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At the moment of writing the Ozonex editor renders the water quite differently. In turn the rendering of the water that you see in the Ozonex editor is not representative to what you'd see in-game. The GPG editor uses the exact same procedures and is therefore completely representative.
The primary usage of these elevation parameters is to both define the water surface and the range of the water ramp.
Surface Defines at which height the surface is. There can only be one surface of water - multiple surfaces to support maps with varying water height is not supported. Is also used as a marking point as to where the water ramp starts.
Any value above the surface will share the same value as the one on the surface. Uses the pixel in the most top left corner of the water ramp.
Deep Has no meaning of any kind. It is an aesthetic parameter as it is mentioned in the shader that renders the water, but never referenced anywhere in a computation. Has no game play effect of any kind.
Abyss Defines at which height the water ramp is at its lowest. Has no game play effect of any kind - solely used for coloring the terrain underneath.
Any value below the abyss will share the same value as the one on the abyss. Uses the pixel in the most top right corner of the water ramp.
Water with a surface in the left top slice, water without a surface but with the water ramp applied in the right bottom slice
The sun color parameters influence the color of the reflection of the sun. This reflection is a form of specular lighting and the options for the specular lighting are below the header 'Sun and Fresnel', discussed below. The sun color is a typical RGB color component as one would expect.
The values range between 0.0 and 2.0, which allows you to overload the color significantly. This is useful in the case that color is reduced due to shadows of some kind. Typically the range is between 0.0 and 1.0, representing values between 0 and 255 in integral-based colors.
Red The red component of the sun color.
Green The green component of the sun color.
Blue The blue component of the sun color.
A slice with red and a green sun color
The reflection of the sun is unrelated to the angle of the sun defined in the lighting settings. It is always most visible when looking perpendicular at the water, where as the reflections are invisible when looking parallel with the water.
Surface color and interpolation The surface color parameters influence the color of the surface itself. It colors the entire surface based on an interpolation of depth of the water. Lets look at the code to find out how this plays out in practice:
float4 HighFidelityPS(...) { // (...) // as found in water2.fx // we want to lerp in some of the water color based on depth, but // not totally on depth as it gets clamped float waterLerp = clamp(waterDepth, waterLerp.x, waterLerp.y); // lerp in the color refractedPixels.xyz = lerp( refractedPixels.xyz, waterColor, waterLerp); // computations such as reflections and wave crests }
The waterDepth is a value in the range between 0.0 and 1.0. At 0.0 we are at the surface height, at 1.0 we are at the abyss height. We defined these values earlier. The water depth is clamped between the two interpolation values. This has a set of consequences:
That means that if we have a minimal value that is larger than 0 all the water will always have some surface color and isn't transparent. This causes a visual annoyance when zooming out described in another article:
Now that we're aware of this we can also understand why the water becomes opaque when we up the values: we are interpolating between the refracted image of what is behind the water over a single color that we defined ourselves. When we up the values, all that remains is the surface color we defined.
An inconvenient error is that the depth of the water is inaccurately defined. This isn't as obvious when you view the water from up top, but it becomes clear when you view the water from an angle.
The reason for this is that the surface is changed in color, but not the color of the terrain behind the surface. That color is changed according to a water ramp, which we'll touch upon in this article and discuss in another.
Reflections of the sky and water crests will always appear on the surface - these are computed and combined after the surface color computations are complete.
Essentially what the surface color and its interpolation values describe is how clear the water is. Take the water from that cup standing next to you in comparison to water that you mixed with lemonade: the former is clear (hopefully) and the latter is almost opaque.
Reflection is the idea that water reflects light of its environment back to its environment. This is effect becomes more apparent the more parallel our viewing angle is with the water.
Refraction is the idea that water changes the angle of light that passes through it. This effect becomes more apparent the more perpendicular our viewing angle is with the water.
Sun A linear interpolation as to how reflective the sun should be. Not sure where this is being used directly.
Sky Determines how much the sky (cubemap) should be reflected.
Unit Determines how much a unit should be reflected.
Refraction Determines how strongly the water distorts anything that is under water.
The sky reflection parameter has precedence over the unit reflection parameter. If there is no sky reflection, then there won't be a unit reflection either. This correlation exists because the sky reflection parameter is used, on its own, to determine whether we reflect anything at all.
float4 HighFidelityPS(...) { // (...) // as found in water2.fx // lerp the reflection into the refraction refractedPixels = lerp( refractedPixels, reflectedPixels, saturate(skyreflectionAmount * fresnel)); // (...) }
As a result, if you decrease the amount the sky is reflected you'll also decrease the amount a unit is reflected by the water. If there is no sky reflection then only the refracted pixels and the surface color remain.
If you have interesting sources, approaches, opinions or ideas that aren't listed yet but may be valuable to the article: feel free to leave a message down below or contact me on Discord. The idea is to create a bunch of resources to share our knowledge surrounding development in Supreme Commander.
