Kupu's thread

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    Whats next on the list of visuals?!

    - Medical overhauls (+ a few new deco options here)
    - Undeathinator will no longer be a red light (lol.... another "why hasn't this changed yet?!" moment)
    - Blackholes.
    - Warp texture.
    - Wedged carved rocks.

    got a request? Tag me in a suggestion post in the suggestion sub-forum. Have i missed one or not responded? Tag me again.... i must of missed it :/
    More decorative medical implements? I hope we get some animated stat monitors

    Here's hoping the carved rock wedges make good beds. Ingots make good seats but I'm still forced to use hull for beds.
     
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    Sorry for the late reply, this game with its fancy graphics but shitty gameplay threw stuff at me (RL)

    Currently there are no plans to separate them into 3 options as they all sit in the same texture file and utilise the same shaders.
    That is somewhat sad to hear, but 3 different functions in one shader doesnt sound like its something final, unles thats a engine specific factor.

    Thanks though, guess until then, or should it never change, ill stick with the texture edits like i did so far.

    Not sure what the painted jelly reference is. If you'd kindly upload a screenshot, i'll try and explain or maybe confirm it's being reworked.
    Sorry about the jelly reference, a modding team i worked with always called a texture preview cube model with rounded edges simply "the jelly block", i guess that did get stuck in my head. :oops:

    Im not at home right now, but luckly generalBLT13 did post a screenshot that illustrates this rather well, most noticable on the left of the screenshot.

    As soon as the normal mappings edges reach a thinness of 3 or less pixels, due to being further away from the object, it starts looking like "jelly blocks", or blocks with rounded edges. This is mostly an illusion due to the lines being so thin, that a difference between a chisled our round edge is no longer easy to notice, so it end up being a subjective thing too. Sadly i know this is hard to avoid, our outright near impossible on such repeative patters as grids, without relying upon a view distance based opacity control for the normal mapping or far more complex methodes.

    So yeah, thats what i meant with Jelly Blocks. Adding to that, with everything already being made out of blocks, i personally avoid or dont like anything that makes it even more obvious that everything is made out of blocks, or creates strong grid patters like the new Hull Texture. But thats just my personal preference, and the reason why i treasure Standard Armor so much ;)

    Please never make Standard Armor anything other than purely flat :D

    Armor, that reminds me, are there any plans on introducing one, or even two, darker shades of grey Hull/Armor and possibly even reballancing the contrasts between the monochrome Hulls/Armors?
    I personally think the regular grey is to close to white, which is very noticable on surfaces illuminated by a sun (At least on our LED Screens).
    And even with using all 3 types of grey i often run into the issue of either not being able to create enough contrast without using other colors our none armor blocks, having to much contrast between the rather bright grey and dark greyish black, or making my ships to heavy/expensive with high amounts of Adv Armor, so i quiet often wish there would be Armor in the shade of for example the computer blocks.

    Kind Regards!
     
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    kupu

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    Sorry about the jelly reference, a modding team i worked with always called a texture preview cube model with rounded edges simply "the jelly block", i guess that did get stuck in my head.

    Im not at home right now, but luckly generalBLT13 did post a screenshot that illustrates this rather well.
    Lol! Yea, i get it now. Luckily what you're seeing there is mip map bleeding. This is not an intended textural choice to have harsh, grid like jelly blocks. :)

    As soon as the normal mappings edges reach a thinness of 3 or less pixels, due to being further away from the object, it starts looking like "jelly blocks", or blocks with rounded edges. Sadly i know this is hard to avoid, our outright near impossible on such repeative patters as grids, without relying upon a view distance based opacity control for the normal mapping or far more complex methodes.
    Yup, the Moiré effect, an artefact that has recently been happening due to changes in mip mapping, not textures. FYI, It still happens with no texture loaded too.

    Currently we have several distance based optimisations that help combat this, but one of the bunch is broken.

    When the player camera is a certain distance away from a block (several hundred meters i think), the lighting switches from pixel shading to vertex shading. At this point normal maps are disabled and the 64px pack is used regardless of your settings.
    On top of those, we have our mipmapping*... which like i say, is unfortunately not working correctly.


    See how it's not approximating the colours the further away the blocks are? It's just a harsh pixel noise.



    I hope that short explanation has been useful. I know it's frustrating having small bugs like this massively impact the visual fidelity of your creations. If nothing else, i hope there is at least some cold comfort in knowing what you're experiencing is not intended behaviour and being chased by the devs.

