Dirigible Development Diary

Spaceflight. Yum.

Higher quality AVI is available here (5Mb, Xvid-encoded)

We’ve been playing around with skyboxes recently, trying to make the illusion of space a bit more aesthetically fulfilling and also to prepare things for a soon-to-be-implemented feature. That I won’t mention yet.

The skybox implementation has thrown up a few interesting technical issues. In one test, I put in a model of a planet. One that fitted inside the available space wasn’t sufficiently large (in comparison to the player) to be a planet. After a few more tests, I settled on taking a roughly square section of a much-enlarged planetary sphere and using that. It’s sufficiently large that the player can’t see where it cuts off, and the boundaries of the space area prevent too much exploration in that regard (at the moment, said boundaries are just standard “invisible walls”. They’ll be replaced with a more suitable paradigm later on.)

Unfortunately, even with a very high resolution texture, it looks like this:

That is with a 2048 x 2048 texture, which is big, and the pixelation is atrocious – it’s like 1996 all over again. I could increase the resolution (or use multiple textures – same effect), but performance drops off exponentially. An 8192 x 8192 texture would use 226 Megabytes of memory, and that’s unacceptable.

Several options have been considered, but the approach I’m going to try for this particular planet (Earth-like – primarily water with some land masses) is to have the whole planet textured blue, and then have the land masses as separately-textured meshes. Hopefully, that’ll look a lot better, and it also allows me to animate the land masses to give the impression that the planet is revolving.

I also put together a new skybox texture (Crab Nebula courtesy of NASA). I was actually somewhat awestruck as the hangar doors opened and I caught a glimpse of it in place. I flew round a bit (ah, the joys of spaceflight…) and took this suitably dramatic shot:

Simon has also been working on some experimental skybox trickery, and this is the result:

It looks enormously better in motion – I’ll put up a video soon.

Beyond the skyboxes, Andy has fixed some bugs in the Environmental Control System (the vacuum stuff) and started on the Terminals. I intend to do a future update going into more detail on those at some point soon.

Finally for this update, I’ve been working on a new fighter model. Here’s a quick clip I did to test the animations (all of them!)