Graphical Quibbles...

[Maniac]

Yeah, it is pretty cool - but I noticed some vanilla icons around (in the city screen and the map), showing the bread/hammer/gold icons and wanted to change these - but when I'm on the interface anyway, I thought I might end up wanting to change other stuff - so I figured out it would be better to ask first to know what your stance is on it.

Go ahead I'd say. Everything else you lay your hands on turns golden.

Ah, sorry - I didn't meant boreholes, just the model they currently have, because it's the original SMAC mine.

I know. I just don't understand how the graphic could be made to look well on ridges.

 

[Lord Tirian]

I know. I just don't understand how the graphic could be made to look well on ridges.

Ah, well, I found a little thing in the nif-files that allows models to "adhere" to the ground and mimic the contour.

I've attached a quick screenshot with the setting enabled in the nif. It's a bit rough, because the model wasn't made for that use - but it might be possible to tweak it a bit. But I sort of like how it just looks like somebody has drilled a huge gaping hole into a mountain, just to grab some resources.

(I admit, this is mostly the product of exploring the possibilities of the graphics engine - so it might not be the best idea, it's a bit of the "shiny new toy! must use it!"-syndrome! - also that would be the reason why I'd only do it way later... once I have fixed some more stuff.)

Cheers, LT.

 

[The_Coyote]

@ Lord Tirian

do you also know the "must know how it works" syndrome

 

[Lord Tirian]

@ Lord Tirian

do you also know the "must know how it works" syndrome

Sure!

Attach to the "NiTriShape"-Node a "NiStringExtraData"-extra data, name it "UserPropBuffer" and for the string data, use "ContourGeometry". For reference, I originally found it in the mod_city_lot.nif and ren_city_lot.nof for the ground textures of modern and renaissance vanilla Civ cities.

I have only tested it with improvements, so far - so don't ask me what happens if you stick it onto an unit or something that's actually deformed by an animation! Also note that it only deforms the geometry, plain nodes aren't affected, as far as I can tell - though it's kinda hard to tell in-game, as I can only tell from the origin of effects (I assume because their position is relative to the parent node, whereas the mesh vertices have a z-component that can be changed).

If you find out more stuff you can do with it, tell us!

Cheers, LT.

 

[Maniac]

I've attached a quick screenshot with the setting enabled in the nif.

The borehole in the northern plot looks kinda stretched. My first impression would be not to use this setting for boreholes.

Is this the setting which allows features or farms to adapt to terrain elevation?
Features don't adapt to terrain height on my computer (so without some ugly hack I used fungus would be invisible for me for instance). Farms do adapt of course.
I wonder what would happen if this trick was used on a feature graphic such as fungus, forest or jungle.

Btw, since you mentioned orange fungus, I've uploaded something from a distant past which may be of interest to you: a texture which makes all the fungus orange!
Come to think of it, this may be useful for a resource graphic: Brilliance or a Pholus Mutagen landmark-resource comes to mind.

For the Pholus Ridge landmark I had in mind it could be an exception to the rule that fungus cannot appear on ridges. What has restrained me from doing so is the inability of my comp to display fungus correctly on ridges. Perhaps the setting you discovered could help solve that problem: create a nif to be used as a resource and/or improvement and which adapts to height.

Oh btw, these last couple models look even more awesome than usual!

 

[Maniac]

I still want to keep fixing the older models first

That list I drew up a while ago has already thinned out considerably by the way.

Spoiler :

Stuff from woodelf:

Buildings:

- Alpha Prime
- Assembly Hall
- Hologram Theatre
- Sea Base/Pressure Dome
- Sea Wall (currently found in the 'Pressure Dome' folder)
-Atmospheric Processor (could use Lord Tirian's windtrap instead)
- Cloning Vats
- Subsea Trunkline
- Aerospace Complex: As far as I can tell, this model may have a normal amount of triangles for how detailed it is, but I don't think it *needs* to be as detailed. For instance there are lots of half-spheres made of many sides (=faces?). At the scale these buildings are displayed in-game, these spheres could be made of much less faces and you wouldn't notice the difference. Though I would be content to just keep the current apollo program graphic which was used as a placeholder after discovering the polygon count of woodelf's model.

