Planet rings.

ruckage · Post by **ruckage** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 1:25 pm

Hello, haven't been on here for a long while but just bought Evochron renegades after playing the demo as it's such a step up from Evochron alliance 2. Great job Vice.

Anyway I was just playing around with the mod kit and thought it would be cool to make new hi res planet rings but I have a few questions.

1) Should the textures be grayscale or can they be coloured?

2) Assuming the textures are grayscale is the colour tinted in some way to match the planet colour.

3) Is the same ring texture used for all planets with rings? Would be great if each planet that had rings had its own unique ring texture - would open up the possibility for some interesting effects for some planets .

If I'd played more I may have been able to answer these myself but I haven't gone beyond the Glacia system yet. I'm looking forward to exploring.

Thanks for your help and I'll post my new textures once they are finished.

ruckage · Post by **ruckage** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 3:17 pm

Ok - I'm being a bit stupid, I now realize there are 2 types of rings - the fragmented variety as seen on Glacia and full rings. This brings me to another question.

In the readme that comes with the mod kit you say that:

rings1.jpg = This texture is mipmapped by the game, so this can be high resolution (longer load time)
rings2.jpg = Regular full detail texture

Is rings2 not mipmapped then and so not recommended to have high resolution textures?

Post by **Vice** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 3:35 pm

Correct. If you want to import a really high detail texture, you'll want to use slot 1, slot 2 is not mipmapped, so a high detail texture might sparkle/shimmer beyond what you might want, depending on resolution and other display/video settings.

ruckage · Post by **ruckage** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 5:25 pm

Thanks Vice. I've made a post in the mods section with a new rings1.jpg in 3 sizes. I'll wait until I get to a system with a planet that uses rings2.jpg before modding that texture.

Out of curiosity is there a reason why only rings1.jpg is mipmapped?

Post by **Vice** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 5:30 pm

Load time, creating mipmap textures in memory can take a while and (with too much of a delay) risk slowing load time beyond the threshhold of the auto-kick time limit for multiplayer. But I wanted to support both options as some designs might not require mipmapping (such as a smooth soft edged ring) while other designs (like sharp particle effects) really need the option to look good at a distance and at narrow angles.

[Edited on 3-4-2008 by Vice]