Eve-ning stars

March 15, 2006

Cliff, at work, has signed up for the 14 days trial of Eve-Online. If my plans for removing sleep from my life had been fulfilled, it’s definitely a game I would sign up to. It’s the best MMO and one of the best space games I’ve played. If it weren’t for the hundreds of hours required to move up the ranks to be able to command a fleet I’d be playing it right now.

This blog isn’t about how good eve is though; it’s about eve’s stars. I was watching Cliff play the other day and I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before about how they render their distance stars. Rather than having a texture map with stars on it, as I’m doing now, which just seems like an awful waste of texture bandwidth (with 90% black and a few dots here and there). It appears they are simply rendering points (using D3DPT_POINTLIST) at different intensities to represent different sized stars and distances. I thought this was pure genius so that, combined with the fact I still have 7 hours in my schedule to “improve the skybox” I’ve decided to try implementing a similar system and perhaps add a slight twist of my own if I have time. I’ll stick up a screenshot once I’m done and perhaps have a comparison with my current implementation to see what everyone thinks.

PS.  I didn’t even realise while I was typing this blog, I’m currently listening to the Eve music, which is superb, you can download it here.

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CIC, Games by Doolwind

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  • Dominik Grabiec

    I did something like that for a simple space demo a while ago. I even added bitmapped nebulas to add character. It looked quite cool, sort of like on a sci-fi show.

    If I remember correctly the tutorial for the nebula should still be available somewhere on the net.

  • http://www.doolwind.com Doolwind

    Dominik Grabiec-

    I found a few good tutorials on making star scape and you can see that in some of my latest screenshots. While it looked ok, I thought I’d experiment with the way eve did it’s skyscapes as they look so nice. I’d be interested to hear how you implemented yours or just a couple of screenshots if you have any.