fancy features.

I still wish you left room open for transparency and team color, even if you don't feel like coding it right now.

The file you uploaded cant find a "DevIL.dll"


Edit: I found it.


Now i get a runtime error for abnormal program termination during loading, probably at the point when loading is supposed to finish.


Hmm, on castles it gives the standard "windows encountered an error and needs to close" dialog.

Try putting these in the shaders directory

http://taspring.clan-sy.com/temp/unit.fp
http://taspring.clan-sy.com/temp/unit.vp

okay, that one works!

do i have to do anything special to get enviromental reflections? As far as i can see i only have the specularity now, and i'm not even usre it's using the alpha texture, i can see water reflections.


oops! acidentaly put textures in root/tatex instead of root/unittextures/tatex


edit2: best feature ever!

zwzsg wrote:I still wish you left room open for transparency and team color, even if you don't feel like coding it right now.

dito.

not to downsize my excitment though... those screens look absolutely amazing...

Super!
Awesome!
Sweet!

WTF are those units SJ!?!?! <.<

And UNREAL looking new Commander in the screens sections. WOW!

Amazing stuff!

-Buggi

It's so hmmm...sexy.
Gearing up to compete with AoE3, are you?

They where submitted by someone on these boards a few months back (sorry dont remember who, think he had worked on evolva before).

my old card don't support this i will have wanted to contribute!
But very impressive, i hope buy a new card faster

Now where can I find those .TGA files?

even without it it looks quite nice, much more polished, does it use specular now?