I'm going to have to stop replying to everyone as there's too many posts, but I'll try and cover the main points.
Sorry I haven't been able to help with the 'unable to load terrain material bug. I would help if I had any idea what was causing it. I can only add more debugging stuff to the next release and trim down the shaders a bit.
The same applies to the black polygon problem, though I have at least seen something similar before. These problems are really difficult to resolve if I can't reproduce them on a test machine.
Lighting: The current implementation is pretty dodgy, I've been focused mainly on getting something simple that looks adequate while I develop the rest of the app and I fully intend to improve it (thanks for the link!). One additional problem here is that I'm limited by having to use the same lighting model for internal and external areas and there is no information to provide additional light sources inside, so its always going to be a bit of a bodge to make both look decent. I'm going to add some lighting controls (brightness mainly) for the next release. Disablng shadowing is supposed to keep the diffused lighting, so maybe thats a bug.
Screenshots: This was always in my plan, I just haven't got around to it yet. So much to do!
Tiles blending into each other: I actually implemented this in the first version of this project by blending textures together but abandoned it for the following reasons:
- It actually doesn't look that good, and is fairly slow to render
- Applying material colours to the textures is difficult. Either a very complex shader or pre-multiplied textures (potentially lots of VRAM and long startup) is needed.
- You need to build adjaceny tables for all the tiles so that you know what to blend with. This is both slow and cumbersome and makes implemention other features difficult or impossible.
The usual approach used for landscapes of basing the blending on vertex colors/attributes doesn't really work here because colours are applied on a tile (not vertex) basis. You could sum and average the colours on each vertex and then smooth them across the faces but my guess is that this would look terrible. If I find/come up with a better way I'll add it.
Smooth walls having noise applied is a bug and I've fixed it already in my version. As is the jpg/png problem.
Fortifications now have slits in the walls (using Impaler[WrG]s suggested design) if there is something above them.
I'll be releasing a new version with many changes later this week (I've had to delay this slightly), hopefully Wednesday. This next version will support single tile buildings and bridges, but I need models for these (except bridges). If anyone would like to create some furniture (table, chair etc) models that would be awesome
The specification:
- .obj format please.
- +z is up since this fits with DF best, +x is right, y+ is depth.
- Consider a tile to be (-0.5, -0.5, 0.0) to (0.5, 0.5, 1.0). Models should fit in this space but by no means take up all of it. For instance a chair would probably look best if it was about a third to a half as big as the tile.
- There is code to ensure that buildings are oriented in sensible ways (chairs face tables for instance), and for this to work the models should face towards -y.
- You can use multiple materials but the first material/submesh will have it's material modified at runtime to reflect the material the building is constructed out of. You can supply additional textures if necessary but I would prefer to keep the number of textures to a minimum.
- The models and texture must either be all your own work or you must provide a link to the source so that I can verify that they are usable. If your own work you must be happy to have them distributed under the BSD license, though you will be credited.
Don't worry too much about to orientation and size requirements as I can fix these if necessary, I'd just rather not have to
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Topic: Visual Fortress: another 3D visualisation app (Read 328535 times)