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Work in Progress / CloudBOX - a skybox maker you can make free skybox textures with!

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baxslash
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Posted: 16th Jun 2010 16:30 Edited at: 2nd Jul 2010 19:45
Here is a skybox maker I'm working on. It's very basic at the moment but it uses DarkCLOUDS and will have the full features at your disposal including the new planet/sun image features and the ability to colour the sky.



Demo Updated 2nd July 2010:
https://forumfiles.thegamecreators.com/download/2041431

Some Keys:
WASD = move
Left-click + mousemove = rotate view

Also yet to be added are terrains and lightmapping but this demo should give you all a taster!

The main thing about this demo is you can add any object (dbo / 3ds / X) into the model but not move/scale (yet...) so you can premake a world and import it in to add to the sky background! There's a 'demo' city in the download too (the one in the screenshot).

I have noticed some strange effects from DarkCLOUDS where the edges of the clouds don't match up but I'm working around that soon!! This version is compiled using the old version of DC so the clouds will look sharper and we will have planets/sun images once I have the latest version running nicely.

Below is the code you need to use to load the skyboxes but in the attachment is a 'tester' program that can open any skyboxes you make using the demo!!


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baxslash
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Posted: 16th Jun 2010 16:31 Edited at: 30th Jun 2010 00:03
Here's the demo!

https://forumfiles.thegamecreators.com/download/2032484

Updated: 29th June 2010!!

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baxslash
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Posted: 16th Jun 2010 19:25 Edited at: 16th Jun 2010 19:25
Another screenshot (With terrains working!):

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/xt/xt_apollo_pic.php?i=2032585

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C0wbox
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Posted: 16th Jun 2010 20:56
So like, when are, Dogs of War, Battle bikes, Iridium, Spotlight, Waystation and Hell for Leather coming out?

I respect your work man, but seriously, don't turn into me, I've got more unfinished WIPs than your average forumnoob. xD

baxslash
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Posted: 17th Jun 2010 00:23 Edited at: 17th Jun 2010 00:55
Dogs of War = Dead (Too complicated)
Battle Bikes = Dead (Although I may use the vehicle system again and I often use the missile tracking system)
Iridium = Too slow in DBP...
Spotlight = Nearly finished (I keep coming back to it)
Waystation = Still active too!
Hell for Leather = Should be finished within 1-2 weeks

Quote: "I respect your work man, but seriously, don't turn into me"

LOL, no worries. I'd rather be prolific and finish a few than never do anything!!

EDIT: Besides which this project officially ROCKS! Check out my latest screenshot (attached) with planets and fog!!

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baxslash
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Posted: 17th Jun 2010 01:02
I thought a little sample giveaway might get people interested here so attached are the skybox images for the skybox in the new screenshot (above)!

Enjoy!!

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Uncle Sam
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Posted: 17th Jun 2010 05:41
Screenshots look very nice. One question though: what's the big sphere?
baxslash
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Posted: 17th Jun 2010 08:31
Quote: "One question though: what's the big sphere?"

Another question: How can someone with no imagination make games?

Uncle Sam
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Posted: 17th Jun 2010 09:12 Edited at: 17th Jun 2010 09:12
How can I think of another question to answer your question?


Good point.
baxslash
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Posted: 17th Jun 2010 10:39 Edited at: 18th Jun 2010 00:43
Actually I'm having trouble with the planet setup at the moment, what I want to do is have you choose an image, give a scale and then have the program insert it in the direction the camera is currently pointing. The positioning system is a bit complex to say the least!

I'm hoping this will be a really usefull tool but I'm a bit disapointed the clouds produced by DC aren't consistant enough for when viewed from different angles (you get noticeable crossovers). Still the new "cirrus" layer clouds work great and I'll add in my own additional cloud images/layers later.

Has anyone downloaded/tried the sample skybox yet?

Any comments / ideas / requests?

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baxslash
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 00:39 Edited at: 18th Jun 2010 00:45
New screenshot with Plants / Trees / and Rocks:



...EDIT: attached skybox of the above scene here: https://forumfiles.thegamecreators.com/download/2033042

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C0wbox
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 01:19
Ok, well, while this all seems good and well - can you do it for skyspheres?

If you could, then it would be of use to quite a lot more people. (Including me )

baxslash
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 01:59
You can satisfy some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time...

What's wrong with cubes anyway? Do you want me to call it Cl0wdbox or something!?!?!

