Kupu's thread

[FunnyBunny14]

What I would like to see is that if you have gates made out of step-on trigger like blocks, that they aren't invisible, but have some kind of animated texture, and later some particle effects.

 

[kupu]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. Much appreciated as always.

Regardless of the final verdicts, i'll be sure to provide a texture and give a breakdown on how to add, or remove the warp gate block textures as there is obviously lots of interest in the topic.

 

[WaffulMann]

On one hand, it would be great for builds. Having a transparent block for the gate means we do not need to design gates that cover it up or are entirely closed. On the other hand, taking away it's texture takes something away from the game in my opinion. It's a very important block and suddenly its invisible. Not sure how I feel and I plan on designing opened gates.

It's not going to be invisible, it's going to be another way of doing gates.
First you have your regular gates, then you have area-triggered gates, much like area-triggered logic blocks.

 

[jzimmerman4]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. Much appreciated as always.

Regardless of the final verdicts, i'll be sure to provide a texture and give a breakdown on how to add, or remove the warp gate block textures as there is obviously lots of interest in the topic.

Have the gate be visible but act similar to a plexdoor (turns invisible when you activate it with R)

 

[therimmer96]

black glass... we need this.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

We already have it (kind of).

 

[Zeno9141]

We already have it (kind of).

Do we? I thought we didn't.

 

[Ithirahad]

We seem to have glass in all the hull colors... But sadly, the color is stupid-dim and as it is currently, I find it to be a waste of block IDs, being only visibly colored about half the time and in the right lightning conditions.

 

[therimmer96]

I want tinted bridge window, that is all :P

 

[kupu]

Black glass is something that could be tweaked perhaps.

The new FTL update has arrived and no doubt discussions will arise around designs and functionality.
While it is all welcome, of course, do note the normal maps are placeholders, the Warpgate modules are waiting for 24 way orientation to allow a proper tiling pattern and until a new monitor arrives the colour values are considered "in limbo".

Those wanting a completely transparent warp gate, please follow these simple steps:

Open the T002.png file in any image editor capable of handling transparency.
Find the warp gate module texture and delete it (all 6 tiles), leaving only transparency, then save.

Open the Block Editor and under the Stations tab, select the warp gate module and toggle the options "Blended".
(potentially, you could set the block to non physical in the block editor too, but i'm not sure if it would conflict with the mechanics)

 

[kupu]

Another specular shader;

The lighting shader code has been reworked slightly, as such the last method i discussed of changing the specular light is different.

If you are changing them yourselves, the variables required are now split between cubelight.glsl and cubelightvars.glsl.

I'll update the previous shader with a cleaner light that you can download in the community content section.

Spoiler: Samples

[

Download here; http://starmadedock.net/content/specular-shader.1214/

 

[NeonSturm]

Is it possible to detect the presence of one object nearby in shaders?
._______.
|/1\ /2\|
|\_/ \_/|
|/3\ /4\|
|\_/ \_/|
`———————´
A shader that draws a line around 4 blocks, but not between these 4?

1. A vertex shader needs to detect whether a nearby block is equal for example by colour at a given coordinate?
2. A fragment shader could detect a pixel colour and see colours of a nearby position (+1, -1) which would be rendered with 0 view distance? then if 2 pixels have some special colour (2 touching blocks) it could behave different than if there is no block touching.

I don't know if shaders can detect the colour of nearby things without performance loss.

 

[kupu]

@NeonSturm
No idea.. I know next to nothing about shaders, sorry. The only reason i'm playing with the specular currently is out of frustration for sun glares (i like white ships :P ). Even then, i "learnt" by breaking it repeatedly all day until it worked.

What were you hoping to achieve with your idea?

 

[NeonSturm]

Space-engineer like stuff with multi-block overlays. or something I could use for the few of my Tron-style-textures.

Will this shader make it into the official? Maybe into the launcher under shader / select the one you want to use?

 

[kupu]

Space-engineer like stuff with multi-block overlays. or something I could use for the few of my Tron-style-textures.

Will this shader make it into the official? Maybe into the launcher under shader / select the one you want to use?

Ah yea. I'm not sure on the best method to implement that texture trick. Last time i talked about it with Schema it was theoretically possible, but not a priority for either of us. Sounded like a pain in the butt iirc.

A specular tweak of some sorts might become vanilla. The current settings were cranked right up to help trouble shoot normal mapping. So i imagine we'd tone them down a little soon.

 

[WaffulMann]

Is it possible to change reflection for certain blocks like rough blocks, like water or grass?

 

[kupu]

Is it possible to change reflection for certain blocks like rough blocks, like water or grass?

Not currently no. There are a few posts on the previous pages discussing this if your curious though.
TL;DR, It would require a specular map, which we currently don't have and can't implement due to a texture map limit.

 

[NeonSturm]

Is the bump map not only utilizing a blue channel? Seems like waste of files then

How big are the limits?

 

[kupu]

Is the bump map not only utilizing a blue channel? Seems like waste of files then

How big are the limits?

From what i understand, the limit is currently 2 types of maps at a time. (The diffuse sheets count as 1, the Normal sheets count as the other).
This is due to performance and engine limits i think.

Ha! We could be more efficient at packing more maps into our files, certainly. However normals (not bump maps) need 2 channels as a minimum.

We could remove the blue channel, giving us one more space in our normal map files, but it's got some drawbacks. The R / G depict the surface slope along the X and Y directions respectively. B channel shows "depth". You can discard the blue channel when using derivative normal maps (i think?) and it's data is constructed on the fly by the GPU. I don't think it's something we would benefit from and the quality usually suffers for it. Considering we are using such small tiles, i'd rather keep all 3 RGB channels for the normals and save the headache of creating even more specific shaders (especially when we get lots of hardware specific bugs already).

The best way is still as we discussed a few days ago, we could gain an extra channel and use it for a greyscale map (emissive, specular, parallax) easily enough if we switched formats (TGA).

We could use the Alpha channel in the newly converted normal map files. (they are currently 24bit PNG, no alpha)

 

[flpsantoss]

hey kupuu, as i said on the stream, i love the textures, and i laugh really hard when i see the gate blocks texture kkkk