Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

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Atahualpa
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Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

Post by Atahualpa »

This mods adds new textures and meshes to the various windows in Vvardenfell. There also are add-ons for Tribunal and Bloodmoon (and Raven Rock). They all word as intended in OpenMW, except for the glow effect itself. The windows appear much darker in OpenMW, as if there was no glow at all.

Is this behaviour intended? -- There are no console messages, everything works fine.


(The screenshots were taken in fully upgraded Raven Rock.)
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lysol
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Re: Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

Post by lysol »

I would guess the function isn't added yet. When or if it gets added some day, I'll add glow to the window textures of my texture packs.
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scrawl
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Re: Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

Post by scrawl »

For the record, the 'function' was there the entire time. Just set the emissive color of the material. That particular mod didn't work because it used a rather obscure method of achieving the same thing.

Unfortunately you'll have to edit NIF files to do so, it can't be a plain 'texture pack'.

Maybe we can add a way for glow maps to be automatically picked up with a certain file extension, like we do for normal maps. Using a texture will be more costly than a simple emissive color, but on the flip side you get to make certain parts of the object more glowing than others..
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Ravenwing
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Re: Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

Post by Ravenwing »

scrawl wrote: 12 Sep 2017, 16:48 Maybe we can add a way for glow maps to be automatically picked up with a certain file extension, like we do for normal maps. Using a texture will be more costly than a simple emissive color, but on the flip side you get to make certain parts of the object more glowing than others..
Does this allow for some streamlined or advanced handling of textures that change? I always questioned the performance impact of the various glowing window mods and thought it would be nice if we had some kind of built in way for handling that. Perhaps I should start a thread elsewhere about it, but I don't even know exactly how these usually work to propose a novel solution. I always just assumed they had a timed script that was constantly checking what time it was to enable a new window texture, which seems like a waste of resources.
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lysol
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Re: Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

Post by lysol »

scrawl wrote: 12 Sep 2017, 16:48 Maybe we can add a way for glow maps to be automatically picked up with a certain file extension, like we do for normal maps. Using a texture will be more costly than a simple emissive color, but on the flip side you get to make certain parts of the object more glowing than others..
This would have been awesome.
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scrawl
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Re: Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

Post by scrawl »

This would have been awesome.
Would have been or would be? We can still do it ;)
Does this allow for some streamlined or advanced handling of textures that change? I always questioned the performance impact of the various glowing window mods and thought it would be nice if we had some kind of built in way for handling that. Perhaps I should start a thread elsewhere about it, but I don't even know exactly how these usually work to propose a novel solution. I always just assumed they had a timed script that was constantly checking what time it was to enable a new window texture, which seems like a waste of resources.
The texture animation is not a script. It's a NiFlipController, which essentially does the same thing (check the current time and set the correct texture from a list).
Making window textures glow and pulse is always going to be a waste of resources, no matter how you do it.

Edit: if you're talking about the switch from daytime to nighttime, that's probably a script. Scripts that don't do anything until it is a certain time shouldn't have much impact.
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Resources one enjoys wasting are not resources wasted - John Lennon, sort of, but I tweaked it.
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Ravenwing
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Re: Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

Post by Ravenwing »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 12 Sep 2017, 23:06 Resources one enjoys wasting are not resources wasted - John Lennon, sort of, but I tweaked it.
Lol, appropriate regardless.
scrawl wrote: 12 Sep 2017, 22:52 The texture animation is not a script. It's a NiFlipController, which essentially does the same thing (check the current time and set the correct texture from a list).
Making window textures glow and pulse is always going to be a waste of resources, no matter how you do it.

Edit: if you're talking about the switch from daytime to nighttime, that's probably a script. Scripts that don't do anything until it is a certain time shouldn't have much impact.
Interesting, I had always assumed someone had made every window an activator with a script that constantly checked what time it was, which seemed very inelegant. I think it was a similar mod that I used in Oblivion that always annoyed me because it would take a couple seconds for the game to realize it should have loaded the glowing textures and they'd all pop into place. I'm guessing we already support the NiFlipController? So if lysol adds the glow to his window textures and sets the time in this list, all his windows would automatically glow at the right times? If so, that's seriously cool.

Lysol, double brownie points from me if you do this. Triple brownie points if you get the texture animated to have the glow flicker like it's firelight.
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scrawl
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Re: Windows Glow v1.0 by Colt17 (and all add-ons)

Post by scrawl »

I'm guessing we already support the NiFlipController? So if lysol adds the glow to his window textures and sets the time in this list, all his windows would automatically glow at the right times?
A controller's default time source is just a constantly increasing realtime-timer (except for when the game is paused, it doesn't increase). In this sense, NiFlipControllers are usually used to flip between textures every n-(milli)seconds regardless of what time of day it is.

It'd be conceivable to add a controller time source that works with in-game time. Another way would be something I've been thinking about for a while: we could provide scripting support in the scene graph, for more flexibility (i.e. instead of picking from a list of premade controllers and setting its parameters/inputs, you write a script and attach it to the scene graph node). The script would have access to OSG features like changing OpenGL state, moving nodes around etc. Interestingly, OSG already supports LUA bindings. From what I can tell though, this binding provides access to the entirety of the OSG API, which could be dangerous and might need extra sandboxing.

Anyway, none of this will be possible via NIFs since we're not extending them.
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