New Horizons

@EmpirePhoenix said:
Your right, fixed, thanks


I'm wondering if there is a reason you don't use imgur.com for stuff like this. Last night I had to wait nearly five minutes for the images to download... reminded me of the old days downloading a gif from a BBS watching the super model come in one scan line at a time. :)

Just curious if there is a reason (because I use imgur.com all the time and would like to know of downsides) or if it's just inertia.

Well it’s my own root server ^^ , but it shouldn’t have slowdowns like that. Did you know the exact time it occured (preferably in gmt+0)?

It’s the same for me…always. I just looked the images are 2.7MB each and you have 5 of them on that page (assuming the ones at the top are the same)…no wonder it’s slow.



Recode them to JPG at a lower resolution and they will get much faster and look the same.

@EmpirePhoenix said:
Well it's my own root server ^^ , but it shouldn't have slowdowns like that. Did you know the exact time it occured (preferably in gmt+0)?


It's faster now... but still takes about a 30 seconds to a minute to load them.

...if they were on imgur I think they would come through faster... let's see.
http://i.imgur.com/hhIUr.jpg

It converted it to jpg though... so maybe it lost some quality. I think that might depend on the size since I've uploaded pngs and it kept them that way before.

Your jpg is 126kb…so 5% of the file size :slight_smile:

@zarch said:
Your jpg is 126kb....so 5% of the file size :)


Yeah, still imgur has a pretty fat pipe... and it converted it automatically. :) I wonder what cut-off it decides to convert to jpg because I'm 90% sure I have pngs hosted there that stay png.

Quality is massivly lost tho, just look at the clearnes of the position debug text. And I don’t like foul compromises :stuck_out_tongue: (if so i had used a lower resolution in the first place)

for some reason imgur also needs quite a bit longer for the smaller picture than my server, is it hosted in usa?



I need around 2 seconds for all three to load (dsl 32m). And the server should have a quite good connection as it uses DE-CIX.for connection, there is rarly a better backbone connection point possible.

@EmpirePhoenix said:
Quality is massivly lost tho, just look at the clearnes of the position debug text. And I don't like foul compromises :P (if so i had used a lower resolution in the first place)


Yeah, I just wanted to try it to see what it would do.

jpeg even without dropping the resolution will still drop the file size a lot over png.

but also the quality as the pictures above demonstrate.

@EmpirePhoenix said:
but also the quality as the pictures above demonstrate.


Yeah, resolution was the same but the quality was butchered pretty badly.

Now we know at least one reason not to use imgur for super large non-jpg files. I just posted another png for one of my own status updates and it stayed in PNG form. So it must have to do with the original file size.
http://i.imgur.com/j2H9A.png

Wow, clicking the image links and watching the large ones was quite different. The specular highlights on those round metallic things are really good looking.



I have to ask, do you plan/have a story (or backstory) for this? Like is there an “evil empire” fighting people or something, or will it be more of an explorer sandbox thing where people make the stories themselves. Just curious. Gonna read more in the thread and find out some more.



EDIT: Nice work on those cables too.

Actually there is around 20 pages of background and pregame story already written, however all of it is in german currently^^



It will contain both parts btw.



Since you asked here is a partial german inital system layout, showing a bit the political structure at the beginning of the ingame setting.



https://aurora42.de/jamwiki-1.2/uploads/en/2012/4/portalmap-24104253.png

5 Likes

you and @madjack should both work together on something, you both like space for some reason :slight_smile:

1 Like

story update in first post, and a picture here :slight_smile:



http://i.imgur.com/WKA8R.jpg

(ignore the statistics)

Well what have I done the past few weeks? Well i created a own terrain system based on this:

The downside is, that I have a infinite artifacts on the lowest terrain height in form of a plane, however this does not matter for me, since it is usually below water, or out of sight.

A look from the side of the Terrain

</img>
HighQuality: https://wiki.visiongamestudios.de/wiki/uploads/en/2012/11/ppmt-30152420.png

This is the whole terrain, 16km x 16km with a visible range of around 20km

</img>
HighQuality: https://wiki.visiongamestudios.de/wiki/uploads/en/2012/11/49_PM-27164322.png

Ground Quality, closeup
https://wiki.visiongamestudios.de/wiki/uploads/en/2012/11/javaw_2012-11-10_01-34-30-13-10014005.png

4 Likes

Kewl, looks like you can make curved terrain?

If it is possible to put the heightdata into a 16bit-grayscale bytebuffer as unsigned shorts, it is possible to display it and have collision calcualtions as well :slight_smile:

@EmpirePhoenix said:
If it is possible to put the heightdata into a 16bit-grayscale bytebuffer as unsigned shorts, it is possible to display it and have collision calcualtions as well :)

Yeah, for one whole planet that probably makes most sense, just "unfolding" the space using mercator projection and translating the objects accordingly.

Actually I don’t plan on having whole planets, because i mostly think its extremely booring.

Eg lets say we use a world the size of Germany, with far less then like 8 million people it is a bit lonely, after all a game is about playing together (or against each other). (Also there will be more than one planet, and typical planets a little big larger than Germany) So for game-play and fun reasons the use-able parts (eg those where are landing pads or whatever) of worlds will only be a few km^2.



With that 16km terrain you still need several hours without vehicles to explore it. , even with vehicles you still need 15-30 minutes to cross.