This list is not complete. There are a couple other simple buildings as well, with still a higher than expected poly count. But because the model is so simple the poly count still only is 100 or so. Eg the rec commons, rec tanks...

Citysets:

caretakers_cityset.nif
believers_cityset.nif

Units:

(Foil)
(Needlejet)
Rover (a model by keldath which uses woodelf's rover as base)
Unity Rover (in the 'Tank' folder)
Transport Foil
Unity Foil

Stuff from other creators, or the creators are unknown to me because GeoModder found the model

Buildings:

- Antimatter Reactor: Scene Viewer crashes when I try to open this one. Can someone tell me how much triangles this one has?
- Nuclear Reactor
- (Observation Bay)
- Supercollider

Improvements:

- Solar Collector: Scene Viewer crashes when I try to open this one. Can someone tell me how much triangles this one has?

Units

- Sea Colony Pod: The_Reckoning

Planetfall also includes a couple buildings which AFAIK come from Empire Earth 2. They have many triangles, but they are also more detailed than the average civ4 building, so perhaps that poly count is normal. Still judging from The_Coyote's unit conversion it seems possible to seriously reduce polycount with hardly any negative effect on the looks. Perhaps the same is possible with these buildings? For instance it's pointless to keep those small windows in the Military Academy. Might as well remove them and add some black rectangles for windows to the dds texture instead. The models are:

- hydroplant.nif
- Skunkworks
- Military Academy

 

[Lord Tirian]

I wonder what would happen if this trick was used on a feature graphic such as fungus, forest or jungle.

I just tested it... and it only works partially.

It works with single models, but once you activate the fancy tiling stuff (to make adjacent fungus tiles connect and to avoid resources, rivers and so forth), it uses the sea level as height. Once I set it to deactivate the tiling/connections and use a single model (like for a single improvement etc.), it works again.

On the other hand, resources *are* single models, so this will be a workable route for the Pholus Ridge/Brilliance. Also, the low graphics xml you use, AFAIK, also restricts itself to a single model, right? In this case, it would work for that as well, so I made a special fungus model for low graphics (based on the poly-reduced fungus model). That way it might at least look a little bit better for you!

EDIT: What sort of benefit would the Pholus Ridge give? Because I had the idea of using orange fungus as a base for the ridge (as you've said above - and orange sounds energy-ish), some sort of pink-purple fungus as the base for brilliance (sort of a super-psychoactive fungus) and maybe brown-black fungus as a base for fungicide (sort of a dead fungus - fungus cancer? I don't fully get the idea of naturally occurring fungicide).

Cheers, LT.

 

[Maniac]

For all three things: If you want changes, tell me, then I'll work on it.

I've been looking some more at the various new graphics in-game. The sea spawning spot stands out (yet still fits in) sufficiently because the spawning spot red is different than the sea fungus mixed-with-water red. Land spawning spots I find almost impossible to see though. That's why I was wondering, could you please making a modified land spawning spot texture with orange fungus on top? Let's see how that looks.

I am amazed how you make all those awesome textures btw.

That way it might at least look a little bit better for you!

Wow, a massive thanks!

What sort of benefit would the Pholus Ridge give?

I've now implemented the Pholus Ridge as two to four Pholus Ridge improvements on a ridge. Each Pholus Ridge improvement gives +2 Planet to nearby bases. In addition a Pholus Mutagen resource appears on each Pholus Ridge plot. That gives +1 Planet in each base, but it's only enabled with the Pholus Mutagen tech.

I'm using the lowfungus you made as the resource and improvement's model. There is one problem though: I placed the orange fungus texture in the pholus ridge folde, but the orange fungus texture doesn't show up. It seems that the game gives higher priority to files in the shared folder than in the resource folder itself! So for the Pholus Ridge to be orange, there would need to be a lowfungus nif which uses some unique name for the dds texture. Would you be interested in making one?

