I know I made this stupid suggestion before (usually after smashing into a roid) that the ships need headlights >.> Might be a simple solution since there would be no beams of light, just illuminated spots where it would hit.

Headlights are technically problematic. I could go into a rambling discussion of vertex versus lightmap lighting and how openGL can only do a few lightsources at once and blah blah. But anyway, it's not impossible, just non-trivial with how we go about doing lighting. Personally, I'm more in favor of an advanced radar system, that showed you wireframes of asteroids or something. That would be neat looking.

oooo wireframe mode....

bring back wireframe

bring back wireframe

bring bac.. uhh yea thats a good idea.

I like that idea...

Or that. Something so you can see very dark roids >.>

OK I'm logging in tonight SPECIFICALLY to see rotating planets. They'd BETTER be there.

After spending 2 semesters modding ut2004, I've come to appreciate the projector lighting system it has. Are projectors the same as dynamic lights with respect to Vendetta's OpenGL, or would such a system be more feasible to implement?

And yes, vertex lighting is evil. All static meshes in ut2004 are vertex lit and it looks horrible with muzzle flashes.

UT, like most first-person shooters, uses a lightmap system for illumination. Radiosity is calculated for a scene, and then applied as a lightmap. Projection lighting basically a self-illuminated texture that that's applied in the same manner.

We don't use lightmapping, except for certain self-illuminated objects (like spaceships and windows on stations and stuff). Plus, that kind of lighting has limitations.. they all have limitations. For the moment, though, we use normal vertex lighting along with a lot of fancy specularity and normal-mapping effects to enhance surfaces. The number of lightsources that can illuminate a surface on this model has some limitations, as does the total number of lightsources per scene.

We've talked about revamping our lighting model a couple of times, but it hasn't been a priority as of yet.. compared to the many fundamental gameplay problems.

Okay. Thanks for the detailed reply Incarnate! I agree, compared to the current gameplay issues, Vendetta's graphics are definitely good enough to not be a priority.

Night time lights would be neat though, Civ4's main menu looks cool because of them.

Okay the planets definitely DO rotate. Hunh.
I'm torn between thinking "OK, that's realistic and a cool feature" and "What a waste of graphics processor cycles."

I really only discovered TODAY (After playing VO for like a year and a quarter) that the planets actually DO rotate.

what i was really saying is that some sectors that are not in a close vicinity with the planets but more off in the distance have a small view of planets off in the distance. The distant view of the planets sometimes are very nice but i have seem a number of them that are very pixelated (or however it is spelled)and some of them even in the distance do not look round anymore and you can count how many pixels there are in the image. I'll have to capture a picture or two if what im talking about :)

Thanks for the replies Inc ^^.

Graphics can wait, afterall runsescape has more subscribers than VO and it has the graphics of an ***....

SO focus on gameplay and stuff to do, storyline things that is.

Thanks for the insight INC, and maybe well see nighttime effects and other stuff in game after Version 2.0

It would be cool if planets where a lot bigger too, so you would feel more in orbit.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/12978?page=1

I agree, adding more things to do is a higher priority than making things look pretty. But when the time comes that you're able to get back around to making things look pretty, I'd say some adjustments to the background would be more important than the planets. Something that's always annoyed me a bit is how the background gets all blurry when you zoom in.

But yeah, this is pretty low priority atm IMO.

That's just because you don't have zoom bound Lebermac.
And how many clock cycles do you think it uses?
I don't see it even worth an option to turn off.

And besides, it only rotates at high graphic settings (as Inc said), so it presupposes that you have a machine that has more than enough horsepower to show a planet rotating extremely slowly in the background

On the subject of Head-Lights I would just like to say the idea of lights on a ship would need to shine for miles bightly to be of any use, or else you would be flying at high speed and suddently find your self talking to a rock.
I would think that our ships would be installed with a long line of devices to sensory objects so that we could hit a switch and see in IR or a EMF Reader or something to bring up the wirefames of objects on the HUD via some magic of technology.

Oooh yes! Good idea Godfrey!

Like in Predator2 - when the predator creature is being hunted in the warehouse by the black-ops military group and switches settings between visible light, ultraviolet, infrared, etc etc. I'd like that a lot.

Switch from wireframe to gravimetric sensors to visible light ro infrared to gamma-ray detectors to whatever. With possible overlays of several of those. And it shows up right on-screen. Awesome. No need for a forward radar bubble because the items show up DIRECTLY on your viewscreen/HUD/front window.

I'm not sure what Chikira means by "a lot of people" but I for one don't think the planets look bad or rushed at all. On extremely high background settings they look pretty damn gorgeous.

Adding "night-lights" back in would be awesome.

Ok, so first I want to start by stating that I think the new lighting system in 1.6 is awesome. Awesomeawesomeawesomeawesome. The new caps look wicked with their onboard lighting when in a dark sector.

But I made a trip to Sol II to check out the new city lights, and while I definately think it looks good, I don't think it's enough! For reference:

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/49261main_usa_nightm.jpe
http://www.transsib.ru/Photo/Other/space03-night.jpg

Now perhaps Sol II only has 1 or 2 billion people on it. But I always imagined it would have upwards of 10 billion, and therefore be super saturated with cities. The lighting on it right now looks like its only got a couple settlements.

Anyway, my bump. Good work though guys :)