Also, these may be a little over-dramatic to emphasize the effect here, or just unfinished tests.
Saving as .GIF has had a strange effect on some of the brighter colors. Little bug on the export process.
I've been working on some art and creating some lighting experiments that I'd like to share.
Ships: the current situation
Each time the ship rotates, it's loading 1 of 16 files. Each were drawn by hand (or in HD mode, rendered separately). The original artists needed to draw a separate picture for each angle. Then add highlights and shadows to make it look convincing.
I've always wanted the option to add more angles. Keep the 16 angles for purists, but smooth out the animation. Problem is each angle would need to be a separate file. You want 360 angles for all 360 angles? That's 360 pictures to draw or render. If you want the ship to light up if you fire, that's doubling it to 720 pictures. 30 ships? Suddenly, that means 21,600 pictures. You're talking An INSANE amount to load into RAM, load, draw, render, etc. The only logical solution is to go fully 3D.
....Or is it? For people that enjoy the 2D or original graphics... The solution is creating normal maps for every ship. Use that for lighting calculations like they do in next generation 3D games.
So, I took it upon myself to experiment with creating normal maps for 2D sprites. Using the original graphics, I created the following (the exporting to gif kind of screwed up the colors it should look better when not limited by 256 colors):
Some things don't quite work the same though. The Chenjesu ship's gems have colors depending on which way it faced. It may not be much to some, but I have to obsess over little things like this:
http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2014/ ... 71mp7n.gif
I can do the same with the HD ships as well. These are even easier since they're in 3D, so normal maps are a snap. Even if Zenzmurfy can't figure out how to render normal maps, I can manually make normal maps by hand and make something like this:
We can even animate Comm images:
Now we can even have things like a "red alert" light, when things go bad.
Now why is lighting for comm images a big deal? Because I'm planning on implementing a bones system into the animations. Animations will take up far less space, it will run smoother, and we have more possibilities. Things can be timed so the characters lips move, their faces make expressions, move around, etc. I'll have to save that for another post though. But if I added the lighting to it, I can get the most realistic, smoothest animation currently possible in 2D games.
Imagine something like this with real time lighting.
Hopefully I'll upload a test app that you can test out the ships yourself. I'm hoping we can get one of our programmers to get ready to implement it. In the future, I'll see about releasing my test app so you can try it out yourself.
How is it done?
Well, I have to draw about 7 images for every ship to construct a normal map. Every ship needs 7 images drawn of it? An image lit from above, below, right, left, front, specular (shinyness), and emissive (things that glow). I combine them using Sprite Lamp. From there, we can even add Depth maps, Ambient Occlusion maps, etc.
This is done with 1 image, and 1 normal map. Once programmed in, we can add lights from lasers, explosions, etc. on your ships. Also without having to re-make every angle, we could even do cool stuff like ship damage too. Red suns, will make shine red lights on the planets.
So when is this going to be released for UQM-HD (or Project 6014)?
That's the tricky part! I've got the art assets, proof of concept demos, etc. but I currently need programmers to help me implement it into the engine! So if anybody can help, let me know! Or if you know of a programmer capable of doing it, have them contact me!
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Thanks!
