Testing Surfaces in EoC

[Shane]

A few people are now starting to model ships for EoC, so I thought I might post some results on just what the engine can handle. Some things we’ve (I’ve) been told are true, some are not.

The Testball:

I created a simple sphere 85 m in diameter, divided it into 13 surfaces, and then applied a different surface attribute to each section. Here’s the breakdown of surfaces:

SURFACE EFFECT

001 chrome
002 tinted glass
003 bump map
004 diffusion map
005 specularity map
006 LW luminosity
007 EoC luminosity channel
008 Secondary textures (fractical over standard)
009 Percentage of planar map dissolve
010 Repeating texture
011 Smoothing 50%
012 Smoothing 100%
Default Standard grey surface, no attributes.

And here’s a pic of what the ball looks like when rendered with Lightwave (which we know does the surfaces right).

Then the item was translated into EoC. To get clear lighting, I took it to the nearest star (Santa Romera II I believe). This is what it looked like:

Results:

001 Chrome Surfacing: FAILED. The engine cannot create a reflection map for the surface. It only appears glossy. The reflection map for this surface did not appear at all.

002 Tinted Glass (though this glass is nearly clear): PASSED. My settings made it a little too dark, but, like the previous tests with the transparent stations, the surface works.

003 Bump Map: FAILED. The engine will not display the bump map at all. (When I earlier believed bump maps did work in EoC I was in error. Damn engine fooled me again.)

004 Diffusion Map: FAILED. The engine only displays the texture as a standard texture, not a diffusion map. If it had shown it correctly, there would have been no green in the ‘scrubbie pad’ texture I used.

005 Specularity Map: FAILED. Same as bump maps. The engine displays the map as if it were a standard texture map. There is no variation in the specularity applied to the surface… the entire surface receives a global spec value.

006 Lightwave Luminosity (set to 100%). FAILED. The surface does not maintain any luminosity attributes. (I really didn’t think it would… the SDK says it won’t, but I needed another test to fill out the testball and so decided to try it out.)

007 Glow Channel. PASSED. Standard Flux Glow Channel… Like 006, this was placed in just to fill out the testball segements.

008 Secondary Texture Layer. FAILED. Used standard texture map for a ship’s hull, and then overlaid a secondary texture map (fractal noise) at 50% opacity. Neither texture appeared in game.

009 Map Opacity. FAILED. Used standard texture map for a ship’s hull and set opacity to 50%. Opacity value was ignored by Flux, which indicates opacity values do not work on projected textures (like UV maps), but only on procedural textures.

010 Repeating Texture. FAILED. Repeating textures will not repeat. Only one instance of the texture was created by Flux.

011 Smoothing 50%. PASSED. Texture did smooth, but did not carry across to adjoining polys without smoothing like in the LW render. You can see it only smoothed about half the surface. Though it did join nicely with the next texture.

012 Smoothing 100%. PASSED. Though it is difficult to say if there is any variation between texture 011 and 012. In all the screenshots the surfaces look identical.

Default Surface: (The circle at the poles of the testball.). PASSED (of course).

So, basically, it seems we’re stuck with the basic texture map, procedurals which are transparent, and avatar channels.

A myth: I was informed that textures over 512×512 would not display in the game. This is incorrect. The top and bottom texture maps for the frigate are both 1024×1024, and work just fine.

Hope some of this helps somebody. More results as I discover them (over time). 😀

“Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede– without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation… of the massacre of Mankind.”
–H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds

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