If you've used this resource for one of your maps feel free to make a post below: I'd love to know about it!
This is a part of a series on water within Supreme Commander.
Image editing tools, such as:
Map editing tools, such as:
For this article I assume that you have extracted all the textures the game has to offer. If you haven't done so and / or don't know how to please review the FAQ in the overview article. There is one explicitly on how to do this properly to allow the GPG editor and the game itself to find the textures.
It is important to understand what it is that we're trying to achieve. Generally with my students I like to work backwards: we start looking at what we're working with and try to understand what it is trying to tell us.
A visual comparison between different types of wave normal maps
That being said, it is very hard to show what it is that we're talking about without some animated content. Essentially what we'll be doing is changing how the waves move and interact with one another - causing all kinds of interesting behavior on the water surface. We'll be changing the aesthetics, the simulation remains the same.
The game provides a bunch of wave normal maps by default. These are used throughout the default skirmish and campaign maps. Assuming that you have extracted the textures properly previously, you can find them at:
%InstallationFolder%/textures/engine/
Inside you'll find a bunch of water normal maps: waves.dds (no foam channel)
waves000.dds (no foam channel)
waves7.dds (completely white foam channel)
waves001.dds (with foam channel)
waves6.dds (with foam channel)
For each image, the normal map is in the top left and the alpha channel is in the bottom right part.
You're not limited to using these normal maps - any repeating normal map can be used! You can think of normal maps that are generally used as strata textures. This can create all kinds of interesting effects. If you do so, read the next section carefully. As not all normal maps are fit as a water normal map out of the box.
A water normal map is the typical purple-looking normal map one would expect, including an interesting interpretation of the alpha channel.
The latter indicates whether or not there is foam on the water. Foam is generated when the total foam value after combining the various water normal maps is larger than 1.0 (more than white). This effect is generally not visible because the majority of the wave maps provided to us has a black alpha channel. The only water normal provided to us that creates this in a nice manner is waves001.dds and waves5.dds.
Water of the map Paradise, with foam on the top left and without foam on the bottom right
When you open up the standard map Paradise you'll see that among the water properties, two of the water normal maps are waves001.dds and in turn producing a small foam effect across the water surface.
At the moment of writing the Ozonex editor renders the water quite differently. In turn the rendering of the water that you see in the Ozonex editor is not representative to what you'd see in-game.
Select the Water layer and then click on 'Water Properties' in the toolbar of the editor. The tool window will respond and change into a 'Water Properties' window. For this article we're interested in the very last water property values: the textures, direction, speed and frequency of the water normal maps.
Showing the properties in which we're interested in for this article
At this point I assume that you have extracted all the textures the game has to offer, as described in the frequently asked questions (FAQ) section of the introduction. Click on the '(...)' button and navigate towards:
Choose any of the water normal maps and start experimenting with them.
Other interesting properties are the direction of a normal map, its speed and how often it is repeated on the water surface. You can change these live in the GPG editor:
Toying around with the water normal maps and these settings can create all sorts of interesting water effects. From here on the journey is yours. If you manage some interesting effect of water, make sure to let us know in the comments!
A visual comparison after changing some of the wave normal maps
You can store water normal maps inside your map folder. For stratum textures, decal textures and props there is a specific location where these should be stored. For water there is no hierarchy that you need to use in order for the game to find the files. It is good practice to store them inside the 'env' folder that the other textures require in order to function.
As an example, you can store them in: %MapName%/env/
For this tutorial we'll use the following normal map:
You'll need an account to be able to download the normal map. The website is free and you'll get 15 points for free each day allowing you to download seamless textures. if you are aware how hard it is to make these kind of textures then you'll know we're practically robbing them via their own freemium model. Do take note of the license on the textures - we cannot share them without explicitly using them.
Once you've downloaded the texture you need to convert it to the .dds format. You can do so by opening it in your favorite image manipulation program that supports the .dds format. Use BC3 / DXT5 as your compression algorithm.
A visual example of water that appears to have really large waves in it
When you upload the map to the vault the name of the folder of your map is changed. The path to your custom textures is not adjusted accordingly, in turn the game cannot find the corresponding textures.
To approach this you can use the Ozonex editor to bump your map version which creates a new folder with the correct version, and in turn you can use the GPG editor to set the corresponding paths. When uploading the name of the folder of the map no longer needs adjusting and everything will be good.