Pink-purple fungus sounds good for Brilliance!

(sort of a dead fungus - fungus cancer? I don't fully get the idea of naturally occurring fungicide).

I just assume some plants have developed a biochemistry to resist being infected by fungus. (as an aside, there are plenty of fungi in nature who feed on other fungi - nothing strange about a fungus cancer)
Further using the idea of retexturing feature graphics for resources, I had the idea to use a jungle nif with the texture from Blue Marble as Fungicide. It suffers from the same problem though: the trees_1024.dds in the shared folder is used. So I was wondering if you would want to create a jungle01_01.nif with a unique texture name?

Edit: this also means Hybrid Forest has never used the modified texture made for it. :-s

 

[GeoModder]

So for the Pholus Ridge to be orange, there would need to be a lowfungus nif which uses some unique name for the dds texture. Would you be interested in making one?

Or you could link the Pholus Ridge to a renamed texture. At least, if your orange fungus texture uses similar dispositions as the normal fungus texture.
Same for your other .nif/.dds troubles.

EDIT: Infact, I'm doing that now, but are those jungle trees supposed to look green or green/orangeish?

 

[GeoModder]

Okay, I'm totally confused now.
Maniac, if you want one of us to relink a renamed texture to a feature, you better give us a download with the nifs+texture in the proper named folder.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Edit: this also means Hybrid Forest has never used the modified texture made for it. :-s

Well... I'm currently doing the hybrid forest, so... soon you'll get it!

By the way, the attached file only contains the model... not the texture, no biggie though, I have blue marble installed myself (by the way, the model actually only fills the quarter of a square, it's a NW connection piece).

Or you could link the Pholus Ridge to a renamed texture. At least, if your orange fungus texture uses similar dispositions as the normal fungus texture.

By the way, I just finished with that - after the removal of the unused transparent parts in the fungus nif, the texture had tons of empty, unused black space in it. I filled it with the orange and purple fungus, so one still only uses one texture file (since the size doesn't actually change a lot - and the game has to load the entire file anyway).

Also, I tweaked the nifs a bit to make them not look like square-shaped blobs of fungus (mainly the brilliance), see the attached screenshots. I'm not uploading it now, because the Hybrid forest uses the shared texture as well, but still has the invisible jungle bits in it - that would make the hybrid forest a mess with the combined fungus texture! So, I'm going to finish the hybrid forest first!

Also... give feedback on the colours... do you like the purple one? (pink was a bit too close to the current fungus)

Cheers, LT

 

[Maniac]

Or you could link the Pholus Ridge to a renamed texture.

That's what I mean.

EDIT: Infact, I'm doing that now, but are those jungle trees supposed to look green or green/orangeish?

The fungicide trees should look dark green, using the texture from Blue Marble. As it has the same size and graphic positions as the vanilla dds, there's no need to have the blue marble texture to be able to make a nif linking to a renamed texture.

you better give us a download with the nifs+texture in the proper named folder.

lowfungusnif for Pholus Ridge in post #147
Orange fungus dds in #145

Fungicide Jungle in #148
Blue Marble Jungle attached. (at least I think that's Blue Marble - I found it somewhere deep in my archives)

 

[GeoModder]

Good I stopped then.
Btw, Maniac, on my screen the hybrid forest shows like I thought it should?

Edit: and you can remove your attachment in the previous post. LT said he'd done it.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Good I stopped then.
Btw, Maniac, on my screen the hybrid forest shows like I thought it should?

Well, I think it's supposed to look like that, it pretty much looks like the included texture. Plus, the override over the shared folder worked for me, when I tested a blue sea fungus texture... strange that the overriding didn't work for Maniac.

Anyway, I'm finished with everything fungus for the moment, I hope! In the attached file, you'll find...

