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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Globe Texture


guyver6

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Hi there Art Departament! :D

For half a month I'm traversing web looking for information on how to best show our beloved planet Earth, and by the way I've found lots of earth textures.

So what? Well, here are the two sets that can be used and what I ask for is to decide which one suits best for Xenocide. The first one originates from NASA, the second one is J. Hasting's.

NOTE: those shots doesn't come from Xenocide...yet :) I'm going to use the same texturing technique that program uses. It's [url="http://vterrain.org"]here[/url], shots are from Enviro program, for which I want to thank Ben Discoe, Virtual Terrain Project Manager.

Guyver
[attachment=5507:attachment] [attachment=5508:attachment]
[attachment=5509:attachment] [attachment=5510:attachment] Edited by guyver6
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i'd say the top one, because it's more "plain" and thus makes it easy to define which areas will use desert terrain, grass terrain, snow terrain, etc.

unless we're going for originality, in which case we should go for the bottom one since EVERYONE uses the top one :P
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[quote name='SupSuper' date='Dec 23 2004, 01:44 PM']unless we're going for originality, in which case we should go for the bottom one since EVERYONE uses the top one :P
[right][post="103979"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]
:D Yeah, looks like that top one is very popular. Nevertheless I've found some time ago on our ftp earth (really HQ) which doesn't look like the ones shown here, but it needs preprocessing to be able to map it onto globe. I'm researching pretty heavily how to draw the globe pretty, so maybe during that researches I'll come out with preprocessing tool (it needs to map planar earth texture onto icosahedron faces and output it as separate textures, that then I apply onto sphere).

Guyver
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the top one is looking great :) altough the lower ones are looking more clear to me

are you going to add the 3d effect like in the concepts (shadow generation with mountains by the sunlight)? what about moving clouds? :D


cheers,
ATeX


EDIT: added more comment Edited by ATeX
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Ok, I'll go with the Top one then.

As to clouds: no clouds. We want to be able to see Earth clearly, clouds just mess the view. As to bump mapping it'll be there (simple bumpmapping for older GFX cards, normal mapping for programmable GFX cards). Textures are gonna be in 1024x1024 resolution as well as in 512x512 (10 textures used to texture earth, so the 1024x1024 version eat 40 MB of video memory, so for older cards 512 ones gonna be used).

One I must say: Earth's gonna look pretty :).

Guyver
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Guyver, I dont know which one you would end up using... However, there is a texture set out there that has specularity added near the ecuator. Be careful that set dont work well with lighting and self shadowing.

Greetings
Red Knight
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Nothing I can add here really, just supporting the top texture :)
Overall it seems more attractive than the other one, and since we'll all be spending quite some time watching the planet in the game, it really has to be the nicest we can find ^_^
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[quote name='guyver6' date='Dec 23 2004, 09:15 AM']Ok, I'll go with the Top one then.

As to clouds: no clouds. We want to be able to see Earth clearly, clouds just mess the view. As to bump mapping it'll be there (simple bumpmapping for older GFX cards, normal mapping for programmable GFX cards). Textures are gonna be in 1024x1024 resolution as well as in 512x512 (10 textures used to texture earth, so the 1024x1024 version eat 40 MB of video memory, so for older cards 512 ones gonna be used).

One I must say: Earth's gonna look pretty :).

Guyver
[right][post="103995"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]

How about transparent clouds? (for the future, I'll be just happy to have the globe working), IMO it would be a nice addition for V1, as for visibility we could have veeery transparent clouds.
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Eh, yes, there's no north pole on the top one. But this isn't something that can't be fixed. :) I'll work on that.

@Red Knight: Oceans specularity may be the option which I consider for making it look prettier. Anyway, I'm planning on using ocean's specularity maps to determine if it's water or no (on that maps water is pure white, while land is black). We can easily check if, for example, ship crashes on water or on land. That kind of map can be also useful for determining country, or coalition, where the ship crashed, ie. make water black and then one color per country, then just simple check what color the crashsite or terror is
on and viola. But that's future plans.