With Supreme Commander we're in a unique position in which we can not only toy around with graphical assets, we can also see how these assets are used in the rendering pipeline of the game. The (HLSL) shaders can be found at:
%InstallationFolder%/gamedata/effects.scd
To strengthen our understanding of this article it is nice to see how the assets are used in the rendering pipeline. For this article, the following bit of code inside the water2.fx file is particularly interesting.
float4 HighFidelityPS(...){ // (...) // calculate the normal we will be using for the water surface float4 W0 = tex2D( NormalSampler0, inV.mLayer0 ); float4 W1 = tex2D( NormalSampler1, inV.mLayer1 ); float4 W2 = tex2D( NormalSampler2, inV.mLayer2 ); float4 W3 = tex2D( NormalSampler3, inV.mLayer3 ); float4 sum = W0 + W1 + W2 + W3; float waveCrest = saturate( sum.a - waveCrestThreshold ); // average, scale, bias and normalize float3 N = 2.0 * sum.xyz - 4.0; // flatness N = normalize(N.xzy); float3 up = float3(0,1,0); N = lerp(up, N, waterTexture.r); // (...) }
The waves that makes the water appear so alive is nothing more than a summation of a bunch of normal maps, each at a different position to simulate the idea of movement.
The values mLayer0 up to mLayer4 are computed in the vertex shader, at an earlier stage of the pipeline. In turn these values are used to get pixel information from a texture using tex2D along with the according texture samplers and coordinates.
After which the various directions of the water are summed together, resulting in a vector. This vector is first used to compute the wave crests values that in turn are used later as part of generating the white foam on the surface water. The normal is then adjusted accordingly to match the fact that we added four normals together, which in turn is used as the normal for lighting, reflections and speculation calculations down the road.
The flatness that we can define in the editor is applied as a linear interpolation between the up vector and the normal computed at the surface of the water. The more flatness we add to the water, the less of the computed water normal will be used.
For more information on the operators used:
You're using normal maps that have white alpha channels. The alpha channel is interpreted as foam. If you want to use those normal maps, change their alpha channels to black (no foam) or some other pattern to introduce foam in a more natural manner.
For the first normal map that has a white alpha channel this doesn't have an effect. Foam is rendered on the water surface when its value is larger than 1.0. In other words when the combined normal maps have an alpha channel that is more white than white itself.
Two examples of problems with foam
When you upload the map to the vault the name of the folder of your map is changed. As an example,
from: %MapName%/ to: %MapName%.v0001/.
The path to your textures is not adjusted accordingly and in turn the game cannot find the corresponding textures when you download the map from the vault.
To approach this you can use the Ozonex editor to bump your map version and then use the GPG editor to set the corresponding paths. The Ozonex editor already prepares the correct name of the folder of the map, such that when uploading the name of the folder of the map no longer needs adjusting and everything will be good.
For more information on normal maps in general:
For more textures that you can use in your projects:
This is a part of a series on water within Supreme Commander. You can find other series at:
This article dives into the idea of water ramps.
A ramp is nothing more than a very thin gradient. Typically a ramp is a texture with a height of 1 and any with that is some power of 2. The reason for the latter is performance. A few examples of ramps, with a significantly larger height, are already available to you:
waterramp.dds waterramp_eg.dds waterramp_evergreen02.dds waterrampSwamp02.dds
A ramp heavily relies on transparency, hence these may look different depending on your theme of the forum. Typically a ramp looks like this in Photoshop where the block pattern indicates that the texture is transparent there.
Water ramps are used in Supreme Commander to color the terrain at each pixel, depending on the depth of the pixel. The functions takes in the depth as an argument that is relative to the surface and abyss parameters. At the surface or higher we expect no coloring of the water, where as a in the abyss we expect the full coloring of the water. Think in terms of lemonade: the deeper you put something in the less visible it will become.
The game provides a bunch of water ramps by default. These are used throughout the default skirmish and campaign maps. Assuming that you have extracted the textures properly previously, you can find them at:
Inside you'll find a bunch of water ramps:
The best way to see them is either through the explorer in Windows 10 or by opening them up in Photoshop. On Windows 10 if you represent images as large pictograms it can, at times, interpret .dds files properly allowing you to see its color scheme.
Select the Water layer and then click on 'Water Properties' in the toolbar of the editor. The tool window will respond and change into a 'Water Properties' window. For this article we're interested in the 'Texure Maps' and particularly in the 'Water Ramp' texture.
At this point I assume that you have extracted all the textures the game has to offer, as described in the frequently asked questions (FAQ) section of the introduction. Click on the '(...)' button next to the water ramp texture and navigate towards:
Choose any of the water ramps available and start experimenting with them.
You can store water ramps inside your map folder. For stratum textures, decal textures and props there is a specific location where these should be stored. For water there is no hierarchy that you need to use in order for the game to find the files. It is good practice to store them inside the 'env' folder that the other textures require in order to function.
For this tutorial we'll use the following water ramp:
Put the texture in the map folder and then select it accordingly with the GPG editor.
It makes you wonder why there hasn't been a custom rainbow water ramp before'
When you upload the map to the vault the name of the folder of your map is changed. The path to your custom water textures is not adjusted accordingly, in turn the game cannot find the corresponding textures.
To approach this you can use the Ozonex editor to bump your map version. This creates a new folder with the correct version, and you can use the GPG editor to set the corresponding paths. When uploading to the vault the name of the folder of the map matches its map version and therefore no longer needs adjusting. The path remains the same and everyone can load in the custom water textures.
