Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

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Game Zone
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Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Game Zone »

Hello, my first post here, I would like to know if its possible in any way to have a skybox?

What I am really aiming for is the ability to have the games floor and walls be either semi transparent, or have transparent elements within it, through this we can see a world behind this, which I will use a skybox, I would also like for the player to be able to select what skybox and or game grid textures to use, is this possible, this is something I can see is in the GLtron game, Armagetron looks like it contains more features than GLtron, but yet I don't see that it has the ability to have a selection of game grids and skybox designs within it. Please inform me of what is possible, or could be possible with Armagetron.

Looking at the movie packs it appears one can change the walls and the floor ceiling, but not whats behind this, I have not tested yet if he floor ceiling and walls can be set to texture an image just once, or if its tiled, or if its scaled as a box, I am guessing is proportions are set to whatever the game grids are , so its height is contained but its length and width are variable, if so, then that cannot be textured as a skybox as its proportions are not a perfect box. Perhaps the game can be edited in the maps so that we have a game area, and a bigger area outside this that can be our skybox with its own texture, or perhaps the game actually has settings within the game for the creation of a skybox beyond the walls of the game.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Phytotron »

This is an old, old subject. Like, as old as both games. Search around the forum and you'll find info and why it's not doable at this time with the current rendering engine thingamabob.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Game Zone »

Before I registered I did a search under skybox, it did not bring any search results, what should I be searching under, and it what category in the board index?
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by sinewav »

Start Here. Just search for gltron threads and you'll get a good picture on the relationship between the two programs. Also, Phytotron and I are glTron fans.

In fact, I think we could do without the skybox model glTron has if Arma supported an alpha channel on rim_wall.png. That would give us cool creative possibilities. I remember asking about this before, but can't find the thread.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Game Zone »

Graphics update, skybox and grid, this is what I made in GLtron.

Image

But with GLtron, I found it hard to work across the operating systems its supposed to work on, so I looked for an alternate that works for the user, so I found Armagetron, which has the benefit of also having online play game types and maps, but its possibilities look severely limited in terms of me changing its graphic look, I want to have a selection of art to use, not one movie pack, and not just a flat design for the walls and floor, I am surprised the game has such nice features and work that has gone into the gameplay, only to have such a massive oversight that graphically is limited, on one of the GLtron threads someone mentions the rendering engine on Armagetron is better, it doesn't make any difference at all, if you cannot have a skybox and transparent walls, in fact even a game that has skybox and transparent walls that had no rendering at all, and Armagetron had a better render than 3d studio, only in real time, it would lose in looks to the game with no rendering, just 100% ambient light, why, because, I would bake in the light into the defuse of the bike, use good skybox designs, and the walls and grid don't need shadows anyway as they are made of light.

So I am wondering what to do here, GLtron does not work on its system formats, and Armagetron does not have the ability it seems for transparent walls and a skybox, or to show a background image some how, I have loads of artwork and no place to put it. I am not even sure if Armagetron can even be altered to do what I want, otherwise I would hire a coder and get it to work, but I don't want to put work into something that will take months for the coder, I want to put something together in quick time. I am surprised that so much work has gone into Armagetron making an excellent game, that this part has been overlooked, a graphic make over on this game would really bring the game up to date and attract a lot of new users to play it, there is a lot of potential that's not being used in the games popularity and in terms of what it could be.

I would like some feedback as I very serious about making this happen.

On a sub note, I am trying to get up to speed quickly on Armagetron, I can see one has the abillity to make maps, I have been looking for 'ingame' screenshots or videos of these working, I cannot find any at all. Can someone post a link of some ingame user maps, all I can find is square arena maps.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by sinewav »

EDIT: Oh yeah, welcome to the ArmagetronAd forums. :)
Game Zone wrote:...but its possibilities look severely limited in terms of me changing its graphic look...to have such a massive oversight that graphically is limited...
Oh no my friend, there is much you can do with it to change the look. If you don't believe me, check out this "art" is did with the game a while ago... (it's a screenshot of the game, no editing!)
http://forums3.armagetronad.net/downloa ... &mode=view
Game Zone wrote:...otherwise I would hire a coder and get it to work, but I don't want to put work into something that will take months for the coder, I want to put something together in quick time... I [am] very serious about making this happen.
There is no shortage of coders who would take your money to develop the game full-time. Get on the IRC channel and ask around.

