Microbe Models/Images/Textures

~sciocont wrote:

-Symmetry options+ Symmetry GUI elements (I'm not quite sure how we could handle double axis (four-fold) symmetry unless you mean Hexagonal (six-fold) symmetry but with one axis subtracted, making it a sort of pseudo hexagonal symmetry.

It would be sort of like this:



The first one has no symmetry, the next has two-fold symmetry, the third four-fold and the last one six-fold. I just added the colours to the hexagons to make them more distinguishable.

Thanks, that's what I was looking for.
Ok, I have some compounds/icons to show.

Spoiler:

These are all 100x100 .png images and will necessarily appear much smaller ingame.

I was able to find some good backgrounds for the microbe stage that are public domain.

Spoiler:

~sciocont wrote:

Thanks, that's what I was looking for.
Ok, I have some compounds/icons to show.

Spoiler:

These are all 100x100 .png images and will necessarily appear much smaller ingame.

Wow, those all look of professional quality! I think the "fat" one looks a bit odd, however. What decided the shapes for each variable?

@EnergyKnife

All of those need to be coloured and would tile poorly. Also, they are very noisy for backgrounds. Preferably there should be few objects in the background to take attention away from the foreground and midground.

With the help of a little Photoshop, these could possibly be little objects you could end up bumping into, I think;

Spoiler:

I don't know, just thinking with my fingers here...

NickTheNick wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Thanks, that's what I was looking for.
Ok, I have some compounds/icons to show.

Spoiler:

These are all 100x100 .png images and will necessarily appear much smaller ingame.

Wow, those all look of professional quality! I think the "fat" one looks a bit odd, however. What decided the shapes for each variable?

@EnergyKnife

All of those need to be coloured and would tile poorly. Also, they are very noisy for backgrounds. Preferably there should be few objects in the background to take attention away from the foreground and midground.

I think I will redesign the "fat" one into something more globular. the shapes were largely determined by the actual chemical shape/ Also, I have to redesign the Agents so that they reflect what organelle they target, but that will have to wait until someone (probably me) makes all of the organelle sprites.

Those look really nice, but I don't know how they would be made with the cell editor. At the moment the cells made are two-dimensional.

~sciocont wrote:

Ok, let's talk GUI for a moment. On the Building Microbe Stage thread, Oliveriver posted a fantastic demo of a GUI concept for the cell editor. I loved it, but it did include some unnecessary buttons and whatnot, so I decided to take a crack at adapting it. The Editor GUI is going to be fairly important in terms of setting the visual style of the game, so I think we should settle on it fairly soon. I want input from artists and programmers here, because we need to have a GUI that is not only good-looking, but possible to implement- I know there have been problems in the past implementing a shatter-style button setup, so I want everything to be optimized here before we have problems putting it in the game.

Here's my crack at it.

Spoiler:

That version is using only tiles to represent the microbe and its organelles. The next one uses tiles and sprites.

Spoiler:

Finally, the finished product.

Spoiler:

The GUI functions would be exactly like those of Oliveriver's prototype- when tabs are selected, they expand to show the parts or functions that that editing mode contains.
Go ahead, start discussing the GUI. I want a final editor GUI design and sprites+hex block arrangements for organelles ready by the end of the month.

That looks completely boss, ~sciocont.

Okay, that's all I wanted to say. Back to lurking for me. Good luck, gentlemen!

Scio, might I ask, what program(s) did you use to make that concept art?

NickTheNick wrote:

Scio, might I ask, what program(s) did you use to make that concept art?

Just GIMP. 2.8 is a huge improvement over 2.7

That is indeed a great GUI but do you guys really wanna leave the grid visible? Doesn't it look kinda awkward like you are looking at a motherboard or something. I was thinking about almost or completely invisible grid and instead of highlighting a cell of the grid playing a gif-like image on a cell (don't know if that is like sprites the art team is talking about or not) representing the cytoskeleton in a way.
Made a quick sketch with paint
[img][/img]

And i wont lie i've copied the idea from this pretty electron microscope pictures in google
http://www.bionalogy.com/images/cytoskeleton2.jpg

I prefer having a semi-transparent hex grid to be able to tell where all the tiles are without having to estimate, and plus it looks nice with the rest of the interface. Bear in mind that the hex grid is solely for the editor.

I would also be fine with having an option in the editor to toggle the grid on and off.

NickTheNick, what about a transparent grid, that show up when you pass the mouse over??? like in sim city 4, where the grid is completely visible where the mouse is, and get more transparent till the borders, where it gets totally invisible...

Or maybe you can select 3 options like, show, hide and semi, or something like this...

I don't know I would have to see what it looks like, but it sounds interesting.

NickTheNick wrote:

I don't know I would have to see what it looks like, but it sounds interesting.

something like this...
go to 1:06...

