More Attempts at Texturing
01/05/2007 (3:53 am) by Nate "Nateholio" Watson
ixeelectronics.com/K96/Screens010407.html
I have several more pics but for some reason yahoo keeps messing them up when I upload them.
Anyway, as you can see in the first pic the platform on the top if the storage tank isnt finished. I havent figured out how to best rotate the image for it so that everything lines up properly. MS Paint only lets you rotate by 90 degrees, the GameCreator program I have lets you rotate by any amount but it looks like junk afterwards, and Photoshop must be related to Windows somehow because it insists on doing stuff I didnt ask it to - "softening" the edges when something is rotated even though I dont want it to. I cant have edge softening because I dont waste time with making alpha channels in Photoshop with that crappy plugin that I cant even remember the name of. I just use a background color (usually green=255) then tell the engine to treat that color as transparent. I think that I will have to end up finishing the platform grating by hand which will take an hour Im sure.
Im also finding that my creativity in making maps is really bad. I have several buildings I modelled but I have no idea where to place them, and even worse, where to place all the "prop" buildings later when its time to lay out the city. It might be one of those things where Ill have to go look at some of the sites I frequent to find some city layout algorithms and implement them in my engine.
This all has got me in a disappointed mood because I hoped to have more things done this week, but oh well.
Edit: I started some experimenting because I needed to be able to name arrays on the fly with names generated by the program. So I tried it and to my suprise and relief it works. I had always thought BASIC would kick back and error if you tried to name an array using a string variable as the name, but apparently it doesnt. Im pretty sure this will lead to another engine rewrite but I can deal with that.
About the author
Edumication: Most importantly EXPERIENCE, then a good helping of engineering books, some college, and finally high school. Chipset design: I have designed a complete 32 bit chipset which uses a neat little private bus and instructions among other things to boost system speed without boosting clock speed or bus width. Of course since I don't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this chipset, its just a simulation on my computer. Other Hardware Junk: I built 2 robots in HS, when I had extra time to do so. One was based on the 8080 CPU, and the second on the Z80 (all hail the mighty Z80). The second bot roamed around the house occasionally getting in the way of hall traffic. It eventually learned the layout of the house, bad times to be roaming around, the front and back yards, and a good portion of the street we lived on. Hardware cartridges including software that allowed a user to connect various TI calculators to the internet via dial-up. Never caught on for several reasons, mainly no real need to do such a thing, and the slow speed of the calculators made it silly. Designed and built a HF data link between my home and truck that allowed internet access anywhere in the country, at a slow data rate though. Designed various fully custom Z80 based control systems for customers, using Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGAs as bus controllers that allowed 3 CPUs to share rescources, and also allowed each CPU to function in 'protected mode'. Systems had triple redundancy and functioned in a form of protected mode, allowing a CPU to multitask via interrupts and use peripherals efficiently via multi-threading. Systems were tested through all faults and operated flawlessly with 2 of 3 CPUs literally fried. Game Design: I spend a great deal of my time while on Alert designing vehicles, buildings, spacecraft, tactics, uniforms, etc. for a game I am leading the development of. Other experience: 4-year internship with Harris-Dracon corp. Network Telecom, Camarillo, CA. Worked with engineers to develop a computer program that processed equipment defects and broken parts to allow the engineering team to track trends and quickly fix problems or design better replacement parts. Also worked with engineering team on the design and testing of wireless internet access for PDAs. I was told when I left the company that the team could use my talents and knowlege about electronics, but that I would need a college degree to work for the company. I decided not so much but thanks anyway. TGE Commercial License Holder view profile »
To remove antialiasing when rotating layers or objects in PhotoShop try this:
1. Edit > Preferences > General (or hit CTRL-K)
2. Select the drop down box next to Image Interpolation and change it to Nearest Neighbor.
That will give you a very blocky edge without the antialiasing process.
One trick / piece of software I love to use for base textures is Macromedia (Adobe) Fireworks. Everything Stays live vector and the native file save format is PNG. The PNG carries the alpha channel so you don't have to fuss with a plug-in. The thing I find most attractive about Fireworks is the live vector objects and the ease of use. I also LOVE the fact that my texture is still editable AND useable. I can grab it from my game directory, edit it, save it back to the game directory and it just works (the PNG still contains all the editable source layers).
...forgot to mention - plus, Fireworks won't antialias your stuff if you don't want it to (you can antialias some things and not others, toggle back and forth, etc..)
Torque Owner Mark Berry
Looks like you are off to a cracking start.
I always hit a wall, when I cant instantly be good at something, and breaking through takes a bit of patience, which I am only slowly aquiring with age.