Hi hi. I've been working on a GUI mock-up. I am hoping to demonstrate a full 3D celestial view instead of the top-down system we have now. Another thing that bothers me is how the GUI currently does not give any context to where a player is looking on the map. In a traditional RTS, you have the starcraft minimap. The area you are looking is "boxed in". In SupCom, it was always rectangular. And with dual windows, my 2nd monitor was essentially a minimap. I've had 2 ideas to help PA with this. 1. View Cube. I've explained it here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...ui-discussion-thread.52055/page-5#post-804424 Some videos here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...ui-discussion-thread.52055/page-5#post-803694 The 2nd Idea I had was a latitude/longitude overlay. I've already built the sphere and grid system. I would fit these all into a full solar system showing orbit paths. I was hoping you guys might have some ideas on how to take the PA textures or those planet icons So I can go and skin that sphere to look like this: If you can somehow figure out the other planet types too, that was be amazing!
Thank you so much! You can see what I did with them here https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...feel-has-a-lot-to-draw-from-ozonexs-pa.52806/
Planets in game have no texture Planets are made of lots of smaller textures, Water, sand, grass, rock. The textures are applied to planet based on the sphere's height map and distance from water layer. In Example Sand texture, this one goes under and around water on planets, Grass texture, this one goes next to sand but not water. Rocks texture, like most objects in game they have there own textures in their biome folders (PAPA formatted and useless to us). these textures are repeated around planet many many times, so in end size 400 planet has 100's of sand grass textures repeated to make nice looking lands
Hopefully when im finished my game engine tech i can share it with Uber. I'm basing my engine off this technology, http://www.euclideon.com/ But my engine will be running a simulated 3d polygon world or galaxy, and indexing the data real-time in ram. This will break the 3d galaxy into smaller easy to load indexed segments. because polygon 3d data is smaller than point cloud it can be animated easily, its being done now on the PA servers, the server is running a virtual game. Then i will use a search algorithm to only grab data from an indexed location then only render the visible pixels/polygons from players camera POV. ---Edited---- Uber may not need it as the server client protocol already seems to do this when bandwidth limit is reached, as i noticed it only redraws visual updates of what is happening on the server that is visible to the players camera when bandwidth limit is reached.
I like you idea for Longitude and Latitude visual mapping, it looks nice, and easy done with a texture on a sphere larger than the planet.
@maxpowerz I will take any more planet textures that you can throw at me. As high res as you can. I can just resize the image if my software can't handle it.
I will make the Earth and Lava texture higher resolution and quality for you very soon, I'm just waiting the 4 hours it takes my computer to render a 25 second long animation. I wish 3Ds Max and Bryce (Ray Trace animation software) would render high quality animations faster. I will post the animation here for you to look at when its done. The animation i'm making is a demo of a planets with a dynamic atmosphere (clouds) then an asteroid comes along and smashes into planet.
My computer is slowly getting there, i can't do much while its rendering Click image and have a look down bottom at time, I highlight this in red box.
There is a glitch in the planets texture at about 5 seconds, and my animation is a bit jumpy, but i have only started learning how to animate over the last week. I used to use this software for making still images of 3d landscapes not animating, Hopefully my animating skills will improve over next few weeks as i learn more..
I'm going to make a proper one demonstrating just the dynamic clouds , no crashing asteroid. That video i posted above was just a play around, i wanted to see if i could make asteroid go visually BOOM . lol It's much harder than it looks. hahaha
I will make new planet texture for you soon, my children have just woken up and i need to get my oldest one ready for school. I will post better textures here soon, maybe few hours, i need to drop my oldest one off at school and go and get some much needed items from the shop (Coffee, i have no COFFEE, AHHHHH, I'm going to die, *insert badly acted over dramatized death here*).