    Please never make Standard Armor anything other than purely flat :D
    I have no intentions of ever changing it. It's incredibly useful to players to have a mix of both meter cube sections and seamless materials.

    Armor, that reminds me, are there any plans on introducing one, or even two, darker shades of grey Hull/Armor and possibly even reballancing the contrasts between the monochrome Hulls/Armors?

    Kind Regards!
    Possibly? how would you all feel if grey Adv' Hull got a little darker? Would this allow the same hull shading without having to manufacture another 5 - 10 blocks in an already long list?
     
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    Lol! Yea, i get it now. Luckily what you're seeing there is mip map bleeding. This is not an intended textural choice to have harsh, grid like jelly blocks. :)
    Good to know that this is an issue creates by mip map bleeding, since Starmade is a Homebrew Engine based on Java is thought this was most likely an issue with the normal mapping shaders themself. :D
    But yeah, that its not them but the mip maps kinda tells that they are better than i thought.

    Yup, the Moiré effect, an artefact that has recently been happening due to changes in mip mapping, not textures. FYI, It still happens with no texture loaded too.
    I would have rather called it a subjective perception of thin detail. Basically details reaching a size were its up to the viewers brain to decide as what they perceive it.

    In this case, Chisled Edge VS Round Edge, when said detail is so small that its just 1 pixel width, the eye cant make out a difference, its just a thin line, but since it surrouns the object (in this case the block), the brain can conclude that its an edge, but no longer if its round or chisled. This also applies to 2 or 3, even 4 pixel wide details depending on how much detail is displayed, factors such as screen size and distance between the screen and the viewers eyes, as well as on how much the viewer focuses on a single detail. On repetitive details, this can be even harder, as there is not only very little rest for the eyes, so to speak calm areas, but also a pattern it will recognize as a whole.

    But i agree that the pixel noise in those lines creates something similar to a minor Moire Effect too, further messing up the viewers perception.

    (But then again, im not a Texture Artist, i rather work with Web and Print Media, and the only time i encounter Moire Artifacts are rather strong cases, mostly when a client wants to much detail in a small space, the classic line/dot overlays on photos or backgrounds, or artifacts due to layering transparent images... the usual madness :D )


    I hope that short explanation has been useful. I know it's frustrating having small bugs like this massively impact the visual fidelity of your creations. If nothing else, i hope there is at least some cold comfort in knowing what you're experiencing is not intended behaviour and being chased by the devs.
    Yes it has, thanks for that. And i agree, it can be very frustrating ^^

    I have no intentions of ever changing it. It's incredibly useful to players to have a mix of both meter cube sections and seamless materials.
    Im very glad to read this :)


    Possibly? how would you all feel if grey Adv' Hull got a little darker? Would this allow the same hull shading without having to manufacture another 5 - 10 blocks in an already long list?
    Well, with knowing the thing about the you know what limit, and the amount of unused/formerly used IDs... Correct me if im wrong, but (Cube + Wedge + Corner + Hepta + Tetra) * 3 = 15.
    Aw come on, sacrifice those 15 IDs, even Minecraft has two shades of grey :p

    Nah but in all honesty, from my server times, and from what i remember reading here in the forums, dark grey is the most wished additional color, closely followed by pink... because pink is hilarious... And out of those 2, i argue that dark grey is the most reasonable one considering the majority of the player base, and overall applicable area, especially for those who focus on darker or more classic terran style builds.
     
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    Reilly Reese

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    Nah but in all honesty, from my server times, and from what i remember reading here in the forums, dark grey is the most wished additional color, closely followed by pink... because pink is hilarious... And out of those 2, i argue that dark grey is the most reasonable one considering the majority of the player base, and overall applicable area, especially for those who focus on darker or more classic terran style builds.
    Screw pink I want teal.
     

    kupu

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    Well, with knowing the thing about the you know what limit...
    Haha, yea. Although my concern wasn't for the ID's. It was regarding crafting and inventory management. It could all get a bit bloated in it's current condition if we suddenly added brown glass, dark grey hull + teal / pink? That's hundreds of block variants. (Perhaps a conversation for outside of a texture thread).

    I will gather an opinion on having more hull colours from the Schine team, as you rightly said, it has been widely requested for some time now.