• New fungus texture for the shared folder (almost the same as before - it adds the orange texture and the purple stuff, also the brownish part of the normal texture is tinted slightly pinkish, because it looked better that way for the hybrid forest).
• The poly-reduced models for the fungus and sea-fungus (same as above, just packed in here for convenience)
• Hybrid forest models (with invisible parts cut, as well as some trees removed to make it lighter), also fiddled a bit with the texture, made the red fungus bits more prominent.
• The Pholus Ridge feature (see screenshot above), just the fungus model, using the orange bits of the texture.
• The purple Brilliance model (also screenshot above) - after seeing it a bit, I'm pretty happy how it looks. Has the right otherworldly feel for something called "Brilliance" - looks also quite nice on water.

I'm fairly happy that all this stuff basically only uses two textures - the one big fungus texture and the hybrid forest texture for the trees. I'll finish and clean up the fungicide and spawning spot tomorrow.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Maniac]

Thanks!

I'm fairly happy that all this stuff basically only uses two textures

Me too.

I'll finish and clean up the fungicide and spawning spot tomorrow.

I'll wait for it, and then release v11.

 

[Lord Tirian]

I'll wait for it, and then release v11.

Sorry for the wait, was a busy day today (I saw cosmic rays today, yay!)... and I had to tweak the fungicide texture a bit more than expected (also made it a smaller one, by cutting away the other tree bits) - the Blue Marble texture looked a bit too normal - it had almost the same colour as the rainy terrain and was also a bit dark. I brightened it a bit and added a bluish tint - now it still looks like jungle, but also like some exotic plant (and not as blue as DNA, so you can still tell them apart easily).

Since I was on it, I made little changes to the DNA models - they cut jungle/trees/fungus now, you see it on the screenshot as well. Not a big change, but looks more "polished", I think.

Finally, the spawning spot - I made the texture a bit brighter in general - the rock was too red as well. And made the top more orange. Since both models use the same texture, you need to put them in separate folders now, or the sea spawning spot will also become orange - on the other hand, you might like it orange - so screenshot shows both, so you can see it. You decide - but I don't like it a lot (the land one, however, is fine, due to the recently added orange spots in the fungus it doesn't look totally strange - on the water, it just looks out of place). Also: On the screenshot, I upped the scale to fScale = 1.25 - definitively much better, I think - you might even go up to 1.3 or so, since I tend to be a bit conservative - but around 1.5 it starts looking a bit too huge in my opinion (for both, land and sea spawning spots).

Cheers, LT.

 

[Maniac]

Thanks for everything!

 

[Lord Tirian]

So... this time just some little things:

1) Took the hydro plant (which was an EE2 whopper with loads of polys) and remade the entire model on a detail level that fits its size and Civ4 more. It doesn't look as good as before, because I cut all sorts of stuff (mainly the tanks - now they're just cylinders)... but you only see that if you look from above (which you rarely do in the Datalinks) and on the map it's too small to see anyway. I think for a Civ4 scale, it's more than sufficient - and now it only has 602 polys. Uses the same scale as before and most of the original texture (though I modified it a bit, to make it look less rusty)... which was a really nice one (for something like that, wouldn't put it into my living room!).

EDIT: I noticed that the hydro plant doesn't seem show up past the arrival era... is this on purpose?

2) Redid the subsea trunkline from scratch - was easier that way. But it's now a 356 poly model that I rather like - I tried to re-use colours from the tidal harness and the industrial yellow-orange theme of the transport crawler - it's a small thing, but I think it helps a bit with a consistent look. This one uses a fScale of 1.0, fInterfaceScale 0.5 and a scale of 1.25 in the CityLSystem.xml (by the way... why can you build it in non-coastal cities?).

Screenshots and models attached.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Maniac]

Awesome! I especially love the Subsea Trunkline.

I think I might use this Hydro Plant model for the Recycling Tanks instead. There's also some pipeline model which can be used for the Hydro Plant.

I also just noticed that issue with the Hydro Plant post Arrival. Will fix it.

The reason for allowing the Subsea Trunkline for non-coastal cities is in case a non-coastal base has a trench plot in its radius.

 

[GeoModder]

Awesome! I especially love the Subsea Trunkline.

Seconded!
Thanks for those models, LT.