Replace space texture in WCP/WCSO ?

Der_Andi

Rear Admiral
Hi,
maybe you all know the problem. The space texture looks like this.
Ugly, isn't it?

A few days ago i visited one of my favorite websites again: APOD, astronomy picture of the day. There i saw this stunning photography.

Is there a way to replace the existing space texture with such images?
Maybe into this...


Andi
 
It's possible to do, but it never seems to work out right. I've tried many times to replace the WCP nebulas with something better, and the end results usually look worse. You have to consider that the backgrounds aren't just static 2d images... well, they are, but they're used as a texture, mapped around a sphere. Worse still, it's mapped around a sphere twice - so if you have a great looking picture, in the game it will appear twice, and you'll be able to see the point where the two mirrored pictures meet up. For this reason, WCP-style amorphous blobs look much better. In order to be able to really improve the WCP backgrounds, we'd first have to replace the skysphere mesh itself with a different mesh, texture-mapped in such a way as to get rid of any mirroring and untextured areas.
 
well, they are, but they're used as a texture, mapped around a sphere. Worse still, it's mapped around a sphere twice - so if you have a great looking picture, in the game it will appear twice, and you'll be able to see the point where the two mirrored pictures meet up.

That's the point. The image, that will be used must be round and not a rectangle.
But i don't understand anything of tre-modding, so i just wondered if there is a solution out. Somewhere...
 
Eh, we have no clue how to modify the way that texture maps around the sky in WCP/SO.

Not much of a loss IMHO, I prefer a lot of blackness with tiny stars and subtle, shapeless nebulae than something like that picture in the first post. That picture is probably 90% computer "enhancements" and 10% an actual picture. It makes space looks like a disco, and it'd make WCP look like Freelancer (We don't want that!). Space is black.
 
If one was to travel in space, you would mostly see stars and black space. Nebulas would not be all that spectacular like you see in photographs. Like Eder pointed out, many of those space photos of nebulas or galaxies are computer enhanced to make it look better.
 
It's possible to do, but it never seems to work out right. I've tried many times to replace the WCP nebulas with something better, and the end results usually look worse. You have to consider that the backgrounds aren't just static 2d images... well, they are, but they're used as a texture, mapped around a sphere. Worse still, it's mapped around a sphere twice - so if you have a great looking picture, in the game it will appear twice, and you'll be able to see the point where the two mirrored pictures meet up. For this reason, WCP-style amorphous blobs look much better. In order to be able to really improve the WCP backgrounds, we'd first have to replace the skysphere mesh itself with a different mesh, texture-mapped in such a way as to get rid of any mirroring and untextured areas.


Interesting...you might not be able to use a nebula then however you could probably generate a nice looking high density "blue" starfield (think WC1) that would look good. I've used this in a couple of my animations...
 
Eh, we have no clue how to modify the way that texture maps around the sky in WCP/SO.
Hehe, I wouldn't say that - we know which mesh the sky uses, and since it's a mesh like any other, it could easily be replaced with a cube (which, obviously, is a much easier thing to texture-map than a sphere). The only trouble is that all backgrounds share the same mesh - so if you change the mesh, all existing backgrounds would not be mapped properly any longer, and that's why I've never given much thought to doing anything like that ;).
 
If I recall correctly, the backgrounds in Homeworld 1&2 were not images or bitmaps, but actual geometry using vertex colors. Rather brilliant, when you think about it - they could do some spectacular things at nearly infinite resolutions without worrying about storing massive textures in the video card's memory. Effectively it was video-card driven vector art, with smooth transitions. And even if the background was complex - on the order of 50 or 60 thousand polys...it's still more effcient than even a moderately-sized skybox.
Always amazed me that no one else seemed to use the technique.
 
I can think of several reasons - the main one being that the technique is entirely useless outside of space sims, and there aren't many of those :). Another reason would be wanting to actually make your backgrounds feel unique, which is hard enough to do with human-drawn space backgrounds, and impossible to do with anything procedurally-generated. And thirdly, because Homeworld's backgrounds are horrible :). All those colours, and that vomit-inducing smoothness... they make me miss the black-space-with-white-dots backgrounds from the old days.
 
Well, that's the thing - they weren't proceedurally generated. As I recall, an artist would paint it as a skydome - and they had a program that would take that bitmap and convert it to the polygon method. I remember it being released to the public as well. I'm gonna disagree with you on the "horrible" comment. If there's one thing that those HW background were it is absolutely spectacular. Not at all realistic, of course, but just beautiful. Overdone? Yup. And there's nothing in the method itself that says that the colors must be super-saturated, or that then have to be blurry.
All that said...I agree that sometimes it's just too much. I too, yearn for a simple blue-black space backdrop with some simple stars. Sort of peaceful, when you think about it.
 
It's a matter of taste, I suppose - in my opinion "garish" would be a much better word than "spectacular". I mean, they look like somebody spilled several randomly-chosen buckets of paint and then put little dots on it to remind people that this was space - and seriously, nobody would realise that if it wasn't for those dots :p.

Anyway, the great thing about black backgrounds is that they serve to highlight the foreground objects. Just imagine how awful the first scene of Star Wars would have been with a Homeworld-style background - who'd even notice that big huge star destroyer?
 
the 'spectacular' part isn't the appearance of the background, its how well it scales.

Most skybox images are huge, and have to be to maintain distance from your play field and because of that.. many of them are images that are dozens of megs in size, which doesn't sound like alot, but keep in mind that your video card has to hold at least a portion of that in its memory at every given moment the skybox is visible, which if you operate on non-bleeding edge hardware like I do makes a huge difference.

I can't tell you how many games I have played where the first thing I do is find the graphics directory and replace all the skybox images with blank files.
 
Oh, I'm all too well aware of size issues with skyboxes, since I develop games for a living :). However, I'm still not convinced - I'd have to see a half-decent background created using this method in order to see any point to it. After all, what's the point of scaling crap - will bigger crap look less crap? :p

Besides, in the greater scheme of things, the size of the skybox images is fairly unimportant - if your card doesn't have enough memory to run smoothly a game with a big skybox images, it's likely to have trouble with the game in question for any number of other reasons, for example pixel shaders and the like.
 
actually we use the method for skyboxes and even models in our current Nintendo DS project (unannounced yet). there's severe limitations on DS texture memory, and it doesn't know how to interpolate bitmaps, so vector colours are the only way to make perfectly smooth transitions. we've got the idea all by ourselves: didn't know Relic had come up with it years earlier :)
 
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