Building a space game.

Hi. I'm attempting to build an RTS space game using filter forge as the main texture source. I've brought the professional edition and it appears that I can legally use the filters in a commercial game.

There are just so many textures/filters to use. Deciding what to use is difficult sometimes because of the large numbers of variations and most of them look just a good as the other.

Also the ability to edit any filter makes it possible to achieve any design. This will be my first game but I'm attempting to make it a very good one. I'm in the beginning stages.



It will be an RTS space game with features like no other (if everything works out).

I will list users in the credits from the filters I use. The background in the pic was created using filter Nebula by geekatplay.


Then made the initial background by accident in spacescape 0.3. After loading in the generated nebula into spacescape (res 1024x1024) I increased the size until everything overlaped allot (I was bored and frustrated when I did this). Your looking at about 500 copies of the nebula blended together. Colors were changed around from within spacescape, added some stars/flares and now I have something with allot of detail.


Later on down the line I'll try mixing different nebula's but for now this background may be used to create the first stage in the game. I think I did a good job on it but that's my opinion. The asteroids, planets, etc will be added in later (after the daunting task of creating them).

I'll continue to post screen-shots as I make progress and opinions of my work both good and bad are welcome. Thanks for taking a look.

I have created a new filter specializing in creating maps for 3D planet model design but it can also be used for other things as it is very versatile and tillable.

Planet Geographer














It was designed with rendering speeds in mind (it seems to render fast). Building this filter took a few days of slowly connecting nodes, waiting, connecting more nodes, more waiting and repeating this process until I got something that looked good. I plan to use this filter for most of my planet designs.

Planet Geographer has been submitted to the filter forge library.
Please enjoy my contribution.

Figured out the alpha transparency thing. To make the texture have a transparent background just adjust the alpha channel in the fill color setting under new image.
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I knew I had done it before when I first bought the program a few months ago but I just could not remember how to do it. I'm still kind of new in the whole graphics thing (diffuse, specular, normal map, etc) still learning.

It's been my dream for years to have a game out there. Sometimes I question my skills and whether I will succeed or not but I'll continue building until its finished because thats the only way it'll get done. I've practiced game scripting for about a year now so my skills in scripting is above average. Soon I'll have to take the time and go through all the tutorials for this program but for now I can succeed in most of the basics of filter creation.

I believe this program is the best for creating graphics without having to know much math and I'm terrible at math. Just connect nodes to different effects and wallah...sometimes weired unexplained but cool looking things are produced which can be applied to other things that looks, weired, crazy, or normal.

Hi Kenneth:

Nice stuff: i like the planetary noise thing in particular.

You might check out the stuff over at my junkyard.
CCX Junkyard I've done a space game that was published back in 2010 & 11 using FF as the primary source for textures. I've got a lot of filters etc posted in there. Feel free to PM me if you have questions, etc.

http://www.filterforge.com/forum/read...#nav_start

This is looking cool
One suggestion I have about the planets, try varying the gradient on the polar ice caps. Add some distortion and\or noise to the gradient, so it won't be a straight line.

In that case...



The oceans on this planet are waaaaaay to reflective. Unless it's a planet with seas of mercury. Take a look at earth videos fr om nasa, wh ere you can see the reflection is very diffused.
Here's a sample:


A general advise is to always do a bit of research on how things should look or behave in real life, that will help you achieve the right effect.

Still working on planets for multi-player space warfare.

UI design is one of the most important things to do right. It can really make or break a game.

I was making a mistake with my recent work. I was developing graphics on a monitor that was not displaying properly. When I looked at my work from a different computer I realized that allot of the good looks were gone, everything in the recent pictures is washed out so I had to redo everything . I'm just glad I caught it before I went any deeper into the game development even though it took a few days to redo it all. This is the way I saw the game on the monitor I was developing on.






The monitor I was using was set on a 20,000,000 :1 contrast ratio but Photo-Shop warned me that something was wrong with it even though it had a great picture. Ignoring the warning was the mistake.

A lesson learned, just because something looks good on one monitor does not mean it will look good on others. I now fully understand why most games have gamma correction and so will this one.

Nice
I have to say your new pictures look very dark on my screens now. Is that the intended look? Maybe it´s just me tho.

Yup, a bit more brightness would help! I think these are coming out really nice. Very excited to see them in motion.

Only the ships hull colors are changeable.

The real bitmap color of the ship's hull is gray scale.


Color is then added from within the game. The hull goes from gray to any player chosen color.

Quote
any player chosen color

Can I has me a rainbow ship?

Project is still ongoing. I've reached some major programming stages in the game. Lines of code is already in the thousands. I'm slowly getting rid of any bugs as I go and also programming in a few failsafe algorithms that will prevent most bugs. Because of my OCD I sometimes find myself triple checking most of my programming to make sure every piece of code exchanges data flawlessly.

I may have a beta version available sometime around March 2013.

More screen-shots soon.