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News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Poll

On a scale of 1 to 5, how do you feel about having 3D/Normal mapped ships as shown. One being like, 3 being in between an 5 being complete dislike for it.

1. I love it it makes the game more engrossing!
- 13 (14.1%)
2. It's good and helps add to the ship aesthetic
- 20 (21.7%)
3. It's satisfactory, I like both the original and the 3d version
- 28 (30.4%)
4. I dislike it - it ruins the aesthetic created by David
- 28 (30.4%)
5. It's horrible! It ruins the game! Don't you dare add this!
- 3 (3.3%)

Total Members Voted: 92


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Author Topic: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!  (Read 38764 times)

Dark.Revenant

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #15 on: May 25, 2014, 09:01:15 PM »

In my humble opinion, normal maps are too much of an expenditure and dividing wall to be worth seriously undertaking unless the effect is very subtle.  Let me give you Skullgirls as an example of a game using normal mapped sprites, while still keeping the aesthetic of a hand-drawn game.  As such I believe that the sole use for a normal map should be to enhance the existing lighting effects rather than fundamentally change how the game looks on its own.
« Last Edit: May 25, 2014, 09:02:47 PM by Dark.Revenant »
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xenoargh

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #16 on: May 25, 2014, 10:57:46 PM »

If the tech exists, subtle is going to be a design choice. 

The fact of the matter is that it's kind of pointless to worry about it from the standpoint of modder difficulty; Alex is quite unlikely to want to change the core aesthetic this late in production, guys.  This isn't like WTF, where the coder's still trying to make his slow voxel thing look decent at crawling framerates, lol.

From a practical standpoint, it'd work well for TCs but practically nothing else; I absolutely agree that it'd be silly to demand that David spend the next couple of months retro-fitting everything with normalmaps, lol.

If Alex allows hooking into the engine at the point sprites are drawn, somebody will want to do normalmaps; if they're done right, they'll look a lot different than Vanilla sprites.  Not necessarily "better", but they'll certainly look more realistic.

In terms of production times and all that... this evening, I looked at the practical problems of production workflow, and it's not that bad... if you're a professional 3D artist.  You can just output a high-poly sculpt to a normal map, like you'd typically do for tiles, render a diffuse map and build the material map and you're done.  Most of the time spent would be on the sculpt; pixel-art detailing would be less important, because the normal map would largely deal with lighting and we could use an AO channel in the material map to handle the rest of it. 

Nothing else about the rendering process would change much; the damage overlays are designed to work with anything they're rendered over and would probably still look decent, although if that system could be overridden and current "heat" levels were readable by mod code, even more attractive possibilities present themselves.

The only big fly in the ointment that I found is that resolution on the normal maps would probably need to be 2X sprite resolutions, largely to produce enough slope in all circumstances.  I don't think sampling on the GPU can quite get it done at the scales required without the occasional issue with shimmer or weird height reads, but that's all conjecture atm, I just did some tests of some things to see what looks good.

All that said... meh.  Unless Alex wants to license the code as an engine and farm it out for other people wanting to build similar games... I can't really imagine anybody going to that much effort, tbh, except on the smallest scales. 

There are maybe 5-10 people around here who might be able to do it, art-wise, but practically nobody would be willing to sink the time in, for free.  The amount of time investment required at that point it serious enough that I'd be very surprised if somebody even found the time to do all the sculpts just to enhance the Vanilla stuff properly, tbh.  I sure can't see Alex and David getting all excited about having to re-master all that art themselves.
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Creepin

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #17 on: May 26, 2014, 01:57:35 AM »

Does this look good or bad?
Discuss!
It looks very good in and of itself, but it is totally not Starsector.

To clarify: 2d pixel art is what makes Starsector feel unique and appealing. While 3d could be "more advanced", "more modern", "more trendy" and other crap like this, in case of Starsector it would be but a trifle crammed to where it doesn't belong. My appreciation for Starsector's visual aesthetics is large part of what makes me play it, and I'm already had to hand-pick mods that are true to vanilla's sharp pixel art style and weed out those built upon 3d (polygon) models. If vanilla to become 3d-ised, this will outright kill the game's appeal for me, so please don't! :)
« Last Edit: May 26, 2014, 02:01:26 AM by Creepin »
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Cycerin

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #18 on: May 26, 2014, 05:25:39 AM »

Normal mapping needs to be very subtle to add rather than detract from the game's aesthetic, because a frontal light source is presumed with the way sprites are drawn for the game. Rather than normal mapping, subtle material mapping could add a way for sprites to stand out, but it would be a pretty challenging task.
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Megas

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #19 on: May 26, 2014, 05:40:25 AM »

I play Starsector to make a fleet of ships go BOOM!  The extra bells-and-whistles is nice, but not necessary to do what I got the game for (although I still want better explosions beneath the whiteout).
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #20 on: May 26, 2014, 05:59:56 AM »

In case you were wondering what I meant by subtle, here are some examples (these examples use a material map and a normal map in conjunction; frankly, the material map is the more important part, and is much easier to make since it only requires minor edits of your existing sprite).  This is used to improve the perception of depth for lighting effects, not change the core aesthetic of the game.