To strengthen our understanding of this article it is nice to see how the assets are used in the rendering pipeline. For this article, the following bit of code inside the terrain.fx file is particularly interesting.
// as defined in terrain.fx // apply the water color float3 ApplyWaterColor( float depth, float3 inColor) { #ifdef DIRECT3D10 float4 wcolor = tex2D(WaterRampSampler, float2(depth,0)); #else float4 wcolor = tex1D(WaterRampSampler, depth); #endif return lerp( inColor.xyz, wcolor.xyz, wcolor.w ); }
The shader code shows us that we are only interested in the first row of pixels, using the depth argument to determine what pixel we should use. The depth value is clamped between 0.0 (surface or higher) and 1.0 (abyss or lower). We use the alpha channel wcolor.w to interpolate between the input and the color retrieved from the ramp. The input is in this case a color too: the color of a fully shaded bit of terrain.
The code shown is part of the shader that renders the terrain - the water itself isn't changed. The water is influenced indirectly by the water ramp through refraction, causing the water itself to change color.
Terrain with black and red stripes on it
The editor or the game cannot find your water ramp and therefore uses the default texture to make sure at least some texture could be loaded and shown. This default texture has no transparency and therefore the terrain, even the bits and pieces above water, completely disappear in the interpolation.
One cause is that the textures that you unpacked are at the wrong location. Make sure that the paths are: Good: /textures/engine/waterramp.dds Bad: /gamedata/textures/engine/waterramp.dds
Another cause when you use custom textures is that the map version got bumped but you didn't update the path accordingly. As an example, when uploading to the vault the folder name is adjusted if it doesn't match the map version accordingly.
If you've used this resource for one of your maps feel free to make a post below: I love to know about it!
At the moment of writing wave generation is not supported in the Ozonex editor.
Waves add in a feeling of the environment being alive. It is visible on all default maps that have water of some kind and on custom maps when people know how to generate these. This article is trying to assist on the latter.
A bunch of waves on the shores of the map Mellow Shallows
As of writing, generating waves can only be achieved in the GPG editor. Once inside, navigate to the water layer. Then in the toolbar of the editor you'll find three little buttons named 'Edit Water Properties', 'Water brush' and 'Water waves'. Choose the latter. This will change the tool window.
Highlighting the actions described earlier in the GPG editor
The new tool window is basic in its nature: you select a wave, choose a depth for them to be generated on and hit generate. Waves will be generated in such a way that they orient to the shore. Slowly but surely the waves will start to spawn. It can take a while for the waves to be visible - some of them have a long animation time including a fade in time.
There isn't a lot of creative freedom in this feature. You can manually select waves but you cannot transform or rotate them. You can delete them. You can delete all the waves by clicking on the reset button.
Generally you want to use multiple types of waves and foam. The longer the animation of the wave the further away from the shore you'd like to generate them. Watch out for waves directly intersecting the terrain - this will create hard lines between the wave and the terrain and it generally looks bad. If this happens, generate the waves at a deeper shore depth. Generating the same type of waves multiple times is not uncommon and can be used to increase the density of the waves.
Personally I like the 'Incomming', 'Incomming2', 'Foam' and the 'Long slow break' waves. I toy around with them on different shore depths, generating one after the other. It is vital to both check how it looks on beaches as checking how it looks near cliffs or reefs of any kind.
If you have interesting sources, approaches, opinions or ideas that aren't listed yet but may be valuable to the article: feel free to leave a message down below or contact me on Discord. The idea is to create a bunch of resources to share our knowledge surrounding various fields of development in Supreme Commander.
This is a part of a series on decals within Supreme Commander.
Parts
This introduction part will try to motivate you as to why decals are important to both the experience of the player and the perception on the product as a whole. Essentially it is the finishing touch on a beautiful cake, the final mile of a marathon or the last tweaks on that hobby of yours.
And exactly that is why it is one of the hardest phases of the development of a map: it is already fleshed out, the resources are in place, the strata are done (at least: that is what you think) and as a whole its seems to be already good and playable. Why spend hours and hours on those decals?
Well, good of you to ask. Lets go on a journey.
With and without
It is important to understand what it is that we're trying to achieve. Generally with my students I like to work backwards: we start looking at the result and try to understand what it is trying to tell us.
The next few images are maps that are either finished and can be found in the vault, or under construction and may be in the vault when you read this some time later. All of them have 2 sections that do show decals and two sections that do not show decals. The purpose is to try and understand what it is that these decals mean to you. What is their added value in your own experience?
Nomad Mission 5, under construction as of writing
Long John Silver, under construction as of writing
Mellow Shallows
When looking at the examples, determine what it is that you think that decals are doing to the map.
Wild Path
Seton's Clutch, before Forged Alliance
Rainmakers Survival
Don't stop here. Experience it live yourself - open up one of the following maps in the Ozonex or GPG editor:
The GPG editor crashes when it is trying to open up a map made by the Ozonex editor that is saved as version 60 (forged alliance), instead of version 56 (vanilla). You need the Ozonex editor to open these up.
