Microbe Models/Images/Textures

Ok, so that got some mixed reactions.  I personally don't like the idea of organelle placement becoming a game of tetris - what you do with you cell should be limited by available mutations more than physical constraints - so i see no reason for an organelle not to snake through a cell.  It may or may not be realistic, but it would look rather interesting.

I can see some of the implementation issues, but they seem fairly easy to solve to me.  In terms of the algorithm, a vacuole or golgi would be formed exactly the same way as the overall cell, by stretching a membrane around the adjacent hexes.  The ER would need some sort of folded texture over that though.  Placement could be as simple as having the organelle by 1 hex big, and automatically connecting adjacent hexes.  Disconnected organelles would simply be treated seperately.  For the purpose of processes/compounds etc. we can also simply treat a 3 hex vacuole as three seperate 1 hex vacuoles.

All that said, I see that this would add some work to the implementation, for something which is really just an aesthetic improvement, and I can certainly understand that would be far from a priority right now, and may not be worth doing at all for the first few builds.  I'd suggest we shelve it for now, and come back to it once we have a first release done, and have some free time to tweak this sort of stuff.

Ok, This is the (hopfefuully) final silhouettes mockup. I'll begin on the actual sprites once you approve of this. The red crosses are rotation anchors- I assumed that it would be easiest to rotate them around the center of one hex than at the corners/ on edges I'll attempt to make the sprites quite large, then we can scale them down to whatever we need.

They all look good, and it is nice to get a visual representation of the different organelles to be found in game. Will Thermoplasts and other organelles be included in a later release?

NickTheNick wrote:

They all look good, and it is nice to get a visual representation of the different organelles to be found in game. Will Thermoplasts and other organelles be included in a later release?

Yes, different organelles will be added as we figure out how we want to run them ingame. the nice thing about the toxin agent organelle is now we can handle a lot of potential organelles as one.

New GUI design. Much easier to implement and, I think, much prettier than my last.

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

I've squared up all of the buttons, taken out the size ring, added a symmetry options button (bottom center) and rearranged a few things.
Tell me what's good and what's wrong.

~sciocont wrote:

New GUI design. Much easier to implement and, I think, much prettier than my last.

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

I've squared up all of the buttons, taken out the size ring, added a symmetry options button (bottom center) and rearranged a few things.
Tell me what's good and what's wrong.

i liked it. its simpler than the other, and i think its better...:)

Yes, I think it looks amazing now. I especially like the icons for the stats. Really, the last point I would have to offer, and it is quite trivial, is to switch the MP bar with the Finish and Revert buttons, with the Finish button being on the opposite end of the red X. Its just that usually in GUIs the accept/start/complete button is opposite the big x/delete/end button.

I agree, it looks great!

NickTheNick wrote:

Yes, I think it looks amazing now. I especially like the icons for the stats. Really, the last point I would have to offer, and it is quite trivial, is to switch the MP bar with the Finish and Revert buttons, with the Finish button being on the opposite end of the red X. Its just that usually in GUIs the accept/start/complete button is opposite the big x/delete/end button.

I can do that quite easily.

Ok, I want the artists out there to look again at the models and textures we have and see what can be improved. A microbe stage animation is in the works, and a release should be coming within a year. We need a uniform visual style. As Myself, Nimbal, and Nick have said, this should be a style of realism, and it should look to some extent as if it were being viewed through a microscope. Here's a quote from another page with texture details:

sciocont wrote:

Nimbal wrote:

I'm not sure if that's what scio means, but I'd like to see a style that imitates looking through a microscope, but with a bit more color where appropriate. There are some YouTube videos that could serve as a reference, for example this one, this one or this one.

I think the defining qualities of this style are:

• Translucency of the microbes
  
• Clearly visible edges that hint at the three-dimensional, round form of the cells
  
• Stuff floating around in the background, out of focus
  
• Jerky camera movement as if moving around a slide on the microscope's tray
  

Those aren't a question of highly detailed models or textures alone, after all, how much surface structure do you really see in those videos I linked above? Achieving this style will probably require some hand-crafted shaders.

This is all good. I'd like to see microscope-like images, though with a bit less transparency and more color than in the youtube videos, since we won't always have a light background to see them against.
In terms of textures, I'd like to see

• Pseudo-randomness: Textures should look like they have a definite order or set of rules, but also should look organic. For this, I recommend checking out Perlin Noise, Voronoi textures (which were the inspiration for the "shatter" graphic art style), and real animal and plant textures for inspiration.
  
  
• Uniform sharpness: Texture should either contain bold, sharp edges, medium-sharpness edges, or soft edges. Don't mix edge types, and always try the sharp edges first, then blur them to the desired degree. If you look in a microscope, you'll see many different levels of focus, but our textures each apply to a single object, which will be either entirely in or entirely out of focus.
  
• Light, desaturated colors: Microbes usually have colors like this because they are small and mostly transparent, so there isn't much pigment in them to build up and create dark colors. When choosing colors for textures, keep this in mind.
  

Look at this color wheel:

The colors I think of are colors like  ████CCFF99C, ████FF9933, ████CC3333, ████6699CC, ████99CC99, ████99FF66, ████FF6633. I want to avoid purples, pinks, and yellows, since these are colors one generally doesn't see in the microbe world. Focus on blues, greens, and  pale oranges.

As for models, make cells look natural- give them some taper, some flash, some intrigue. Make any other models look very close to what they look like in real life.

Keep in mind that your textures may need to be recolored to support many different color schemes, so it's best to make them in grayscale and test them out with a few of the aforementioned colors.

Here is my Wriggler, if you like it. :3

Well, I'm not sure if this is correct to do or not, but I tried at creating a sprite/texture for the bacteria film. I wasn't quite sure what kind of bacteria you were thinking of, so I tried to make something that wouldn't look too distracting.

bacteria film:

Also sorry I'm not sure what "download link" would be- perhaps I should create a dropbox account or something? D:

Sorry if I misunderstood and if I need to make an application or something. Didn't see any guidelines on the faq, I think...

For a download link, you just upload it to a file sharing/hosting website, like Rapidshare, Dropbox, or Mediafire, and then paste the download link here.

(dropbox)/s/2xdro9v0j0lwjwz/bacteria%20film.png

I hope that works out. D: Sorry for spamming.
Can't post external links since I'm a new member, it seems.