Well since I've been kinda frustrated with skinning boards, and since transparent board spaces have (hopefully only temporarily) disappeared, I decided to work on the Afghan board design. It wound up being a perfect choice, because the skin image I chose was so dark that you couldn't see how pixelated it looked. Not only that, but since the design was meant to simply have a repeated pattern as the "normal" field, there was no need for transparency. The board looks good like it is already! It actually looks WAY better, now that I can make the grid behind the spaces black. THIS is what that design was meant to look like!



I still wish I could toggle the board coordinate display off, or figure out how to make it look better, but for now it looks okay. I have had to turn down the lighting in an odd way in order to downplay the coordinate boxes (they get really bright in full lighting), so the tiles look a bit oddly shaded, but they will look better when I can have them in full light.

I decided to do something with this dsgn...

Since there only needed to be one pattern for the design, I decided to include only WHITE squares for all of the parts. The result is that we can all now change the colors of ANY space tile simply by changing the colors in config. Compare the above image, with this one...



In the second image, ALL of the spaces are actually white, with color changed in config. This is now an extremely flexible and versatile board design. :) In fact, all of the following were achieved simply by changing the board colors in config:









This was never my favorite theme, but with the limits of the current version of S3D, it kinda is! It just kinda works. :)

After a lot of small tweaks, this theme is ready. :)



I added some brightness to the textures, hopefully without losing too much detail. I also re-aligned the tiles and board, and updated the XML file to reflect the correct version of the theme.

I hope you enjoy!

Oh! Scotty, if:

- A) You want to release this design with the next exe release, and
- B) You add a way to toggle the coordinate boxes on and off...

...would you please toggle the board coordinates OFF by default before you release it?

THANK YOU!

You shouldn't add light simulation to your texture. That's what OpenGL does for free. Just create a model with bevel and adjust the light. That's all. The texture would get enlighted as well, of course.



And about tiling, I don't see any reason why you don't map the background texture multiple times in this design; if you have the original tile without the dark center.

Zitat von Scotty im Beitrag #3

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And about tiling, I don't see any reason why you don't map the background texture multiple times in this design; if you have the original tile without the dark center.

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Zitat von Scotty im Beitrag #3

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You shouldn't add light simulation to your texture. That's what OpenGL does for free. Just create a model with bevel and adjust the light. That's all. The texture would get enlighted as well, of course.

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If you simulate light by texture you will not have any dependency on position, angle, light settings etc. It makes no sense to have light in textures. That's what I tried to demonstrate.

@all: Apollonius found the reason why textures are ugly, independent from their size. It's because I rescale them internally. And that can be fixed.

Zitat von Scotty im Beitrag #6

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If you simulate light by texture you will not have any dependency on position, angle, light settings etc. It makes no sense to have light in textures. That's what I tried to demonstrate.

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Zitat von Scotty im Beitrag #6

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@all: Apollonius found the reason why textures are ugly, independent from their size. It's because I rescale them internally. And that can be fixed.

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Zitat von Apollonius im Beitrag #7

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....I did?

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I take way too much credit, of course.

But I will say this, I have been doing a LOT of research on the internet, in an attempt to discover a way to solve this issue. The Wings3D guy was extremely helpful and informative, and I read up on opengl, texturing, etc. I don't know why, but for some reason it's been very important for me to try and make this dream happen, for many years now.

What can I say, I am a freak.

Most of the thanks is yours though, Scotty.

Well...

Here it is! :)



It's not finished completely, I think there are many tweaks left until it's as good as it can be, but there it is for right now. Scotty, I know you don't like the tile texture, but none of the others I tried looked anywhere near as good to me. I'm not saying that I won't change it...I will, I just have to find something that works as well visually. Is this okay with you, for now?

I had to slightly resize all textures in order for them to be rendered correctly, but now they all look great.

Thanks, Scotty!