You can find maps that you have downloaded in:
You can find the default maps at the installation folder of Supreme Commander Forged Alliance.
Once inside:
For the Ozonex editor, use select all the decals by making a selection box that crosses the entire map. Then press Delete. You can now quickly switch between a view with and without decals via using CTRL + Z and CTRL + Y
For the GPG editor, use CTRL+A to select all the decals. Then press Delete. You can now quickly switch between a view with and without decals via using CTRL + Z and then deleting them again.
I hope this gives an idea to you as to what decals mean to you. This can be anything - there is no good or bad here. Use this as your argumentation as to why you'd want to spent hours on hours on decalling.
The next topics cover as to what decals mean to me. We don't have to agree and a discussion is always welcome.
State Decals on their own do not affect the simulation. After all, they do not make the terrain more bumpy or change the terrain type - it just looks more bumpy or more grassy. Nevertheless, to me they do affect the interpretation of the simulation. In other terms: to me decals have influence on the gameplay.
Let me elaborate via the usage of strata. Typically a rock stratum is used for places that are expected to be unpathable, such as cliffs, mountains and steep hills. This is done in almost every single map. Especially the default maps that are shipped with the game both learn us and use this association to make it easier for the player to understand the simulation.
In its essence: the rock stratum communicates some form of state to a player: this piece of terrain is likely unpathable.
Other instruments that communicate state are:
And that is how we get back to decals. Decals allow you to tap into a source of associations that the player typically learns throughout playing the game. This source of associations can be used to make your map easier to understand. As an example, would you say there is a hill on this bit of terrain?
After some careful consideration you'll probably say: 'Yes, of course! Look at the lighting on that piece of terrain. There must be some elevation there.' And you're right: there is.
Typically though, after play testing the map with new players, people build turrets behind the hill such that the hill blocks all projectiles flying towards units that are in front of the hill. In turn this forces me as a map designer to question as to why this is.
The reason turned out that even though the state was communicated through lighting, it was communicated too poorly. People do not have time to inspect the terrain when they are playing a real time strategy game. And because the lighting wasn't that significant, people just generally just overlooked the hill.
To communicate 'the hill' better I decided to place a few decals on it.
After which I never had the complaint again of their turrets shooting some hidden hill. Players either made their turrets in front of the hill. And if not, at the very least understood what went wrong and that they could've known about it before hand.
Alas, to me, decals can help you as a designer to communicate state.
Articles
Magic Circle <under construction>
The hard truth We started off with a question what decals are for you. Throughout the article we tried to answer this question by comparing maps with and without decals. The hard truth is however that the majority of popular maps barely have any decals on them at all.
Some people were discussing this fact in the Map & Mod Making Discord channel, and they have a good point. When we take the top 20 of the 18th of August, 2020 then the results are as following:
The overall consensus is that decals aren't that important for a map to be popular. Surely people may enjoy aesthetics maps, but generally, they won't choose a map for aesthetics. They choose a map for the game play experience that the map facilitates. And decals aren't a part of that choice.
Which brings us back to the original question. The reason we're trying to understand what decals mean to you is because, in practice, you're doing all the work for yourself. After all, the tactics were already set in stone, markers such as extractors were already placed and the map complexity was already done the moment you started the work on decals.
This is a blog post on where you can find the current decals, how you could potentially edit these decals and how to add them back into your map. Take note that I am no designer, hence the 'edits' will be relatively simple.
This blog is also useful for adding custom stratums and, in the near future when it is supported, custom props.
We'll go through the steps with a case study for the one of the missions of the Nomad campaign.
Interesting sources A list of sources that you can use as inspiration for new decals, stratums and textures in general.
A video tutorial by @Morax about the same topic, with the focus on stratums instead of decals:
Tools
If you cannot afford Photoshop then you can use Gimp as an alternative. Gimp supports the .dds format used by Supreme Commander by default.
Take note that Supreme Commander also supports the .png format by default.
The case One of the nomad maps have lava in them. The map doesn't use the default stratum textures for lava, hence creating cracks like in Haven Reef is rather difficult.
The expected results:
The current results:
As you can see the colors do not match as nicely as one would like. Therefore we decide to make a small but evident change to the textures.
Where to find the original decals of Supreme Commander The game itself typically resides inside your Steam folder, from there you can go to:
Copy the file and change its extension from .scd to .zip. Extract the .zip file you just 'created' - the contents contain all the stratum textures of the game, nicely organised per theme.
The files we need for this case study are:
On Windows 10 .dds files can be visualized in the Explorer. Make sure that your view is not on details but instead of large or very large pictograms.
On editing decals I cannot pin point what to do for every possible edit. But I can give you some pointers and will tell you what I do to my textures to make them fit in more.