    Screw pink I want teal.
    Both, if i have my way >: )
     
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    Haha, yea. Although my concern wasn't for the ID's. It was regarding crafting and inventory management. It could all get a bit bloated in it's current condition if we suddenly added brown glass, dark grey hull + teal / pink? That's hundreds of block variants. (Perhaps a conversation for outside of a texture thread).

    I will gather an opinion on having more hull colours from the Schine team, as you rightly said, it has been widely requested for some time now.



    Both, if i have my way >: )
    whats the problem with adding every possible color in the game? its the same block each time just with another color (i think we can change those blocks into another color with photoshop instantly)
     

    therimmer96

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    whats the problem with adding every possible color in the game? its the same block each time just with another color (i think we can change those blocks into another color with photoshop instantly)
    Extra data for each block. As it is right now, the game sends 3 bytes per block over the network about that block. Adding RGB data would make it significantly larger, limiting the potential size of ships, aswell as increasing RAM usage.

    ever noticed how SE with its more detailed block states and RGB colors has a significantly smaller scale than starmade? ;)
     
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    Extra data for each block. As it is right now, the game sends 3 bytes per block over the network about that block. Adding RGB data would make it significantly larger, limiting the potential size of ships, aswell as increasing RAM usage.

    ever noticed how SE with its more detailed block states and RGB colors has a significantly smaller scale than starmade? ;)
    i have to admit ... that smaller scale thing made me ragequit after i had 10 fps on my 200m ship ^^
     

    kupu

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    (i think we can change those blocks into another color with photoshop instantly)
    The actual texture file? Sure. You could even have a greyscale albedo texture then apply an RGB value to it via a shader... However this means-
    Extra data for each block.
    I can't remember the actual figures... but it was a laughable increase in resources required to allow a RGB slider option on a block.
    Thats why we slammed the idea into oblivion 6 months ago, so you can continue building huge shit.
     
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    Haha, yea. Although my concern wasn't for the ID's. It was regarding crafting and inventory management. It could all get a bit bloated in it's current condition if we suddenly added brown glass, dark grey hull + teal / pink? That's hundreds of block variants. (Perhaps a conversation for outside of a texture thread).
    I doubt that people would complain about being able to manufacture and use more blocks, i would even go so far as bet that they would cherish it. Thats something the Modded MC community showed me, when i added something around 100 new blocks in our custom Modpack, the feedback was overall very positive. Well except for the flower power gamers complaining about all those blocks being concrete, glass or metal in various states of decay...

    Also, Starmade with its ability to group 5 different blocks into one inventory slot, suffers far les from iventory management issues than most MC Modpacks :)

    I will gather an opinion on having more hull colours from the Schine team, as you rightly said, it has been widely requested for some time now.
    Thank you very much! :D
     
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    Guess we'll wait untill 128 gb of ddr4 is default on laptops...
    [DOUBLEPOST=1444082393,1444082003][/DOUBLEPOST]Also kupu do you ever plan to make those block animation gifs longer (as option)? to make air vents,reactors, shields, run smoother?
     
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    I really love all the work you have done.

    While the topic of hull color is up, I would like to bring up a black sheep, or I should say green sheep.
    I just really don't like the color of basic green hull, it just seems so out of place compared to everything else. I don't think it need to look like the other greens, but I do think it needs to change.
     
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    One thing I dislike a bit is how the black lights and such are purple.
    On another note, Yes, tease us!
     
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    black is the absence of light :P you cant have black light. Purple/dark blue is the darkest you can go with lights.
    example of the black light IRL which I believe is the thing we have IGN
    so black light is ultraviolet or infrared radiation, invisible to the eye in sense,but still produces pruple/ish light
     
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    y'all know there is room for 18 complete basic-to-advanced crafting chains for hulls in the custom id ranges, right? and creating them is a quick xml job to set the recipes, move a few h/s/l sliders in gimp or photoshop, and bang, you're done.

    as has been suggested, minecraft demonstrates how it could be cool to see some of those kinds of extension packs become either standard/commonplace on servers, although this is dependent upon the custom block dissemination features being refined, bugfixed and made implementable by individual servers to give their universe its own distinct look and feel.

    IMHO, let us consider chewing what we have already bitten off: starmade devs have bigger problems than a butter shortage, and I would prefer to see things that aren't working made to work than to constantly be hungering for more and more and more and more.
     
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    Yes, I know that much but it's just illogical to me that in real life and in the game it's called a "Black" light when it's not.
    Or maybe it's me being stupid and weird o_O