Universal Forum Archive

Ive been laying down surfaces using startblock, lay tile and lay path. but everyithing i lay down is all squared off cause its in a square tile.

I was checking out zar's pics of ciroz in the making, and noticed that lots of the surfacses dont seem to be confined to the grid squares. for instance, the edge of the grassy feild is round and curvey when it meets the other texture.

I was reading through the docs and from what i gathered theres a way to blend surfaces better but it hasnt been written about yet. and i can't find anything here in the forums about it.
any help? thanks

yea he used a different way of laying down the planet texture graphics, the roads and such are made in a paint program and tiled on the landscape, not by laying textures from the planet side tiled across the map.

some setting (im a bit drunken right now and cant recall the specifics) use the land texmap 0-16 settings to tile it across and down the map the graphic file you specify in the server console. Its quite tedious and time consuming, and when done right looks damn good. Maybe zaroba can fill in the gaps XD

yea, ciroz ground is really just covered with very large texmaps.
16 texmaps that each cover a 64x64 tile area and are around 1600x1600 pixles each.
did it that way to solve that squared off issue.


i'm pretty sure the auto texture genwerator could be used to make rounded effects. it basicly does the above automatically. it takes the textures that are set, blends them together based on the landscape height, and generates 64 textures to cover the map.

Ive given up on autogen entirely, between the autogen surfaces being generated ALOT bigger than my other surfaces, and the big nasty lines that cut through your landscape for some reason, i'm just covering all the visibale areas with surface. i have a feeling that trying to blend texpmaps to the other surfaces will be a pain in the butt too, cause the texmaps will always be drawn on a bigger scale, thus there will be obvious seams when placed next to my smaller, more detailed surface tiles. I'll just contunie with my original plan create surfaces that go nicely next to eachother and not worry about round stuff. thanks

I just realized the potential for texmaps. does anyone know how many different texmaps i can use and the max amount of pixels the engine will allow per texmap?

16, and more than enough (the physical limitations of your hardware and/or directx most likely won't let you use texmaps much beyond, say, 8192x8192 (and probably more like 4096x4096 with a decent framerate) - but try it and see. There's a definite upper limit to texture sizes in directx - not sure exactly what it is - but you shouldn't really need more than the above two sizes, unless you're stretching one over a huge amount of landscape. In which case, just use autogen instead. Mode 3 just splits the autogenerated texture into a bunch of texmaps and applies them the landscape (separate from the 16 you can also play with).

f

Wow, that changes everything.
one more question, can i lay invisible surface tiles overtop parts of the texmaps so i can give certain areas of the texmap properties and give other areas of the same texmap different properties while letting the entire texmap show?

Not in the sense of using pure blue etc for transparency. That just produces holes in the landscape, as far as I know. But I think you can blend textures with surfaces in numerous ways and get close to what you want.

It's settings/landscape settings/texmap and secondary surface blending modes you need to play with.

There are at least 32 different modes. The only person who ever understood what they do is mit, and he a) has never documented it, and b) claims not to remember what they are anyway. The way I think about them is like the way you'd blend layers in pshop or something. You just have to try the numbers and play with different secondary surfaces (that'd be "tile" surfaces) and see what's what.

With luck you can more or less make the blended surface invisible in the same way you would in photoshop or similar. For example, by using a totally black surface tile, and choosing a blend mode that equates to "luminance" (or a white tile and "darkness", perhaps).

Sorry I can't be more clear, but I hope that at least sets you down the right (if long and tedious) path.

f

that actually clears alot up. i think it answers a question i had not asked here yet. my ly tiles had black lines 1pxl thick separating the grass from the road. then i landed on zion and noticed the lys were perfectly seamless. sounds like this option might be the difference.

thanks i think ive got my texturing aresonal together now !

Np. Actually I wouldn't be sure that your 1px lines were a fault of your textures. I get that effect anytime I use blue transparencies at the moment. It's the result of automatic mipmapping, I believe. You're supposed to be able to turn that off (well, on building/vehicle etc textures anyway) by adding _nomip to the end of the filename, but that doesn't work for me either. So for me, anything using blue transparencies gets the outline. I've a feeling mit's graphics hardware just treats the whole thing differently, cos otherwise he might have got as annoyed about is as I have :)

The only other thing I could think of is that you're using non-standard texture sizes for your lys, and directx is rescaling them and messing up the seam between grass and road.

f

Ok, its time. ive spent a day and a half making an 8192x8192 pixel texmap for the upper left hand 16th of my heightmap. it felt like i was photoshopping 'google earth' it was so detailed.

only one problem. it seems for all my proficiency at laying tiles and surfaces, i cant for the life of me lay a texmap. i thought it was something that could be done using startline. this texmap is intended to cover 64x64 tiles.

how do i lay down texmap 0 over the upper left hand 64x64 tiles on my map?
please be detailed, I'm dumb

another lesser question bout texmaps, do they have to be index colod mode or can they be rgb color mode?