Why aren't you called C0wsphere?

If you were,then you would be of use to quite a lot more people, (but not for me )

C0wbox
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 03:50


I was just saying man, I only use skyspheres and so do quite a lot of people.

They're just higher poly and cooler than skyboxes, because skyboxes have been around since Quake1.

JLMoondog
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 10:23
I haven't downloaded the test skybox so forgive me. Does your editor distort the skybox images to account for perspective?

baxslash
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 11:00 Edited at: 18th Jun 2010 11:02
Quote: "They're just higher poly and cooler than skyboxes"

Agreed, I'll look into whether this will be possible, I don't see much of a difference in quality though myself...
I did a version of this that used 14 images (an extra one for each corner) to try and resolve the DarkCLOUDS inconsistancy but it didn't resolve it or look/perform any better.

Quote: "Does your editor distort the skybox images to account for perspective?"

Yes, actually it's fairly simple to achieve. You just set the FOV to 90(degrees) and take a screenshot! The code is quite simple really, have it!:


C0wbox
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 14:26
Quote: "I don't see much of a difference in quality"

It's not necessarily about quality. - Yeah sure the skyboxes look great and all that.

But I can think of 2 examples where skyspheres are preferable:
1. A game with outer and inner atmosphere views (like a space game where you could see the planet from outside and inside)
2. A game with 2 skyspheres (1 for clouds that can rotate and 1 for the scenery infront)

This second example I would be interested in using in:
World Off Road



baxslash
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 14:33 Edited at: 18th Jun 2010 14:38
So I looked into it and @VanB wrote a "skygrabber" routine (it's called that if you want to do a search) for making skysphere images. It takes a while to render (I'm waiting for the first decent sized one from my program right now! 1024x1024) but the results are great!

So yes it'll do Skyspheres too!

1% done after about 3 minutes so far...

I'll upload the image as soon as it's rendered (assuming I live that long)

That's the kind of feature request I was after anyway thanks C0wbox, only problem is I'll have to think of a new name now that it does spheres too!!

Some ideas:
SkyScope
Backdrop
SkyScene
SkyMaker

EDIT: "World Off Road" looks great! Downloading it now... I'll get this working and upload a working version for you to try out but the rendering time is quite huge for 1024x1024... (6% and counting)

C0wbox
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 14:44
!

GLaD you like WOR, I've just made a WIP for it xD

Still, a render at all for a skysphere, however long it takes, is good enough for me. (Because I won't have to do it very often.)

Sixty Squares
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 20:08
Wow, this looks great. I'm liking the GUI and all of the features so far, keep up the good work! Also, I tested the demo and on a side note, what program did you use to create that city object?
baxslash
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Posted: 18th Jun 2010 20:27
Quote: "what program did you use to create that city object?"

I didn't, it was just a quick download from Google 3D Warehouse... just to test really.

Quote: "I'm liking the GUI and all of the features so far, keep up the good work!"

Thanks, lots still to finish off yet though!

baxslash
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Posted: 22nd Jun 2010 12:39 Edited at: 22nd Jun 2010 12:39
I haven't had a chance to work on this for a few days but here is a quick render of the Skysphere using VanB's code. Once I have some of the simple environment controls working like Fog and Sky Colour I'll upload a new Demo:


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C0wbox
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Posted: 22nd Jun 2010 16:10
!

Yeh this'll definitely be useful for WOR. (And other people I'm sure)

How's the speed of rendering a skysphere?

baxslash
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Posted: 22nd Jun 2010 16:21 Edited at: 22nd Jun 2010 16:26
Quote: "How's the speed of rendering a skysphere?"

Try it! I've attached the Spheremap renderer set to render a 1024x1024 spheremap from the skybox images attached. I have the renderer running as a seperate little exe so you can carry on playing around in the main program if you want while it runs...

EDIT: I didn't actually answer your question I guess because I didn't time it but the 512x512 version I posted earlier took around 30-40 minutes on my machine (which is fairly slow I think). I'm guessing a 1024x1024 image will take about 1.5 to 2 hrs.

