2020-01-16 Empty Sectors

[Vectorus]

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...)

[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.

[Vectorus]

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.

[jakbruce2012]

Yeah, I imagine rendering some few million stars every frame would be just a teeny bit too costly for this century's computing tech.

[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.

[Haxus]

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.

[Vectorus]

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...

[jakbruce2012]

The results are very nice!

[Haxus]

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.

[Deantwo]

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?