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CrashToDesktop

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #21 on: May 26, 2014, 06:32:16 AM »

I wouldn't mind seeing those ships - they look fine IMO, this or David's would fit.  Reminds me of some minecraft texture packs that added that added a 3D affect.
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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #22 on: May 26, 2014, 07:46:40 AM »

A wild half normalized Onslaught appear:

You may want to know that the effect is more visible animated, with missile flying over for example. Still, it is subtle to stay close to David's art.
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Debido

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #23 on: May 26, 2014, 07:59:32 AM »

I really like what you've done with the normalized sprites, they're very respectful of the source sprites, and should be the benchmark for how people do normal maps *if* they are going to do so in a manner that doesn't make it deviate from the original aesthetic.

I've been playing with the Paragon and Conquest with the normal maps and there is *something* almost indescribably better. It's no one particular thing, it just looks a bit more real, that the lights and that the ships aren't just a flat 2D sprite but take on their own presence in the game world that they never did before without looking gaudy.

Fantastic work.
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Megas

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #24 on: May 26, 2014, 09:58:49 AM »

The only thing I notice between "normalized" and standard in that last pic is the purple highlights at the edges, and I missed them the first time I looked at the image.  Glowing stuff at the edges is a style preference.  I suppose I need to see them in action in the game.  I see no difference between the two halves with just a quick glance at the picture.
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David

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #25 on: May 26, 2014, 10:29:30 AM »

My comment was requested, so here's what's pretty much the stock answer (which I've given before in different form):

We investigated using normal-mapped sprites very early on in production of Starsector. I worked on a spaceship game back in 2007 (which didn't go anywhere) that was going to use normal maps and did make a test sprite for it. It's a cool effect, but:
- it's *at least* 2x the work-time per sprite, almost certainly more, not counting such schemes as hiring a 3d modeller to re-make everything (and remake everything again if I change anything, and the management/accounting overhead time thereof; unless you've had experience being a small business owner/manager, you'll be shocked at how this balloons unexpectedly).
- normal mapping bumps up system requirements (this is less and less a problem over time, true, but min system requirements is not about what hardcore gamers like all y'all have - the hardcore will always demand more and better, always, always - it's about what is really convenient and cheap for anyone who happens to pick up Starsector.)
- and ultimately, it's not the direction we chose to pursue with the aesthetics of the game.

Game-making is a balance between artistic intent, technical plausibility, and business reality and we've got a good thing going here. This is not to say that enthusiastic modders should not go wild with the possibilities here if they so desire, of course. So: go for it.
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Tecrys

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #26 on: May 26, 2014, 11:06:22 AM »

My comment was requested, so here's what's pretty much the stock answer (which I've given before in different form):

We investigated using normal-mapped sprites very early on in production of Starsector. I worked on a spaceship game back in 2007 (which didn't go anywhere) that was going to use normal maps and did make a test sprite for it. It's a cool effect, but:
- it's *at least* 2x the work-time per sprite, almost certainly more, not counting such schemes as hiring a 3d modeller to re-make everything (and remake everything again if I change anything, and the management/accounting overhead time thereof; unless you've had experience being a small business owner/manager, you'll be shocked at how this balloons unexpectedly).
- normal mapping bumps up system requirements (this is less and less a problem over time, true, but min system requirements is not about what hardcore gamers like all y'all have - the hardcore will always demand more and better, always, always - it's about what is really convenient and cheap for anyone who happens to pick up Starsector.)
- and ultimately, it's not the direction we chose to pursue with the aesthetics of the game.

Game-making is a balance between artistic intent, technical plausibility, and business reality and we've got a good thing going here. This is not to say that enthusiastic modders should not go wild with the possibilities here if they so desire, of course. So: go for it.

I would've never been able to express myself in this way which is why I haven't posted here yet but I have to say that this is exactly how I feel about it.

#signed
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HELMUT

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #27 on: May 26, 2014, 02:03:14 PM »

I was just thinking, is it possible to have those 3D ships working with the usual 2D ones? The organic effect on that Conquest could be very interesting on a modded faction, thought about BGE for example.
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Debido

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #28 on: May 26, 2014, 02:13:13 PM »

I was just thinking, is it possible to have those 3D ships working with the usual 2D ones? The organic effect on that Conquest could be very interesting on a modded faction, thought about BGE for example.

Yes
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Tecrys

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Re: '3D' Starsector Ship - Does this look good or bad? Vote Now!
« Reply #29 on: May 26, 2014, 03:30:16 PM »

I was just thinking, is it possible to have those 3D ships working with the usual 2D ones? The organic effect on that Conquest could be very interesting on a modded faction, thought about BGE for example.

Yes

Well, I would have to say that it's yes and no:
-yes, it works for the ship sprite
-no, it does not work on animated parts, unless it's possible to assign the effects to each animation frame which would involve a tremendous amount of work
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