As a side note you can pass the renderer an image size in the commandline (IE:"2048") to render different size spheremaps so you could make your own spheremap maker using this if you wanted

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C0wbox
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Posted: 22nd Jun 2010 20:53
Ok well, I ran the .exe in that .zip and it took 13 minutes to get to 100%, so I guess if I've gota do that for every map that isn't bad. Still, that seems the most inefficient method, if you're using point to grab each pixel from the skysphere.

baxslash
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Posted: 22nd Jun 2010 22:52 Edited at: 22nd Jun 2010 22:57
Quote: "Still, that seems the most inefficient method, if you're using point to grab each pixel from the skysphere."

If you know a faster way I'd be more than happy to change it...

I considered using "get image" to grab the image in 'chunks' but I haven't tried it yet and I think it will cause problems at the top and bottom of the image.

I don't understand why "Point" is so slow anyway, isn't there something in the language drawing each point every loop? Why is it so slow to get the same information back?

Edit: New name / logo;


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C0wbox
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Posted: 22nd Jun 2010 23:19
It's probably because point will be some kind of extra command bolted on which has to check pixels against a colour chart or something to determine what colour it is. I don't think each pixel has data personally stored about it that can be accessed.

baxslash
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Posted: 23rd Jun 2010 00:58
Attached is "EnviroScope", the latest version of CloudBOX!

Let me know what you think!

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Diggsey
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Posted: 23rd Jun 2010 01:58
Graphics cards are designed to be sent information from the CPU, not the other way around. Using "point" involves locking the entire surface (copying it from graphics memory to CPU memory - the very slowest thing you can do with a graphics card) and then reading that data, and finally unlocking it again.

C0wbox
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Posted: 23rd Jun 2010 02:17
Yeh, knew it would be something like that.^^ xD

@ baxslash
I tried EnviroScope, and I'm sure it's all awesome, but I have no media ready for using in it to make a skysphere so I didn't check it much.

But the one thing that annoyed me was the fact it wasn't in a resizeable window/fullscreen so it clipped under my taskbar, and off the bottom of my screen.

baxslash
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Posted: 23rd Jun 2010 09:13
I could keep it resizeable I guess, I just hate the way it screws with the image...

Andrew_Neale
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Posted: 23rd Jun 2010 14:14
I may be misunderstanding what you're doing, but rather than using point, could you not either lock the backbuffer and read the data that way or create a memblock from the image and read from that? Both should be much faster than the point command.

COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE...I've had to much you say? NONSENSE! CANNEVERHAVETOOMUCH!
Diggsey
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 02:24 Edited at: 24th Jun 2010 02:26
The problem is that each pixel in the resulting texture requires a different camera angle to be used, so either way, you still have to lock the surface the same number of times.

The best way would be to have another surface in graphics memory, and copy the data into it as you go (fast) then only copy it back to CPU memory at the very end.

You could actually do this by setting the main camera to render to texture, creating a bitmap to be the destination, then after each render to the texture, you render the single pixel of the texture to the bitmap.

Finally you save the bitmap to a file as the final image.

This process could be repeated hundreds of times per second, making the whole thing much faster.

C0wbox
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 03:16
Yeh, that's what I thought ^
(I just don't do this kinda thing so I wasn't sure of the method xD)

Zeus
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 03:28
Quote: "So like, when are, Dogs of War, Battle bikes, Iridium, Spotlight, Waystation and Hell for Leather coming out?

I respect your work man, but seriously, don't turn into me, I've got more unfinished WIPs than your average forumnoob. xD"


Oh yeah?

I missed you Shadowtroid!
C0wbox
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 03:52 Edited at: 24th Jun 2010 03:58
@ Zeus
Hah, well, if you want to be included in this, then you probably have more unfinished WIPs than I, but still, it was said for effect.

As I see it, I have 7 unfinished WIPs and you have 15.

Zeus
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 06:55
Oh yeah I have more than doubled your score!!! Go me, go me, I lose, go me!

I missed you Shadowtroid!
baxslash
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 10:34
OK, thanks guys but I have over 50 unfinished projects (not including about half that number again that I've deleted) in my projects folder and I've only been really doing this for about a year and a half...

I try to post the ones I think are looking promising and that I might actually finish because I get a lot of help and inspiration from the community.

Back on topic I've added a lot more control to inserting your own objects into the scene as well as more control over adding the 'in-built' plants etc.

I've had some feedback from Simul regarding positioning planets and environmental control too so hopefully I can add that in the next update!

Zeus
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 17:53
Well on topic, I will most def use this program for my games when it is completed. Looks great!