Guyver
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Oooh looks like I'm the only one leaning towards the bottom one. The main reason for this is the lighter ocean color that helps distinguish it from space slightly (though I think it might be a little too light). What I like about the top one though is the contrast between the desert and green areas.

I hope noone suggests we do a "The Matrix"-code globe since its a computer generation...=p
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[quote name='JakeDrake' date='Dec 24 2004, 02:42 AM']Oooh looks like I'm the only one leaning towards the bottom one.  The main reason for this is the lighter ocean color that helps distinguish it from space slightly (though I think it might be a little too light).  What I like about the top one though is the contrast between the desert and green areas.
[right][post="104101"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]
The space background on our globe is gonna be different, more colors here and there. Those shots don't come from Xenocide, that's why the background is so black.

Guyver
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This may be a foolish question to ask for V 1.0, but is it possible to have the urban light illumination visible in the nightime area of earth? I think it would look very nice, and shouldn't be to difficult to program. If you are unclear as to what I mean, just look at a nightside photograph of earth taken from space. All of the urban centers have lights that can be seen from space.
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/Looks at the bottom Globe
Oh my! is there really as much desert area as that globe suggest? If there is, we better take beter care of Mother Earth!

Back to the topic on hand, I have to go with the flow and agree that the top one looks nicer.
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[quote name='Denevive' date='Dec 24 2004, 03:59 AM']This may be a foolish question to ask for V 1.0, but is it possible to have the urban light illumination visible in the nightime area of earth? I think it would look very nice, and shouldn't be to difficult to program. If you are unclear as to what I mean, just look at a nightside photograph of earth taken from space. All of the urban centers have lights that can be seen from space.
[right][post="104110"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]
I know perfectly what you mean, I have Earth's lights textures also, and I was thinking of doing it (requires some more work than you think, but is possible). BUT I won't do it from the same reason that I won't do coulds: [b]the earth's surface must be seen even on the dark side.[/b] ^_^

Guyver
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I like the lower ones. The oceans are brighter. Pictures from space that I've seen have the oceans brighter (of course they have clouds too but whatever).
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Ok, here is URL: [url="http://celestia.h-schmidt.net/earth-vt/"]http://celestia.h-schmidt.net/earth-vt/[/url]. Those textures are cut into 512x512 chunks, but it's nothing we can't fix. I think that we'll use that textures for our Globe.

Guyver

EDIT: BTW, See the globe in programming forum. Edited by guyver6
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I prefer the top texture. I looks more "real". I don't think that the oceans being brighter is actually a good thing. I have lived on the coasts for most of my life, and I can assure you that for the most part, after going out a couple of miles from shore, the ocean is not "bright". A brighter ocean [i]might[/i] be preferable if we were doing a remake of TFTD for Version 1.0, but since we're doing UFO defense I say that the top texture is far more preferable.
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That way or another top one is now on our ftp, you can access it [url="http://www.projectxenocide.com/public/Earth/"]here[/url]. In source dir there are unprojected color map, normal map and specularity map. In prepared dir there are two texture-packs, "hi" is 1024x1024 textures, "lo" is 512x512, those are projected onto icosahedron and ready to use in-game.

But the code isn't ready to use them automatically... yet. :)

Guyver
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  • 1 month later...
Just found this, NaSA's World Wind. It's simply the same as our Geoscape. But *gasp* it has VERY, i mean, VERY detailed maps. I can see my own house, no kidding!

[url="http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/"]http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/[/url]
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yeah i had that program too its real awesome... i could see my entire neighborhood as well as my school... real good stuff...

though i think it wil be difficult to do the same thing with xenocide... it hooks ups to NASA database which is updated every month i think... and then it downloads a more deteailed map of the area you zoomed into...

would be cool if you could zoom in onto a crash site and see the ufo and what destruction it did...
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that's not really what I was thinking of, that would be too extreme. Also, the image becomes really gray and ugly as you zoom in enough.

But before that, the globe is awezome, and you can zoom in quite a bit too.

This is how close you can get before it switches to ugly textures:

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v97/mikker/zoom.jpg[/img]

For the part where it stays green, couldn't that be used for our project?
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