FreeOrion

eleazar wrote:And I (and i think to a lesser degree, Geoff) tends to commit iteratively, I.E. I may make several or a dozen commits in what adds up to a single feature.

That depends on whether you consider "the design screen" to be one feature, or dozens or hundreds of smaller features. One "feature" might be thousands of lines of code and a month or two of work.

eleazar wrote:Who is prognosticating? I'm just saying the project is in danger of dying, as some seem to deny. And while no one can magically add new contributors, we can see a potential danger, and make an effort to attract new contributors.

Ok, maybe "prognostication" is not quite right. However, arguing about how much danger the project is in gets us exactly nowhere. "mak[ing] an effort to attract new contributors" does. So how about doing that instead?

Here is a first set of screenshots, more to come soon. Cool things to notice: the atmosphere shader, the star lens effects and the glow applied to the star.

Looks good. Is this the rough draft for the combat area? or will we incorporate this into the zoom factor for the overall galaxy as well? Because if we did that would be awesome.

This is the combat screen demo. There will be no way to transition between the combat-level view of the system and the galaxy-level view.

That's seriously sweet!

Great job! Can't wait to see some Durghas there!

Nice pictures!

tzlaine wrote: Ok, maybe "prognostication" is not quite right. However, arguing about how much danger the project is in gets us exactly nowhere. "mak[ing] an effort to attract new contributors" does. So how about doing that instead?

Considering this, would it be a good idea to do some advertisement on the Ogre recruitment forum http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=9, to which loonycyborg offered a link to sometime ago? And if so what should we say about the Ogre usage in the project? That it is being used for the space combat engine and possibly something else in the future too? Also at this stage would we need both programmers and artists or just programmers or artists? Or is it still too early to do something like this?

MikkoM wrote:Nice pictures!

tzlaine wrote: Ok, maybe "prognostication" is not quite right. However, arguing about how much danger the project is in gets us exactly nowhere. "mak[ing] an effort to attract new contributors" does. So how about doing that instead?

Considering this, would it be a good idea to do some advertisement on the Ogre recruitment forum http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=9, to which loonycyborg offered a link to sometime ago? And if so what should we say about the Ogre usage in the project? That it is being used for the space combat engine and possibly something else in the future too? Also at this stage would we need both programmers and artists or just programmers or artists? Or is it still too early to do something like this?

It's really never too early to get competent Ogre programmers in on FO. Pd should weigh in on when/if/what kind of artists should be involved.

Currently that would be experienced texture painters. We have quite a lot of planet surface textures that will have to be painted on a fairly high resolution. Experience with normal map creation is a bonus. I'll be able to provide more details once I'm finished with the first bunch. People experienced with painting nebulae are very welcome as well. Ideally those are created in a 3D painting application, since the textures are going to be split on the 6 sides of an inverted cube(skybox) and will have to fit seamlessly.

tzlaine wrote:It's really never too early to get competent Ogre programmers in on FO. Pd should weigh in on when/if/what kind of artists should be involved.

Do you think that your/tzlaine`s recent away notice could be a problem for attracting new programmers? Since I would at least think that new people might need some support at first before they get to know the project. Now there is still Geoff the Medio of course, but if I am not mistaken he isn`t that much involved with the Ogre integration. And are there enough interesting things for the possible new contributors to do while you/tzlaine are gone/is gone?

MikkoM wrote:

tzlaine wrote:It's really never too early to get competent Ogre programmers in on FO. Pd should weigh in on when/if/what kind of artists should be involved.

Do you think that your/tzlaine`s recent away notice could be a problem for attracting new programmers? Since I would at least think that new people might need some support at first before they get to know the project. Now there is still Geoff the Medio of course, but if I am not mistaken he isn`t that much involved with the Ogre integration. And are there enough interesting things for the possible new contributors to do while you/tzlaine are gone/is gone?

My vote is to wait until I'm done with traveling.

I've set up all basic atmosphere shaders and am now using tweaked sidepanel textures. Those are going to be scaled up and repainted at a higher resolution soon.

Screenshots have been scaled down to 50%

The new screenies look good! I noticed you marked the gas giant as needing an atmosphere. I wasn't planning on giving gas giants separate atmospheres, because the whole planet is essentially an atmosphere. However, a variant of the atmosphere shader is used to render the gas giants, so you should see some fading out at the edges. The fading is less pronounced than it is for other planet types, since the gas giant has a thicker atmosphere. This can be tweaked to your liking by modifying the gas giant shader slightly.

Great, I'll look into this.