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While you're working on it, is there any way that the seams of the skybox could be made less obvious? I don't think I've seen another game where the join between the faces is quite so obvious and immersion-breaking.
(Sorry to be blunt, it's more than made up for by the fact that no other game has a skybox where each pixel actually represents whole new stars and worlds you can go to...)
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01-18-2020, 04:24 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-18-2020, 05:14 PM by Haxus.)
There is one very costly way to eliminate the seams. That would be to render the contents of the sky box in every frame, instead of making a sky box at all.
I might give that a try.
Update: ok, never mind. “Costly” was an understatement.
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Haha, thanks for trying!
What if it were a sphere with smooth shading instead of a cube? Please bear in mind that I don't really know what I'm talking about.
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Yeah, I imagine rendering some few million stars every frame would be just a teeny bit too costly for this century's computing tech.
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01-18-2020, 09:40 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-18-2020, 09:41 PM by Haxus.)
The sky box uses a texture called a “cube map”. Each face of the cube map is a rendering of the galaxy in that direction. Other shapes do not work.
OpenGL has a setting that is supposed to blend the seams of the cube map. It is enabled in SoH. I will check to be sure it is being used properly.
I think it only blends the adjoining pixels. That might mean the blend is less effective at high resolution.
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Hooray! Thank you so much. Easy for us to ask things, hard work for you to deliver them - and yet you always seem to deliver more than we ask for...
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The results are very nice!
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I got lucky with this one. After staring at the code for a while, I was struck with an idea. Four lines of code later, no more seam.