Yes, I know, I have played a lot of Sim city before. What I meant was that I would have to see what it would look like in Thrive to be able to make a better decision.

NickTheNick wrote:

I prefer having a semi-transparent hex grid to be able to tell where all the tiles are without having to estimate, and plus it looks nice with the rest of the interface. Bear in mind that the hex grid is solely for the editor.

I would also be fine with having an option in the editor to toggle the grid on and off.

QFT

P3DR0PS wrote:

NickTheNick, what about a transparent grid, that show up when you pass the mouse over??? like in sim city 4, where the grid is completely visible where the mouse is, and get more transparent till the borders, where it gets totally invisible...

Or maybe you can select 3 options like, show, hide and semi, or something like this...

I do like this idea, although symmetry options may make it basically irrelevant. For instance, if you have 6-fold symmetry turned on and are placing cell area/an organelle, you're going to have all the central hexagons highlighted anyway, and moving further away will only result in some of the central hexes fading away. Without testing we can't say which is truly better, although I'd prefer a permanent hex grid for shape and organelle editing (other editing modes may not need it).

Oliveriver wrote:

I do like this idea, although symmetry options may make it basically irrelevant. For instance, if you have 6-fold symmetry turned on and are placing cell area/an organelle, you're going to have all the central hexagons highlighted anyway, and moving further away will only result in some of the central hexes fading away. Without testing we can't say which is truly better, although I'd prefer a permanent hex grid for shape and organelle editing (other editing modes may not need it).

thinking now that you said, it's true, we don't actually know how it would looks like, but anyway there is not enough space to use this...

Not much discussion is going on here and the topic is important, where is the art-team GUI needs artists right?
Btw how is 3D cell gonna be generated from that 2D grid?

Tritium wrote:

Btw how is 3D cell gonna be generated from that 2D grid?

See here for an untested algorithm.

Tritium wrote:

Not much discussion is going on here and the topic is important, where is the art-team GUI needs artists right?

What needs to be shown in the in-game GUI for the microbe phase/stage?

~sciocont wrote:

Ok, let's talk GUI for a moment. On the Building Microbe Stage thread, Oliveriver posted a fantastic demo of a GUI concept for the cell editor. I loved it, but it did include some unnecessary buttons and whatnot, so I decided to take a crack at adapting it. The Editor GUI is going to be fairly important in terms of setting the visual style of the game, so I think we should settle on it fairly soon. I want input from artists and programmers here, because we need to have a GUI that is not only good-looking, but possible to implement- I know there have been problems in the past implementing a shatter-style button setup, so I want everything to be optimized here before we have problems putting it in the game.

Here's my crack at it.

Spoiler:

That version is using only tiles to represent the microbe and its organelles. The next one uses tiles and sprites.

Spoiler:

Finally, the finished product.

Spoiler:

The GUI functions would be exactly like those of Oliveriver's prototype- when tabs are selected, they expand to show the parts or functions that that editing mode contains.
Go ahead, start discussing the GUI. I want a final editor GUI design and sprites+hex block arrangements for organelles ready by the end of the month.

OMG YES!

Thriving Cheese wrote:

Tritium wrote:

Not much discussion is going on here and the topic is important, where is the art-team GUI needs artists right?

What needs to be shown in the in-game GUI for the microbe phase/stage?

Not much, really. The GUI should be minimal, so it would be best just to have a pause screen menu.

Ok, we need to settle on silhouettes for organelles. These are important because organelles cannot overlap, and making your cell larger is expensive, so each organelle's shape and size need to counter its usefulness.

Here's some ideas.

~sciocont wrote:

Ok, we need to settle on silhouettes for organelles. These are important because organelles cannot overlap, and making your cell larger is expensive, so each organelle's shape and size need to counter its usefulness.

Here's some ideas.

Just a note; I think the chloroplast should just be 2 tiles, acording to the pictures you get when you searches for "chlororplast" on Google pictures.

~sciocont wrote:

Thriving Cheese wrote:

Tritium wrote:

Not much discussion is going on here and the topic is important, where is the art-team GUI needs artists right?

What needs to be shown in the in-game GUI for the microbe phase/stage?

Not much, really. The GUI should be minimal, so it would be best just to have a pause screen menu.

Ok, we need to settle on silhouettes for organelles. These are important because organelles cannot overlap, and making your cell larger is expensive, so each organelle's shape and size need to counter its usefulness.

Here's some ideas.

Looking at that reminds me of something I was going to say a couple of days ago but forgot - how are we going to handle rotating organelles in the editor? In your editor concept, you had several of the same organelles but oriented differently. How are we going to allow the player to turn an organelle? It may be as simple as having them press a button while moving the cursor to keep part of an organelle locked in place while the rest rotates around it.

Staying on topic, I too think the chloroplast may be better as two hexagons. All the others look perfect, in my opinion.