As far as I remember, you use start block: drag the block over the area you want to texmap, then type (I think - from memory) the command .texmap [n] to lay that number texmap.

Or use the world editor, I think you can do texmaps in that too.

- Texmaps can be RLE (indexed), I think, but if you're going to all the trouble of hand-painting something that large I don't know why you'd want to limit it to only 256 colours.

- A bitmap that size isn't going to be particularly downloadable. 16 of those and even a fast connection's gonna take ages to download the files...

- jpg might be better but you'd have to put up with some seams. dds is prolly best

- what's wrong with the autogen system? Or are you using that first, then adding details? Just curious why you'd be going to all this trouble :)

f

it took about an hour for the texmap jpg to load on my machine , which is pretty fast. and though it looked nice, the ground below my feet was still about as blurry as autogen.
tried the next step down, 4096, and it looked great but still took 15 mins to load. stepped it down to 2048 and it still looked good. and uploaded on my machine in about 3 minutes. the step below that came out blurry compared to the others. so i think 2048 is the way im gonna go.

it should be noted that i didnt lose any framerate with the 8192x8192 pixel texmap. I layed 2 of them down and flew around as smoothly as with the default settings. the only problem with the huge sizes is the time it takes to download from what i could see.

autogen is great but im gonna go the route where i break the heightmap into a grid of 16 equal squares, and cover them with 2048x2048 pxl photoshopped jps.Ill use the 16 squares from the heightmap as a template when im photoopping the texmaps. the results are better than autogen or lay surface, in my opinion.

heres a taste, this screeny was the 8192pxl texmap. dont laugh at my photoshopping job, cause texmap wont be being used it was a test texmap

sorry stuff sinks in slowly
k so how does one use autogen mode 3? do i upload the texmaps onto the 'auto terrain src' or the 'auto terrain texture'?

Autogen has 3 modes, and they all work in mostly the same way... mode 3 has one important difference, though:

Mode 1 - the game takes the autogen source textures and blends them across the map according to the heights set in landscape settings, and the heights in the heightmap.

The benefits: your players only have to download up to eight source textures; the landscape is textured in a fairly nice way, without too much effort. Easy to make simple landscapes with snow on the mountains and sand on the beach, etc.

The drawbacks: has an impact on framerate. Not a problem for an economy world; not necessarily a problem for action worlds if players have decent machines.


Mode 2 - same as mode 1, but it does this in a more accurate and pleasing way.

The benefits: same as above, only more.

The drawbacks: same as above, only more. There's more of a framerate hit (can't explain why though I'd guess the more pleasing look is because the engine's doing more passes in the blending process, or something).


Mode 3 - same as mode 2. BUT... once the client has got the source textures, and has calculated the blended landscape, it then splits the whole map into 64 texmaps and saves them out as .dds files. So you get the benefit of the nicely blended autogen stuff in terms of how it looks, but players' machines don't have to do the calculations involved in blending the landscape... they just texmap the world using the cached .dds files, which is a lot quicker (and means, eg, that the game has to load less textures at any one time - there's 64, instead of 16)

Benefits: it looks good, it's faster etc.

Drawbacks: takes a bit of time to actually generate the landscape then save it out - few seconds on a fast machine (during which you see nothing and a little "generating landscape" message when you first join the world).

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However, the thing that's probably of most use to you... doing it this way basically produces a bunch of texmap files you could then, in theory, go back to and add detail on. In fact that's sometimes necessary to correct seams etc.. not perfect at the moment. These files all llive in (I think) /clients/data/textures/gen. You end up with 64 files... and in theory, I guess you could edit them and then assign them to the 64 "Autogen Texture" slots in the world server, though I've never tried it.

ALSO... (yes there's more) there's a little command you can use with mode 2 which is basically the precursor to mode 3. Once your landscape is all finished, you can type .savegentex (I think) and it'll pop up a little dialogue that lets you export the landscape as a 4x4 grid of bitmaps (jpg doesn't work properly at the moment), with some control over the input and output scale of the textures it uses. Again, with the bitmap files saved, you could edit them, and then assign them to normal texmap slots for the world - turn off autogen and just use the texmaps it created, in other words.

Another command you'd find useful is .autotexmap 16. This takes the the texmaps assigned in the world server and sticks them on the landscape for you. I believe it might work with other texmap numbers but i've never tried it with anything other than 16. Saves having to do all the start block thing if you just want to cover the world in texmaps.

The "desert racing world" was done this way... I messed about with autogen mode 2, exported the texmaps, fiddled with them, assigned them to the world server and automatically put them back on the landscape.


Right, I'm gonna stop typing now. Post again if you need more help..
f

thank you, fooli! ive progressed lightyears since this thread was first started!

I tried all and the only thing that works its the main texture al world green

I used auto tex 1 and all terrain black
auto 2 1gb of pics in client and never load them when i relog
auto 3 just make the textures never loads ingame
lay textures i cant cos when i drop one with enough res its is sampled 2x or 4x by the game

Please help