First of all, lets talk about the alpha channel. This isn't a separate alpha channel as one would typically expect, instead the base layer is not a background layer - it is a separate layer that has alpha encoded directly into the layer itself.
The channels of the decal
The layers of the decal
Therefore whenever you work with an alpha channel, think in terms of layer transparency. This is also useful to know when you search on the internet.
In our case we simply want the colors of the decal to match the colors of the stratum. Take note that the decal has different colors in photoshop than it has in the editor - this is due to the lighting settings of Supreme Commander that are applied to the decal. You can change these settings in the editor.
For the purpose of this blog we want to match the color of the decal with the color of the stratum used commonly on the plateau's. This allows us to more easily 'hide' the decal, making our life easier in the long run. We can do this by navigating to Image -> Adjustments -> Match Color and then choosing the stratum we exported along with it as source.
The original decal
The adjusted decal
Other tools that are certainly interesting without breaking any tiling patterns are:
And pretty much anything inside Image -> Adjustments is generally worth knowing about its existence.
Adding the decal back in Now that we have made our adjustments it is time to make it available within the Editor and within Supreme Commander for usage.
Navigate towards your map. We refer to your map folder as root. Add in the following folders to your map:
Save your decals in .dds format in the decals folder and save any new stratum textures in .dds format into the layers folder. Take note that this nicely matches the structure of the original env.scd file that we extracted earlier.
For the future, you can add in custom props by storing them into root/env/props.
From this moment on the decals and / or additional layers should be visible in the Resource Browser of the Ozonex editor. Choose as Type the Map folder, and the corresponding Category. From this moment on everything works as expected and you can even load in the decals from the old GPG editor.
The outcome of the change
The difference is small but it is now nearly invisible unless you pay really, really close attention to the decal work and know what to look for. In both cases, players either don't do that or they don't know what to look for. All is beautiful.
About you If you have interesting sources that aren't listed yet: feel free to contact me on Discord or the Aeolus in Forged Alliance Forever! Take note that for the latter, if I did not respond, I may have missed your message.
Text editors such as:
The GPG editor is vastly outmatched feature wise on this topic. I recommend using the Ozonex editor for this topic and the article will only discuss how to approach this inside the Ozonex editor.
Personally I use Visual Studio Code as the text editor in this article. The exact same procedure applies for Notepad.
There are numerous markers available for various usages. The most common markers are the mass extractor, hydrocarbon and the blank markers used for spawn locations or objectives. More uncommon markers are the AI markers such as 'Naval Link', 'Rally Point' or a pathing marker such as 'Amphibous Path Marker'. These are markers that have no meaning to players, instead they have significant meaning to the various AI systems that players use to fight against and learn with.
Throughout this article we will dive into the AI markers. We'll discuss what markers mean to various AI's, how they could be placed in accordance and we'll dive into pathing markers and common misconceptions about them.
This article is written in collaboration with some of the developers of the AI community that surrounds Supreme Commander. In specific:
A rally point marker gives the AI an indication where it can send its units after construction when its not ready to be sent out yet. An example situation is when a platoon is being constructed. Until the platoon has been constructed, the units wait at the rally point marker.
This marker is used by:
There are two types of rally point markers:
An AI will use the closest rally point marker to a factory as its rally point. A base can have multiple rally points given that it has multiple factories. Both land, amphibious and air units can rally to a land based rally point. Naval factories will look for the nearest naval rally point.
A few rally point markers on the map Withered Battle
Question: How are Rally Point markers used exactly? The current text (about platoons) is an assumption from observed behavior. Question: Can a base have multiple functional rally point markers? Question: Do air units have a rally point marker? Question: Can Amphibious units use both rally point markers?
An expansion area marker provides the AI with an intuition as to where it can expand to. The majority of the AI's will construct a fully-fledged base or a support base at the location, depending whether or not it is a large expansion area. Such an area may include factories, generators, shields and defenses where applicable.
It does not require mass extractors near it, but mass extractors near an expansion area marker may be preferred over ones that are not. By telling the AI to build a base at the location extractors can be automatically more secured from the perspective of a player.
Besides that it can function as a forward operation base to apply pressure on the enemy. The terrain surrounding an expansion area should be flat and large enough to support a range of buildings, including factories and shields.
Whether or not an expansion is a separately functioning base depends on its distance to the spawn location and other expansions. An expansion should be about 150 - 250 units away from other expansions in order for it to be a standalone base, depending on the AI at hand. Expansions that are close to each other may share their pool of units including engineers, causing odd interactions.
A few expansion markers on the map Open Palms
Question: Is there a difference between a large expansion area and an expansion area marker? Question: Does an expansion area require extractors? Question: Can expansion area's also construct naval factories if it is close to the water? Question: Is there a minimal distance between expansions, or between the spawn and an expansion for it to be effective?
A naval area marker provides the AI with an intuition as to where it can build a full-fledged naval base. This includes naval factories, naval and anti air defenses and a sonar.