I missed you Shadowtroid!
baxslash
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 18:51
Quote: "The problem is that each pixel in the resulting texture requires a different camera angle to be used, so either way, you still have to lock the surface the same number of times.

The best way would be to have another surface in graphics memory, and copy the data into it as you go (fast) then only copy it back to CPU memory at the very end.

You could actually do this by setting the main camera to render to texture, creating a bitmap to be the destination, then after each render to the texture, you render the single pixel of the texture to the bitmap.

Finally you save the bitmap to a file as the final image.

This process could be repeated hundreds of times per second, making the whole thing much faster."

Thanks Diggsey! I'll give that a try

Quote: "Well on topic, I will most def use this program for my games when it is completed. Looks great!"

Thanks Zeus! I hope you like the rest of the features I'm adding (working on water at the moment). Evolved's fresnel water shader doesn't want to play with DarkCLOUDS because it said something about his mummy...

Zeus
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 20:47
Yeah, I have always like your projects baxslash. Just do me a favor, please keep it free. I am young and can't convince my parents to get it for me.

It's over Shadowtroid!
baxslash
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 21:57 Edited at: 24th Jun 2010 22:31
I've already said, this one will definitely be free!! It's a tool I wish was out there...

I mean OK there's terragen and stuff bu this is designed the way I might want to use it. I'm not letting myself really play with it yet!

Here's what happens when you let a five year old loose with your software!! I love it, they're the best testers...


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Zeus
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Posted: 24th Jun 2010 23:30
Cool!

It's over Shadowtroid!
Sixty Squares
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Posted: 25th Jun 2010 03:20 Edited at: 25th Jun 2010 03:20
Wow if he/she changed the sky color that would actually make a pretty impressive scene . I wonder if chaos is the key to creating beautiful plant landscapes .

Madscientist
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Posted: 25th Jun 2010 04:38
I've got a great suggestion.
In your code, add an export option that takes the images created, creates a UV texture by combining them, textures a cube with it and reverses the cubes normals. Then export the cube as a .dbo so that people have a complete skybox model.

If it hasn't exploded yet, I haven't touched it.
Sixty Squares
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Quote: "In your code, add an export option that takes the images created, creates a UV texture by combining them, textures a cube with it and reverses the cubes normals. Then export the cube as a .dbo so that people have a complete skybox model."


Great idea. It might even be possible with the MAKE MESH FROM OBJECT, ADD LIMB, TEXTURE LIMB and SAVE OBJECT commands.

baxslash
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Posted: 25th Jun 2010 09:18 Edited at: 25th Jun 2010 16:50
That is a really great idea. I'll also do the same for the skyspheres. I'll add this in today!

EDIT: Attached is the latest version of RenderSphere (the spheremap render engine I'm using). It now renders about 25% faster with some little tweeks I've done and creates the skysphere object as a 'DBO' ("EnviroSphere.dbo") you can import straight into your scene!! The sphere is 1 unit in size so just scale it up to the required size and use:


I'm just working on making the "EnviroBox.dbo" objects in the same way (Making the six images into one texture is making it more complicated, plus I'm gardening in between...)

I guess the main advantage of using boxes over spheres is that you get results much quicker. For example I set a 2048x2048 sphere image rendering over an hour ago... nearly done. I can do a 960x960 skybox which actually makes an image of much higher quality (the sphere has to cover the equivalent of six sides in 2048 pixels but the box uses 6x960=5760 pixels!) in less than a second. You do the math but hey people want skypheres

If I was going to make spheres for my game I would test the quality of the boxes first is all I'm saying! Rather than waste over an hour per sphere image!!

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C0wbox
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Posted: 25th Jun 2010 18:17 Edited at: 25th Jun 2010 18:17
!

I'm back (sorry, I was moving to Scotland) hah, your 5 year old has talent xD

But yeh, all these new ideas are sounding good, I hope to use the final product soon

baxslash
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Posted: 29th Jun 2010 00:43 Edited at: 29th Jun 2010 00:48
Update: I've got the skybox and skysphere objects and single textures working now as jpegs (the bmp's were MASSIVE)...

Also I've got planet positioning and scaling sorted. You just point the camera where you want a planet and edit the scale manually via text input...
Image 1:


Image 2:


Updated and maybe complete demo coming very soon!!

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baxslash
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Posted: 29th Jun 2010 00:45 Edited at: 29th Jun 2010 00:47
Image 2 for planet setup.

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