Night textures

[Florian]

Hi,

 

I separated the night textures from Karen's new lighting system.

 

regular night textures: http://www.eternal-lands.com/forum/index.p...=si&img=534

night shift textures: http://www.eternal-lands.com/forum/index.p...=si&img=535

 

Should I commit that?

[Roja]

Ummm...uh, well I know with the new sky client we are able to change the ambient/diffuse lighting to look similar to that. I'm not sure what these "night textures" are other than the very same thing in a different part of the code perhaps?

[Entropy]

I am not sure the night textures would work with lights around them.

The best (non hackish) way to do it is with the ambient light..

[Florian]

What this code does is:

average the color of the textures to make them more gray, with emphasis on the blue channel so red and green are reduced a bit more.

With white lights this seems to work pretty well, where is a colored light to test?

[Schmurk]

With the new sky, the color of the sun light changes during sunrise/sunset.

[Entropy]

What this code does is:

average the color of the textures to make them more gray, with emphasis on the blue channel so red and green are reduced a bit more.

With white lights this seems to work pretty well, where is a colored light to test?

 

It's not only about colored lights, it's about normal lights too.

For example, say you see a building at night. The colors are less evident, and it looks bluish. But if you turn on a powerful reflector, it will not look like that anymore, it will look like daytime (if the reflector has the same color temperature as the sun).

[majestyk]

I sometimes found it difficult to tell if it now night or day, just by looking at the environment. I can't tell if it would be technically a good decision to implement it this way, but I surely like the outcome. It looks very good and makes day and night easy to distinguish.

 

Cheers,

maj

[Roja]

With the new sky and lighting you'll find that it is easy to distinguish

[Florian]

What about the people with low end systems who can't use the new sky?

[Schmurk]

You can disable it but you'll still have the new lights that are defined by it.

And honestly, I don't think that the new sky will require a lot of performance. The thing that will require a lot of performance is when you'll tilt the camera to look more far because it'll need to display more objects. But there's also an option to reduce the maximum view distance...

[majestyk]

And honestly, I don't think that the new sky will require a lot of performance. The thing that will require a lot of performance is when you'll tilt the camera to look more far because it'll need to display more objects.

 

With a bit of nitpicking on my side: to see the sky, you will need to tilt the camera. So technically the sky does not require a lot of performance, but it is linked to the tilting of the camera, which does.

 

On a different sidenote: IMO the skybox is one of the best additions to the client ever! I am using it on my linux machine for months now, I love it, and I miss it every time I switch to my windows machine. (Just using the opportunity to make advertisement for the skybox)

 

Cheers,

maj

[Schmurk]

With a bit of nitpicking on my side: to see the sky, you will need to tilt the camera. So technically the sky does not require a lot of performance, but it is linked to the tilting of the camera, which does.

Yes sure but actually you can also see the sky without tilting the camera. Just look at the water reflections.

[Florian]

Could you give me a sky xml file with night lighting?

[hussam]

I tried building with night textures enabled. but when I enabled it in EL preferences, it killed the performance in the game.

Edited May 1, 2008 by hussam

[Florian]

I tried building with night textures enabled. but when I enabled it in EL preferences, it killed the performance in the game.

It only affects the loading performance. The textures are changed when they are loaded into the texture cache. So it affects map loading speed, nothing else.

(Of course when you toggle the option the game seems to freeze for a short time, depending on your CPU speed, because the textures are reloaded)

[The_Piper]

Yes, cant you just convert the textures and save them somewhere once?

 

And then just load the pre-converted textures?

 

No need to convert every texture at loading time again and again and again IMO.

 

Piper

[Florian]

Night Textures will probably be removed as the sky feature allows to change the ambient light which should have similar effects.

 

And precomputing the textures would require lots of disc space (60 ! files per texture).

[Schmurk]

The sky already allows to change the ambient light, just have a look at the XML files in the skybox directory.

However, I think you have to see that with Roja because she made the files.

[Florian]

I hate XML

[Schmurk]

Arf... it's not very difficult though, just have a look at the comments in the skybox_defs.xml and skybox_default.xml files, it should not be too hard to understand...