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+--- Thread: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors (/showthread.php?tid=2122)
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - Vectorus - 01-17-2020
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...)
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - Haxus - 01-18-2020
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.
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - Vectorus - 01-18-2020
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.
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - jakbruce2012 - 01-18-2020
Yeah, I imagine rendering some few million stars every frame would be just a teeny bit too costly for this century's computing tech.
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - Haxus - 01-18-2020
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.
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - Haxus - 01-18-2020
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.
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - Vectorus - 01-19-2020
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...
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - jakbruce2012 - 01-19-2020
The results are very nice!
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - Haxus - 01-19-2020
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.
RE: 2020-01-16 Empty Sectors - Deantwo - 02-04-2020
(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?