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2020-01-16 Empty Sectors
#11
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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#12
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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#13
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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#14
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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#15
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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#16
Manfred von Richthofen Wrote:Success flourishes only in perseverance — ceaseless, restless perseverance.
The sky box is now seamless.

The GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_SEAMLESS setting was being used properly, confirmed by close analysis of the rendered scene. That one pixel blend at the edge is a narrow line.

The fix resulted from changes to the way the cloudy background of the galaxy is rendered.
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#17
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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#18
The results are very nice!
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#19
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.
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#20
(01-16-2020, 04:30 PM)Haxus Wrote: Observed System Contents
The star map should show the contents of systems that are explored but not scanned.

Star map will now show contents of explored systems. Right-click now offers an "Observatory Report" for systems that are explored but not scanned.

Does this mean that it is also included in the starmap XML?
Could it be?
Hazeron Forum and Wiki Moderator
hazeron.com/wiki/User:Deantwo
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