Also keep one thing in mind: There is no oversight. It's a choice. It's a retro game, simple, minimalistic, and has graphics suited for it. I personally love the look of the game and would do very little to change it. But if you want to hire someone to develop graphics, I support that idea completely.

I've made a few glTron artpacks myself. Maybe I'll post some here. Also, some glTron artpacks have been converted to Armagetron. And I made an Armagetron artpack for glTron. :D
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Game Zone »

Also keep one thing in mind: There is no oversight. It's a choice. It's a retro game, simple, minimalistic, and has graphics suited for it. I personally love the look of the game and would do very little to change it. But if you want to hire someone to develop graphics, I support that idea completely.
I have the graphics, I just want to get them into the game, I want to know how to have the game so that, I have walls and floor that are translucent, or have translucent parts, and a box 'behind' the game area, 6 sides, so I can put 6 textures on the box, this box will have images on, the image must be displayed right to the edge, its not tiled, 1 image per face and it fits perfectly, must be 100% lit box, no shadows on it, this will them form the background world. so we have the playable game area, 'inside' a box, the outer box has my 6 images on it.
Like this
Image
Only the teapot would be our game area, we have just put a big box 'around' it and stuck some images on it, our game/arena sits 'inside' this box.

By the way,I found an ingame map images
http://www.adventuresoftron.com/moviepacks.htm
So I can see a little how that works.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Phytotron »

Heh, you found sinewav's webpage.

Those 'walls' in the pics with the the teapot remind of the 'Waterworld' GLTron artpack. Is it? If so, are you by any chance the author, and/or trying to transpose it into Armagetron? Sinewav and I happened to have had an exchange about just that months ago when I tried to do it. (As sinewav alluded to, I've transposed a number of GLTron artpacks into Armagetron, mainly for my personal use.) No joy for the Waterworld one, for some of the reasons to follow.

As to skyboxes (i.e., a second layer of walls behind frontmost walls, producing a nice parallax effect if one takes advantage), there simply is no way with Armagetron. There are the rim walls, the end; "beyond" them is just a black void. Any translucency in those textures just turns black. Same with the floor, except I think off the top of my head that it's whatever [MOVIEPACK_]FLOOR_[R/B/G] are set to that shows through.

I don't think one can successfully create a single floor tile that'll fit perfectly within the arena, either. Arenas vary in size, for one, and while one could adjust GRID_SIZE[_MOVIEPACK] to try to fit, the floor texture isn't (I don't think) centered in the arena. Actually, it may be centered (again, this is off the top of my head at the moment), but even still, there's not really any way to match it up with the rim walls, since they also are just tiled around. I suppose one could tinker and find the exact right arena size, coupled with the exact right RIM_WALL_STRETCH_[X/Y], to match the exact right floor size, but that'd be a pain and the ass* and not [uh...modular? expandable? whatever term I'm looking for—you'd be locked to those dimensions].

That's just the way it is, man.


* Unless a developer or someone else would know all the math off the top of their heads. I no smert enuff 4 dat.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Discosuperstar »

It seems to me the best way to do this theoretically is not to replace the rim/floor, but add a cube outside the arena, set to a maximal size that won't be clipped, but will also always be bigger than the arena. Incidentally, the best effect would be if the floor reflection also used the same cubemap as a reflection map.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Game Zone »

Phytotron wrote:Heh, you found sinewav's webpage.

Those 'walls' in the pics with the the teapot remind of the 'Waterworld' GLTron artpack. Is it? If so, are you by any chance the author, and/or trying to transpose it into Armagetron?
No it's not me.
Discosuperstar wrote:It seems to me the best way to do this theoretically is not to replace the rim/floor, but add a cube outside the arena, set to a maximal size that won't be clipped, but will also always be bigger than the arena. Incidentally, the best effect would be if the floor reflection also used the same cubemap as a reflection map.
That's what I'm suggesting. But from what Phytotron says it seems impossible, GLtron uses actual models for levels, but having a quick look at Armagetron it looks like it uses a vector format, perhaps its like the original Doom and isn't actual 3D but a workaround like doom 1 and 2 was. I have had a quick look online at the maps and looking at it, there is walls within walls, I am not sure if you can select the height, or have walls of different heights, or even if you can have different textures on the walls, or only one texture for 'all' walls, otherwise you would have some leeway to have game walls, and then a surface beyond the game walls to put a different texture on with a background scene. So i am not sure of the capabilities.