It requires a certain depth such that factories can be safely build and navy units can safely maneuver around the factories. Typically you want the marker to about 50 units off the shore such that a decent naval base can be constructed.
A naval base is much like an expansion but then with a focus on water. Units such as engineers may be shared with other expansions, depending on the direct (Cartesian) distance between the two. If such an interaction would be odd then place t the naval area marker at a sufficient distance from any other expansion area, including the spawn location.
A naval area marker that is far away from the spawning location to prevent odd interactions
A naval area marker that is close to the spawning location units can freely move up and down the beach and therefore interactions make sense
Question: Does it indeed include a sonar? Question: Can other structures, such as generators, be constructed on land that is nearby? Question: I recall that around the spawn location an AI make may naval factories, does this also hold for expansion area's near water?
A protected experimental construction marker is quite literally what it says it is: a place where the AI can build an experimental in a relative safe manner.
An protected experimental construction marker at the back of the base in Field of Isis
A naval link marker is one of the markers that didn't have a meaning until one was given to it. The majority of the AI's will not take this marker into consideration.
It provides information on where a naval army can do bombardment on some target that is on land. The marker is expected near shores that are applicable for bombardment, significantly closer to the shore than naval pathing markers would be.
A bunch of naval link markers that are significantly more close to the shore than naval pathing markers on Mellow Shallows
The defense point describes where AI's can build support bases that do not have factories. At least defenses will be built and other structures such as air pads and shields depend upon the AI at hand.
There are two types of defensive point markers:
The marker is particularly useful to protect entrances, allow the AI to utilize choke points more effectively or to allow an expansion to be more fortified than it would be on its own.
In the case of LOUD a base constructed at a defensive marker is considered to be a standalone base, given that it has sufficient distance to other expansions.
An expansion fortified with minor gun positions on the Varga Pass
Question: Can these also spawn other structures, such as generators, shields, or even factories? Question: Is there a minimal distance between a defensive points and the spawn location or expansions for it to be effective?
Transport markers allow for alternative drop off points. There markers are optional. Typically transports use land pathing markers as their drop off points. Transport markers are considered when land pathing markers are either too dangerous.
Transport markers are especially useful to mark positions that would be strange to include into the pathing graph, such as small islands. They can also be used to allow for more strategic dropping of units, such as behind a mass extractor somewhere.
A couple of transport markers on the map High Noon
Question: Are these considered before the applicable pathing marker, or after? Question: Can you place these on water for amphibious drop points? Question: How about pick-up points, like the ferry function?
Island markers are used to mark islands. In practice they are used in the most rudimentary way such that they are more commonly used as a flag to indicate that transports may be important on this map.
These markers should be placed on each island once.
The island marker being used as a flag on Snoey Triangle
Question: These are barely used by the AI, correct?
Combat zone markers are used to indicate where we as a developer expect confrontations. This marker is poorly named as its main function is to be a target to which the AI can send out scouts. You can think of them as positions that need to be checked on a regular basis.
The marker should be placed at the center of paths from one spawn location to another or at remote hiding spots that are not intuitive for the AI but players may use.
A series of combat zones on the map Williamsons Bridge
Question: Are these also used to send out units?
No movement marker should even be on top of any other marker. Typically you want a distance of about 25 units between movement markers and other markers.
TODO: Refactor / replace / remove the old article
Markers to assist the pathing of the AI were introduced in Forged Alliance: maps made for Supreme Commander do not have pathing markers.
An overview of the map Four-Corners with markers on it
It allows the AI to do threat analysis and construct paths that attempt to avoid these threats. There are four types of markers:
A common usage is for platoons: a platoon will use the most restricted layer for its pathing. As an example, if a platoon has both land and amphibious units than it will use land markers instead of amphibious markers. Take note that for players the pathing markers are not used. Throughout generating the path the platoon will try and avoid threats that it cannot handle. Think of an tech 1 platoon versing an experimental: its better to avoid it when you can.
For more information on how AI markers are used, make sure to read the 'Under the hood' section.
You can manually place markers via navigating to Markers -> Markers. Make sure that markers are visible. Make sure that the correct markers are visible inside the editor. You can check so by navigating to 'Markers -> Layers'.
An overview of the correct layers being enabled inside the 'Markers -> Layers' window
It is good practice to only have your the markers visible on which you are currently working, to prevent cluttering the screen.
The idea of markers is to describe the map complexity of the map in more abstract terms. This is quite a sentence, so allow me to elaborate through an image.
A visualisation of the map complexity of the maps Winter Duel and Hardshield Oasis
The term 'map complexity' is a term I coined myself to describe how many paths or points of interest one can take or utilize. Markers assist the AI in such a way that these paths are represented on an abstract level and these paths should take the AI to anything remotely interesting on the map. This could be anything from reclaim to mass extractors, expansions or spawn locations.
If you happen to know the real jargon used throughout the (map) design industry with regard to map complexity, please do notify me and I'll update this article correspondingly .
