Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Square 1-ish

James managed to solve the seaming issue with the skybox over the weekend. The problem was with the lighting, like I suspected. But there's no code that will solve the problem where the skybox texture is too low of resolution, so I need to build a new one from scratch. Unfortunately for me, XNA only accepts textures with dimensions that are powers of two and I therefore need to make the new one at 1024x1024 per face, or 4096x4096 for the full layout. Except that GIMP and my computer can't really handle working on a 4096x4096 image. As a workaround I've split the new skybox into two separate 1024x3072 images while I work on it and will cut those up into 3 1024x1024 textures each when finished. That way I'll only have to fix one more seam manually. Of course, fixing each individual seam is going to be a bigger pain than previously, as I'll have to be cutting faces from the two images and fixing their seam in a third image. Hopefully generating different chunks of nebulae won't damage the overall look too much, as I have no idea how I would fix that.

We're having some issues with shaders as well; it seems that XNA can't pull transparency from our .FBX's, and I'm guessing a bunch of other stuff I was probably going to end up relying on. so I've borrowed some digital-tutors CD's on doing real-time shading in XNA from a friend for the tech team to go through.

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