I have a question, does Armagetron support pixel shaders, and if not, do you think it would be difficult to implement?
Also I read it has an upper and lower sky, is that correct, so on layer one we could put a grid, or layer two clouds, is this correct? I have seen levels with moving skies, I am guessing this is just panning the texture, is that correct, and if so, do we have control of panning speed and direction, and if we have two upper sky textures, can we have the textures pan in different directions? Also with the floor, do we have two options there, so bottom layer could be rock, and above it a grid with transparency? I am just trying to get an understanding with how it puts things together and what I can do with it and how I can push and manipulate it.

By the way, Ill be putting a web site up soon of the experiments with GLtron, so you can see what is possible, with what I have in mind, so Ill add a link soon for that.

I am also interested in what Armagetron players think of GLtron, do you like to play this version and what are your thoughts, I think I may have to work with both, but in different ways if I cant get Armagetron to do what I want with background art.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Discosuperstar »

I haven't worked with GL in a while, and I'll admit I've never looked at the Arma code, so what I say could be wrong. I base this only on my knowledge of gfx and what I see in the game.

Arma internally stores everything as 2D. However, when it comes to actual rendering it's still all fully 3d polygons and everything. The outer rim can be a low rim; it's an option in the menu. With a low rim you can even see the grid continue past it assuming you have the right settings on. So for a skybox, in theory, all you need to do is add 1 box, maximum scale, at world origin, normals pointed inward, and texture appropriately. In addition, add support for transparency in walls/floor/sky (I don't think they have it right now). Now again, I haven't seen the code, so in practice I don't know how easy or difficult it would be to add.

Come to think of it, I wonder if one could simply add the skybox as part of the bike model. I might give it a shot when I can.

As far as pixel shaders go, no Arma doesn't have them. If I ever have the time I was considering looking into the Arma code to add it, since I don't think any of the usual developers were doing it.

Afaik, there are two sky layers, at two different heights. Their textures are editable, and can move if you set the option right. Movement speed can be controlled I think, but it varies based on map scale (in huge maps it moves really fast). There is only one floor layer, which is textured with the grid or a solid color.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Jonathan »

The problem is that Armagetron is hardcoded to its traditional style. It's easy to swap textures and such, but to change pretty much anything else you must change the code. There have been plans for an overhaul for ages, but it just doesn't get done.

BTW, you can have transparent textures. Two sort of exceptions:
- It will work on walls, but as the polygons are unsorted you'll only see half of the other walls/cycles on the grid through them.
- The alpha channel of a cycle is used to color it.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by andi75 »

What's the basic rendering loop in Armagetron?

Btw. you can get away with unsorted lightcycle trails most of the time, since

a) when looking from above, they rarely cover each other and
b) when their alpha isn't too low, it's hardly noticable

Ofc. hacking into it some sort of topological sorting shouldn't be too hard (since there's no nasty cases of intersecting walls etc.).
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by Z-Man »

andi75 wrote:What's the basic rendering loop in Armagetron?
Nothing unusual. Clear screen and z-buffer, render floor and sky, render arena walls, render objects, which is now the cycles, trails and zones. There's two passes, one for the opaque stuff, one for the glowing things rendered with additive blending (those commute). Putting a skybox there between the clear and the first other rendering isn't a code problem, it's merely a content problem. The way we handle content right now is horrible and should not be extended.
andi75 wrote:Ofc. hacking into it some sort of topological sorting shouldn't be too hard (since there's no nasty cases of intersecting walls etc.).
There was once. In fact, it's one of the reasons the grid datastructures are organized the way they are, they allow easy sorting and visibility culling. However, doing that uses CPU time every frame and makes it pretty much impossible to store the geometry data in display lists for batch rendering. I haven't switched back to the sorted rendering in a while, but the switch to display lists alone gave about a 100% performance boost, and losing that would be the base cost of supporting full scale transparency. Making it all optional would be possible for sure, but uurgh at maintaining two vastly different code paths and dealing with the inevitable 'why is it so slow in this configuration?' support requests.
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Re: Skybox like GLtron - selectable choice of movie packs

Post by andi75 »

Putting a skybox there between the clear and the first other rendering isn't a code problem, it's merely a content problem.
I see. Handling resources is always a headache (grab this model from here, this texture from there, and for the love of god, where have my different model lod's gone?).
but the switch to display lists alone gave about a 100% performance boost
That's quite a surprise. I thought you were fill rate limited anyway (in which case the display lists give you exactly zero performance boost). Or is it merely an issue of dropping performance from 3200 FPS to 1600 FPS?
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