Sky Texturing

[tscraftsman]

I know this is just eye candy factor and there are bigger programing fish to fry.

Just curious if there is a way to modify the sky texture to change the cloud patterns and shapes. I've noticed the sky in the early screenshots that are posted on the OR website showing a more defined cloud shape.

I'd surmise that the sky texturing would be abit more involved since the user could add or lessen the cloud and fog cover at a push of a key. Is the texture(s) hard wired into the program or modifiable much like the environment folders in each route folder?

If someone could point out were to start looking it would be much appreciated.

Thanks in-advance.

[tscraftsman]

With some modifying I was able to figure it out and here is a preliminary result. I took the clouds ace file texture from the SLI Green River Route and saved it as a Clouds01.tga file but not after I made a backup copy I then pasted this texture in the Content folder of my Openrails folder and seemed to work quite well. Just a fresher look to the sky.

[OTTODAD]

Here are more optons of slowly moving clouds:




.

[tscraftsman]

Looks good Otto.

I noticed my clouds start out moving fast like a decent clip but eventually slow down after a couple minutes. Definitely windy up there!

Now we could get more into what flight simulator has and have more active weather but for now i'm quite content on being able to change the cloud cover to something less boring than the stock cloud rendering.

Now if we could adjust the sunrise/sunset times to something more seasonal instead of having the sun rise at approx 0300 now adays somewhere around 0700 depending how far north you are.

[OTTODAD]

A lot of work to be done yet with ORTS, like fixing these weird spots in the water !

[tscraftsman]

I know what ya mean Otto.

I did some experimenting by actually removing a couple texture layers to get down to a base layer for a palatable water surface. Not perfect but atleast none of the white chunky things. I'll continue to experiment.

[mnjrr]

Hi Matt and Otto,

Good, creative work!

[OTTODAD]

I did some experimenting by actually removing a couple texture layers to get down to a base layer for a palatable water surface. Not perfect but at least none of the white chunky things. I'll continue to experiment.

Looking forward to the results of your experiments, making the water surface color look like the one in MSTS, provided by KOSMOS !

[bprice]

With some modifying I was able to figure it out and here is a preliminary result. I took the clouds ace file texture from the SLI Green River Route and saved it as a Clouds01.tga file but not after I made a backup copy I then pasted this texture in the Content folder of my Openrails folder and seemed to work quite well. Just a fresher look to the sky.

Can you provide a step-by-step of this process? This looks interesting.

Basil

[rdamurphy]

I know what ya mean Otto.

I did some experimenting by actually removing a couple texture layers to get down to a base layer for a palatable water surface. Not perfect but atleast none of the white chunky things. I'll continue to experiment.

Impressive.

Could you perhaps expand on this?

Robert

[tscraftsman]

Will do, I'll take some notes of my findings and abit of a pictorial.

[tscraftsman]

A shot of the topwater texture used in the screenshots shown below. I have been pulling my hairout trying to figure out how to rescale or tweak the tiling factor for the water texture in OR in order to eliminate the magnified stretching of the texture,that is why in Ottos screenshots the white bubbles in the Kosmo textures for MSTS appear as massive white smears.



I'm not a programmer but I've looked at the numbers in the 3dviewer folder and in the water and environment files and played around with some numbers but couldn't see any difference. Wish I understood what factor controls how the water texture is tiled and sized in OR. Is it for performance reasons that the texture is stretched on a smaller tile factor? Kinda hit a brick wall until a bone this thrown...

I'm content at the moment with a somewhat freshwater lake appearance with not having white spots. Atleast the water surface doesn't flicker

[twpol]

I'm not a programmer but I've looked at the numbers in the 3dviewer folder and in the water and environment files and played around with some numbers but couldn't see any difference. Wish I understood what factor controls how the water texture is tiled and sized in OR. Is it for performance reasons that the texture is stretched on a smaller tile factor? Kinda hit a brick wall until a bone this thrown...

I'm content at the moment with a somewhat freshwater lake appearance with not having white spots. At least the water surface doesn't flicker

Thanks for all the work you've put in to this. I must say, I don't know what controls the stretching of the water texture but if it does not match MSTS (it sounds like this is the case), please could you report a bug over on http://launchpad.net/or with a couple of pictures from the same spot in OR and MSTS and we can work on fixing that.

As for the built-in cloud images that I see you've replaced, we'd love better images for clouds, stars, etc., but obviously they must be copyright and licensable to Open Rails.

Thanks again.

[mnjrr]

Hello,

Information about the exciting work that the OR team has been doing on the water and environmental effects in OR is at the following links:

http://www.elvastower.com/forums/ind..._1#entry140376

http://www.elvastower.com/forums/ind..._1#entry121802

http://www.elvastower.com/forums/ind..._1#entry138739