I was just about to mention it xD. But I’ve never tried it, just read some reviews :S.
Holy shit that looks amazing! I’m gonna try it asap.
Btw I’ve made some progress myself. Here’s a WIP trading station menu made with a viewport stacked on top of a nifty screen (engines as placeholders).
Does anyone know how to increase the contrast on a viewport/camera? As you can see the modules are rendered in a very grayish fashion. I’ve tried all kinds of lighting but brightness can’t really correct contrast. I guess I could attach a filter to the viewport and correct all pixels, but that seems like an unnecessary complication. Any regular way to do it?
So I’ve also finished the module texture/model overhaul. The final one was this junkyard/scrap/pirate themed faction.
I think it could still use some improvements, but close enough.
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Looks to me like the gray background is affecting them and no amount of contrast adjustment will fix that. Set the background to black and see what they look like.
Just tried that and it seems that the translucent gray nifty background was being drawn on top of the icon viewport.
I am a moron. :chimpanzee_facepalm:
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From various forum threads, it seems like nifty has magic code to detect whether you want to draw it in front of something or in back of something… and then does the opposite. 
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Reason #26584096 not to use Nifty. 
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Harsh… a lot of work has gone into creating and maintaining Nifty, I’ve used it for all my GUI’s and while not perfect, have found it to be very solid.
… the old adage, "if you don’t have anything nice to say … "
… sorry, it just erks me when people bash other’s hard work for no productive reason.
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oh and while I’m at it, @MoffKalast, damn i hate you, your game is looking fkn amazing, really great work my dude =)
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I seem to have defeated it’s magic abilities by setting the viewport as a postView.
Now there’s too much contrast! 
I love easily fixable problems.
Yeah sorry, I sometimes get carried away when slightly mad at things. I blame Reddit.
Honestly, it’s good enough to make it too much of an effort to switch to another gui library and the write-into textfields are really neat.
Thanks, that means a lot coming from a guru like you. 
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Do you mean you freeze the lighting and shadows into the images (bright and dark spots in the texture pixels mixed with the colors)? I used to do that in previous attempts to make a space opera game too. It can look okay, but never really good.
There are some things to consider:
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If you have only small ships in a large space then you can write your own light manager (I’ve been writing one for my pacific islands game - it has up to 4 lights per island + the torch of the player - a perfect situation because islands are small and far away from each other). I also plan to extend that idea by creating “temporary light zones” (I’ve got many ideas how to determine the closest 4 light sources for every object and combining or splitting these zones).
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If you have huge ships and space stations (you have). Then look for “deferred shading” or “light prepass shading” - some proprietary projects in this forum already showed that. I think the engine should have that too. The big engines have switched to that rendering type years ago. What it allows you to do - literally 1000 lights, even on one object like a huge ship or space station - with quite good performance.
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You could use a trick (e.g. make you own voxel-based lighting - which sounds like minecraft but can look really cool if done by an awesome graphics and shader coder).
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I think jME 3.1 has a light management too. I don’t know how good it is implemented though and how much you can customize it (or must customize it).
Happy Coding,
So I’m on a streak today, added warp effects.
http://i.imgur.com/2qS6jee.webm
Alternative link in case embedding fails miserably.
Seems like a fur shader doesn’t it?
Well it’s not, sadly, actually as shaderless as possible using only unshaded.j3md and the translucent bucket.
The way it works is by rotating two of these models at breakneck speed in different directions with slightly different colors. Also the faster you go, the more elongated the warp bubble gets.
IIRC @Kecon was working on something like that, perhaps he can help?
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Once again - you are the master of making very nice effects using a very simple idea. Looks great! 
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Needed to add the other side of the medal, to stay fair:
The deffered rendering - it has some disadvantages too and to overcome them can be non-trivial. Say good bye to transparency (and hello to lots of cumbersome workarounds). Good bye to simple multi sampling. And hello to high data bandwith. So it’s not only advantages.
One trick I use in my shader for lighting is passing in light sounce info at runtime. For example, if a missile is passing by your ship I pass the cords of the missile and the frag shader illuminates (makes brighter) the immediate area near the missile. Kind of like a reverse light pass I guess is the best way to describe it. So it’s like IBL but instead of the light image I pass in “light source” coordinates if that makes sense. Once the game comes out of beta in a few months I will release most of these cool effects back to the JME community.
Sounds like the same technique jme uses for singlepass lighting in 3.1+
@zissis the hud consoles bleeding trough other ships are super nice. Very very good idea that makes the displays automatically look like some piece of high tech, and brings them alive.
@Ogli: Deferred brings some other disadvantages with it. And if it is suitable for your game depends on a few factors. The only case where it really shines is having a waste amount of small lightsources. Translucency is actually already solved on higher GL versions.
Its a pain to implement, but it solves nearly all common problems. At the cost of high bandwith of course. But for a space game i probably would never opt for a deferred pipeline.
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Nice effects
We tried some deferred shading from various projects, but no project was mature enough for us and we think that we might try out the PBR branch later, but that is in the future.
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Something I find fun to share with you, this my first real trial for new 3d Gizmo introduced in the new SDK by @Dokthar I am using it now in placing some stuffs in my project scene
very interesting and fun to work with :).
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It’s May. In Europe: since 17 hours. :chimpanzee_closedlaugh:
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I am at North Africa same time zone of Europe, but today is Vacation so I missed to check my Calendar 
What’s the class name of the gizmo?