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[thewonderidiot]

Holy schist, those images look awesome. Hope it'll still run on my aging laptop when the next release is done. I remember my graphics processor having a strong dislike of Visual Fortress's shaders.

The shaders will be detected and auto-loaded if supported. If your laptop doesn't support them, you'll just get the standard flat image texture on all of the faces.

[thewonderidiot]

Overseer 0.15 is out!

Changes v0.15
---------------------
-Added an option for backface culling which can help performance and allows you to see directly into caverns from outside.
-Added a robust material system that detects the presence of proper texture images in /materials/images/. Image name must be material_name.bmp. When in doubt about what name a material should have, check out the material dump program from DFHack, or ask.
-Made it so that geometry is colored with the colors from Stonesense, thanks to Japa. The colors directory is an exact copy of the one in stonesense, so any changes there can just be copied directly across.
-Added in support for plants and trees. I've only included two trees as good-looking tree models are hard to find. They can be pretty easily added though. The format is, for example, acacia_tree.ive. For non-tree plants (trees include towercaps and such), you'll see _shrub.ive after the plant name instead of _tree.ive. Plant names can get confusing, so check out treedump from DFHack if you have any problems figuring out what to name a model.
-Added a skybox. It's stored in /materials/images/skybox as six images, so it can be easily swapped out for a different one.
-Redid the world lighting. It might not be obvious but it's more flexible now and will allow having a light attached to the shadow for dark renderings.

I think the list of changes pretty much covers everything, but as always, if you have any questions, just ask! Here's a couple of images from this release:

This shows the two trees that I've included, as well as the sample textures for the ground in my embark.


Here's a zoomed out shot with backface culling enabled, so you can see all of the minerals in the caverns.


EDIT: Forgot to mention, F1 toggles the FPS in the top left of the screen, though you'll get error messages about fonts (I haven't built truetype into my copy of OSG yet so it complains, but it works).
Also, the acacia_tree.ive file I've included is actually a Chestnut tree (so it should be chestnut_tree.ive). It's not really a big deal, I just had it changed for the pictures and forgot to change it back.

And a note about the ive format. It's OSG's binary format, and loads the fastest and works best with OSG. You can convert other model types into ive using osgconv, which you can get with a binary release of OpenSceneGraph.

Oh and, the textures included aren't meant to be final. In fact most of them came from google image search <_<. If you have any good textures though, feel free to post them so I can put them in the official release, and so others can use them before I do so!

[thewonderidiot]

Sorry to have to push out another release so soon, but there was a silly looking graphical glitch that was happening in certain situations that had to be ironed out.

Overseer 0.16 is up now.

Changes v0.16
---------------------
-Fixed a bug with flickering when neither a texture nor a color are found for a tile.
-Renamed acacia_tree.ive to chestnut_tree.ive since the model is of a chestnut.

[Zebra2]

Soooo looking forward to playing with this when I get home. Looks great. Good job on adding a skybox, too. I was wondering when someone would do that.

[Untelligent]

Niiiice.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Still doesn't look as good as 3Dwarf did, but I'm sure it will in time. Also it's the first visualizer with a material color feature that actually works on my computer, which is awesome. Those mountains look deciduous.

Out of curiosity, is ther any way to turn off the color? It looks pretty neat right now, but I can see circumstances in the future where it'd make some of my projects look a bit silly (imagine carving something out of the rock, only to find your giant statue has stripes of orthoclase and microcline and armok knows what else running through it).


One little oddity is that I actually had plants turned on when I took that screenshot; I checked before and after I ran Overseer to make sure. Any reason you can think of why the impertinent vegetation isn't showing up?

[thewonderidiot]

Sure, I'll add the option to disable color to the ini file. Also, your vegetation isn't showing up because there aren't any models for any of the trees or shrubs on your map yet. You can use the tree models I have included if you copy/paste and rename them to the names of trees on your map. (Got oaks? Copy chestnut_tree.ive and name it oak_tree.ive).

