Doesn't Earth just look beautiful in DA with High-Res texturing? :)

Indeed it does.

I wish high resolution planet surface maps would be included in DA final. Doubtful they will, but would be nice suprise

... Oh my god. That is unbelieveably good. What do you have to have run it with that good graphics? A Geforce 10000 or something? For crying out loud...It's unbelieveable!

Wow! Do you think you could realease these texture maps to the public!

... Oh my god. That is unbelieveably good. What do you have to have run it with that good graphics? A Geforce 10000 or something? For crying out loud...It's unbelieveable!

LoL, Nah, not a 10000 . But i am running a GeForce 7900GTX (8xQ FSAA, 16x AF full trilinear, multisample transparency AA, etc...). This computer is also my graphics workstation, so it's well equipped to handle the high-res textures. I have no doubt that it would severely hamper gameplay on older systems.

Wow! Do you think you could realease these texture maps to the public!

I guess if people are really that interested. I've thought about releasing my graphics tweaks (nebula graphics, high-res textures, etc...). I've actually cut the earth map down to 2048 x 1024 without any noticable quality drop. 4096 x 2048 was a tad overkill.


Well Kryo, no comment?? Come on, what do you think?

I think it looks good. You should release it into the GalCiv II Library.

Well Kryo, no comment?? Come on, what do you think?

It does look quite nice, I wouldn't mind having that myself if not for the fact that I never play as Terrans

I've thought about doing high-res versions of the Alien's homeworlds too. Looks like you prefer Drengin eh?

Looks like you prefer Drengin eh?

Actually, no, the character I've got set up for my medals was just for testing. I generally play Yor myself, though with DA I've being going custom to pair up Super Annihilator with my choice of ability bonuses. I don't use the meta myself as I prefer to play with mods.

Yikes, oh well... Anyways, i whipped up a High Res Drengi and Kona just to see how they would turn out, and how well i could do the alien worlds, what do you think? Oh, and Drengi has it's own custom High Res moon now too.

Drengi


Kona



P.S.
Note, the Drengi and Kona High Res maps are NOT identical to the stock game images, for obvious reasons. Namely i don't have High-Res versions of those, so i made my own, so the land masses will look different, however i tried to match the colorations of the land masses and oceans almost exactly, and i think it turned out well.

Looks great. Are you drawing these by hand or using a planet-generator tool (such as Lunarcell)?

The next step would be doing the RAW maps and getting those to colorize properly, but I wouldn't sweat too much over that unless you're really a masochist

Looks great. Are you drawing these by hand or using a planet-generator tool (such as Lunarcell)? The next step would be doing the RAW maps and getting those to colorize properly, but I wouldn't sweat too much over that unless you're really a masochist

I'm generating them with Newtek Lightwave 3D. I have a huge database of source images for planet generation (high res very zoomed in photos of terrestrial land bodies, like islands, pennensulas, etc... As well as some random made up textures), and i use many of Lightwave's built in procedural textures. Then i merge them on a plain sphere in Lightwave and use the surface baking camera to generate a rectangular texture file. Then i tweak the colors in Paint Shop Pro, add in some fractal noise to the oceans, etc...

And i WAS thinking ahead to RAW terrain maps , so i saved a grayscale version of each planet map without the ice caps. Just gotta load them into Paint Shop Pro and lighten up the continents and resize/convert them, and there ya go .

And since you like the Yor, here's Iconia.

Library please

As long as it doesnt slow down the game too much that is

Those are sweet looking  . I may try them if they make it to the library, but I imagine my PC will come to a crawl with them  . Just gotta see them first hand atleast once though.

You have release those! This is to sweet to go unreleased!

I would have posted these sooner, but the forums seemed to have been down for over 12 hours... At least for me.

Those are wonderful, can't wait till you release them!

the forums seemed to have been down for over 12 hours

They were for me also.

Gah! i was editing my post Alex! Now i have to make a new one! D@mn you! Just kidding . The 2 above are Altaria and New Iconia.

More:

Toria


Arcea


Dratha

Gah! i was editing my post Alex! Now i have to make a new one! D@mn you! Just kidding

OOPS!    That was perfect timing on my part.

You really should release them!

You really should release them!

OK OK I’ll release them when they're done. Maybe I could even persuade Kryo to certify them as well?

(Still have Thala, Kora, and Kryseth to do. Problem is, there are no images for Kora and Kryseth yet. Kryo, any idea if there are going to be any at some point? Or are they going to be left as rendomly generated by the game? Or perhaps they'll mearely be re-uses of the current planet images? If that's the case could you perhaps clue me in to their color schemes so i can match them?)

Kryo, any idea if there are going to be any at some point?

They're still random ATM. I don't know if that will change or not, but I'll see if I can find out.

Since that means you'll probably just be making them up, I'd personally think the Korath world should look like an even more polluted and drained version of Drengi. Darker water, paler land, maybe, something that matches their diplomacy image nicely. The Krynn seem to be mostly middle-eastern-themed, so a desert planet would probably be appropriate for them.

Thala

Kryo, do you think it might be possible for Cari or whomever is in charge in this department, to like... Well... Um... Do us modders a favor? And enable bump and spec textures for planet surfaces? And give us the ability to define specific individual cloud and night light maps for custom planets??

Also, is it possible to use a higher resolution .raw terrain map for planets? Other than 384x192? If so, how would i implement that?

And as i'm about to make the raw terrains for the planets, and new custom terrain color scehems, could you clue me in as to how you guys made the color schemes to begin with? I mean obviously i know how to make a color scheme for raw terrain, i've done it before, but it's a pain in the arse. Is there any specfic tool you used to match the greyscale level to a certain decimal level, so you know ahead of time where to change the color levels?

Because right now it's all trial and error for me. I make the raw map, and a custom terrain scheme with a red surface at .01, and a purple at .1, then load the game, see where the color boundries are, close the game, and adjust the color scheme for the proper color for .01-.1, and repeat the process for .1-.99. That takes forever as you might imagine. I'm just wondering if the devs had anything to shortcut the process that i might be able to use?

Kryo, do you think it might be possible for Cari or whomever is in charge in this department, to like... Well... Um... Do us modders a favor? And enable bump and spec textures for planet surfaces? And give us the ability to define specific individual cloud and night light maps for custom planets??

I've already requested most of that myself for 1.6.

Also, is it possible to use a higher resolution .raw terrain map for planets? Other than 384x192? If so, how would i implement that?

It should be (note that the pregenerated heightmaps that are in the DA beta are all 512x256) but either I was doing it wrong, or it doesn't seem to work as expected when you specify one for a custom planet. If I can get one of my requests that would be moot, but I'll try and corner CodeCritter and figure it out.

And as i'm about to make the raw terrains for the planets, and new custom terrain color scehems, could you clue me in as to how you guys made the color schemes to begin with? I mean obviously i know how to make a color scheme for raw terrain, i've done it before, but it's a pain in the arse. Is there any specfic tool you used to match the greyscale level to a certain decimal level, so you know ahead of time where to change the color levels?

I don't know how it was done for the original game (only earth actually got a custom RAW map--everything else was random, so those didn't really need any special work). But when I did my 'Real Mars' map I did it the trial and error way and yeah it was a real pain. I've since found it a lot less painful to just use the curves tool in PSP to isolate certain grey levels to see where they cover. Every 25 or 26 units of brightness (0-255) corresponds to 0.1 (0.0-1.0) in the TerrainColorSchemes.

Whoa... these look awesome! I'll certainly download them when you release them. I just hope they don't make my computer explode...