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[Araph]

Spoiler: Quick Dirt Texture Test (click to show/hide)

How's the dirt texture? It's tile-able and everything. It looks a bit rocky, but I think it works for dry, hard dirt.

[dreadmullet]

Hmmm... not bad. Something like that could work. I have a few many criticisms, though:

(I'm not being mean, I'm trying to be as helpful as possible here. Also, you may have skipped on some things in order to show us something to criticise now. That's fine.)

- Don't think you know what dirt looks like. You have no idea what dirt looks like unless you look at it. Use reference images, like this. Even if we're not going for a completely realistic look, you should still use reference images. That's just general advice.

- It's not tileable. Try to preview the tiling somehow. I have to admit, making tileable textures is really difficult. I don't have any good tiling methods to suggest.

- It's too small. I was thinking, since there may be only one or two dirt and rock textures, they should be really, really high quality. Like, minimum 2048x2048, preferably 4096x4096.

- There are at least two areas where you probably overused the clone tool. You can see small places where it repeats a little at the center and middle left.

- Tileable textures should have minimal contrast. Looking at your image, there are shades of brown contrasted with really dark areas. It looks really obvious it's a tiled texture.

[Araph]

Spoiler: Previewed tiled bad dirt (click to show/hide)

I looked at it in Dreamweaver... despite the repetition of the pattern, I don't see any overt lines. If it looks like it has lines to you, though, I'll go over it again and try to smooth it out more.

I did look at dirt, and that was what I was basing this off of. I didn't know you had intended for it to be of a different consistency or coloration. I'll retry with the same type of dirt in that picture.

I'll also remake it as a giant image.

I'm not quite sure what you're referring to with the clone tool; do you mean the horizontal lines in the areas you pointed out?

I'll adjust the contrast, as well.

[dreadmullet]

I outlined a few glaring errors:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Here's what it looks like tiled 8x8. It would look really bad in game.
When the image is viewed from far away like this, it seems tileable. However, if you look at the edges up close, you can see the seams.

[Araph]

Okay, I see your point about the tiling and cloning. Here's a second try at the image:

Spoiler: Warning: Giant Mondo Dirt Texture (click to show/hide)

It's 4096x4096; the image posted is half-size. I tried to replicate the coloration and bumps of the dirt in the link you posted. The sides are as smooth of a transition as I could get while working fast.

[Scelly9]

Not bad. There's still a few line though. Left side of every tile.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Araph]

I'll go over the edges again.

[dreadmullet]

That... looks pretty good. Like, 10 times better. From far away, it tiles very well. However, I can still spot the seams:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[DrPoo]

Good to see that your already working on the graphics!

Im an asshole, i havent even been doing anything.. i owe an apology.. but you know.. school, girlfriend, rabid parents, etc. etc. etc.

[dreadmullet]

Some stuff about voxels:


How large should the voxels be?

This is very much up for debate. I think minecarts should be one voxel, robots 1x1x2 voxels. The average tunnel might be 2x2 voxels, perhaps 3x2. Maybe it would make voxels too big, but I think if they have decent smoothing it will work well.


How would minecart tracks work?

The most significant issue I keep thinking about is how minecarts and tracks would interact with voxels. Looking at malloc's latest screenshots, it seems like if you laid down a track on the terrain, it would be way too blocky. The minecart would go straight, and then drop down a short 45 degree slope, then go straight, then go down the slope. It would look ridiculous. So, I've thought of a solution: Make it so tracks don't always go down the 45 degree slope. The track would try to run at less of an angle. Here's what I'm talking about.


How should the voxels be textured? That's a huge question.

It's almost impossible to use UVs with voxels. Imagine you're in a closed cavern with walls on all 6 sides. Where would the UVs be placed?

I strongly suggest using triplanar texturing. It's a fairly simple solution, and it looks AWESOME. I think the best way to implement it would be to use shaders. I've worked with GLSL shaders before, I should be able to create a triplanar shader.  Here's a good explanation. Scroll all the way down to "Texturing and Shading".

[malloc]

Triplaner shading is awesome Dreadmullet, but it is an overkill for how I made the terrain work right now.
Especially considering it has some bad sides too.
E.i you can only have a limited amount of textures, and it does not work with atlas texture maps. Also, since we are not using marching cubes to render the texturing it will simply look bad, and considering our voxels are all pretty much rendered as cubes (The slopes are also kinda cubes..) we can actually calculate the texture coordinates fine without projecting and blending between tree different textures. (EDIT: having slept I realized we are already kinda using triplaner texture mapping. As all the normals are orthogonal to one of the three axis planes, so they are already projected to some plane.)

Anyway, I spend the day making terrain mesh generate from very arbitrary slope and cube combinations. It took a lot of time, and I have pretty much made it account for everything so a solid mesh is generated.

Stress testing the terrain mesh generator:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Here used to render more sensible terrain:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(btw there is an error in this video I fixed shortly after. That weird looking terrain near the camera icon now has a slope.)

There is still a few corner cases which I have chosen not to bother with right now. Next order of business is to add more types of terrain cells.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

The stress test looks quite nice.

[Araph]

Spoiler: Finished Dirt Texture (click to show/hide)

Turns out I'd forgotten to smooth one layer, which was making it tile badly. Fixed that, and it should work fine now.

Triplanar shading looks great; my vote goes towards using it, even if it is overkill.

In a similar graphical vein, question about the voxels: how smoothed will they be? Also, I would hope that humanoid robots would be somewhere around 2x2x4 voxels; that might make the voxels be pretty small, but I think it would make the world be a little more detailed. Minecraft-like sizes work, but It's a bit too chunky for my tastes.

Finally, what sort of textures should I be making now? I know that there's the basics (dirt, stone, grass, wood, metal), but are there any in particular that I should make in addition to those?

Finally, robot-related questions: they're steampunk and bronzed, right? Are we leaning towards a dwemer-esque style right now?

[dreadmullet]

I hate to tell you, but...it's still not tileable.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And yes, the robots are steampunk. However, I really, really, don't want them to all be bronze. Bronze/brass steampunk is so incredibly cliché.


As for other textures, I've been meaning to make a superultra high quality generic metal texture. It would be used for the robots, among many other things. Unless you really want to make a nice metal texture; otherwise, a wood texture would be great. Apparently there is a lot of wood in used in mines, for supports and things. I'm not sure if the robots should be really keen on using trees, but it makes sense I guess. Anyway, a wood texture that could be used to texture a plank like in the image I linked to would be great. An other, smaller texture for the ends of the planks would be great, too.

[eerr]

Well, my version of "what robots look like"

is that You find a strong enough metal(more likely alloy) for the pressure tank, and for the rest of the robotic limbs


So then you have a brass tank robot with copper arms.

Or maybe a tin tank robot with gold arms.

But the colors are limited to 2-3 metal/alloys(colors!) to avoid clashing too much.
It will already look rather, odd,