I'll be working on adding more vegetation as I code, and anybody who wants to help is free to contribute. It's just hard to find quality low-polygon tree models for free. I'll put them in as I stumble across them though, I promise 

[Untelligent]

Oh, I see. I read the bit where you only had two tree models, I just assumed you were using them for all of the trees at the moment.

[thewonderidiot]

Nope. If things aren't looking more populated by the next release though I'll probably toss in a generic tree model that can optionally be used for every tree. I realize that having to copy/paste is inconvenient for now, but hopefully it's not too bad

EDIT: It's probably a good thing the chestnut tree isn't being used for generic tree. It's way too complex. My laptop can't handle using it for everything.

Same goes for the palm. Anybody know where to get good low poly tree models that actually look good?

[Zebra2]

For some reason it doesn't give the skybox on my home system. I tired it on another computer and the skybox worked, but moving in any direction would make me jump a distance about 5x the length of the map.

Anyways, here's an updated one of claspedshocked

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[thewonderidiot]

For some reason it doesn't give the skybox on my home system.

What are the specs on your home system?

I tired it on another computer and the skybox worked, but moving in any direction would make me jump a distance about 5x the length of the map.

Weird, but that can be resolved by making the moveSpeed in the ini file a lot smaller.

[Sowelu]

I'd say that a generic tree is quite important, especially for people with giant mods.  Too much work otherwise.  Also, trees don't need to be that realistic, especially when generic.  Just do the old trick of three flat surfaces for the leaves, arranged in kind of an *-shaped pattern.

Man, this stuff looks gorgeous.  I wonder if someday, these 3d views will help inspire Toady's layer generation; his interface might be entirely home-brew, but seeing what the layers look like in this program (and comparing them to real life) is very inspiring to me.  I can tell that it'll need more textures for the horrifically bright materials, though, to dim them down a bit.

I'm looking forwards to tricks that smoothly blend neighboring tiles of different floor materials together, so grass will spill over onto sand or vice versa.

[oolon1]

Starting to look really good.

I can tell that it'll need more textures for the horrifically bright materials, though, to dim them down a bit.

He copied over the Stonesense color xmls, and Stonesense has a very bright and colorful art style.  That's why it's so brightly colored.  Putting simple alpha texture maps over top of the colors would help, but I think we can go in and choose some more realistic colors to go with this visualizer.  Besides, those colors will be covered by opaque textures later, anyway, I believe.

[thewonderidiot]

I'd say that a generic tree is quite important, especially for people with giant mods.  Too much work otherwise.  Also, trees don't need to be that realistic, especially when generic.  Just do the old trick of three flat surfaces for the leaves, arranged in kind of an *-shaped pattern.

I'm working on it! Actually I'm going to try impostors before I resort to standard billboards. The idea is that the (relatively) high poly tree is rendered once, and then that image is copied to billboards where other trees are supposed to be. There's a distance threshold too, so trees you're close to will be nice and gorgeous, and the trees that are farther away will be static images, but you shouldn't be able to discern a difference. It won't play too well with shadows right off the bat, but shadows are for another day.

I'm looking forwards to tricks that smoothly blend neighboring tiles of different floor materials together, so grass will spill over onto sand or vice versa.

This is a work in progress! Sexymustard has some ideas on how to do it texture-wise and I have some ideas about how to write it into my material system. This is his last week of work, so hopefully more material enhancements will be bumped out soon.

Putting simple alpha texture maps over top of the colors would help.

Already planning on doing that for the next release 


EDIT: Actually, to go along with the bright colors, Japa is talking about making a cartoony tileset for Overseer. Along that vein, once shaders are implemented I'm probably going to put in the option for cel shading for a very cartoony effect.

[Sexy Mustard]

Hello thread! Sexy Mustard here to prove i am not just WonderIdiot's imaginary friend and more importantly to replace all those bleh textures that we have packaged with v0.16 located here http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=3033  i hope you like my work ^.^

Edit: oops i forgot to say, to install them you need to just put the contents of the file into the images folder inside the materials folder.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

For some reason these visualizers always seem to crash out for me. Not sure why. This one gets to "Drawing z-level 108" then the window closes. Windows 7, 4 gig memory. Video card is kinda old, radeon x1900, maybe that's it.