Now that we have an idea where markers should be placed we can dive deeper and get practical. You can place pathing markers by navigating to Markers -> Markers and then select the 'Path' marker. Make sure you select the correct type of pathing marker, in our case we are placing land markers.
Selecting the correct type of pathing marker that we want to place
If you hover with your mouse on the terrain a green plus should follow your mouse. If it doesn't, then you haven't selected a marker to place yet. Just click on the terrain to place the marker. Take note that when you place markers
A bunch of land markers that are not connected
Markers are by default not connected to any other marker. You can select markers that are on the map by deselecting a marker to place. You can do so by clicking on the highlighted marker again. You can either click and hold shift to select multiple markers, or hold the left mouse button and drag to select a whole bunch of markers. Then you can press:
If you do not see a line being made between the selected markers, make sure that:
Markers that in the process of being connected
From this point on you'd place navy, air and amphibious markers in a similar manner. A few things to keep in mind:
Amphibious markers are a combination of land and navy markers. The easiest approach to them is to just export the land and navy markers all together and import them as amphibious markers.
Navigate to 'Markers -> Layers' and make sure that only the land and navy pathing markers are visible. Select all the land and navy markers. You can freely export them by clicking on the 'Export selected' button. Save them somewhere such that you can find the file. You can name it anything, for the sake of the article we'll name it article.fafmapmarkers.
If you have a few markers selected the 'Export selected' button is at the bottom of the selection box
The output of the export is a file with the .fafmapmarkers extension, which is in its core just a json file. You can open it up with any text editor. For this article, we'll use Visual Studio Code but you can do the same in Notepad.
The output of the export is an unformatted json file
Inside the file we want to replace the follow instances into:
Where marker type 14 and 16 are land and navy markers respectively and marker type 17 is an amphibious marker. You can quickly perform these changes by pressing CTRL + H and then replacing the instances accordingly.
Once completed you can import the file back into the Ozonex editor. Make sure that amphibious markers are toggled in the window 'Markers -> Layers' From this point you can connect the markers of the separate graphs where applicable, e.g. connect them through beaches and ramps into the water.
In some cases automatic marker placement is applicable.
Auto generated markers in Winter Duel
Auto generated markers in Bloat
This can be achieved through a mod and some manual tweaking. The mod that can do this for us is AI-Uveso. Install it through the vault and start your game. Under the game settings, make sure the following are set:
The latter is optional - it allows you to view the results more easily. You do not have to have any AI's active, do make sure that the mod itself is active.
An overview of the settings required
From here on you can start the game - the game may take significantly longer to load. This is due the generation of the markers and storing them inside the logs such that you can access them. Once the game has started you can open up the logging window. You can find your hotkey preset in the help menu via pressing 'F1'.
The key bindings window
Search for 'log window' and determine your hotkey. Then close the key bindings window and use the hotkey to open up the Moholog. A few notes about the Moholog:
Once you have opened the Moholog window you can search for the output of the generation that took place. It starts with this message:
INFO: * AI-Uveso: [siminit.lua, line:2070] - Running from: @c:\programdata\faforever\gamedata\lua.nx2\lua\siminit.lua. INFO: * AI-Uveso: [siminit.lua, line:2071] - Checking directory /mods/ for AI-Uveso... INFO: * AI-Uveso: [siminit.lua, line:2078] - Found directory: /mods/ai-uveso/mod_info.lua. INFO: * AI-Uveso: [siminit.lua, line:2083] - Check OK. Found 1 AI-Uveso directory. INFO: * AI-Uveso: [siminit.lua, line:2087] - Checking files and filesize for AI-Uveso... INFO: * AI-Uveso: [siminit.lua, line:2114] - Check OK! files: 84, bytecount: 1550735.
And it should have contents that starts and ends with similar content to:
['Amphibious27-6'] = { ['type'] = STRING( 'Air Path Node' ), ['position'] = VECTOR3( 512.00006103516, 70.2265625, 580.26672363281 ), ['orientation'] = VECTOR3( 0, 0, 0 ), ['hint'] = BOOLEAN( true ), ['graph'] = STRING( 'DefaultAir' ), ['adjacentTo'] = STRING( 'Air7-7 Air8-7 Air6-8 Air8-8 Air7-9 Air8-9 Air6-9 Air6-7' ), ['color'] = STRING( 'ffffffff' ), ['prop'] = STRING( '/env/common/props/markers/M_Path_prop.bp' ), }, ['Land1-9'] = { ['type'] = STRING( 'Land Path Node' ), ['position'] = VECTOR3( 51.200004577637, 106.39488983154, 324.26669311523 ), ['orientation'] = VECTOR3( 0, 0, 0 ), ['hint'] = BOOLEAN( true ), ['graph'] = STRING( 'DefaultLand' ), ['adjacentTo'] = STRING( 'Land1-10 Land2-10 Land1-8 Land2-8' ), ['color'] = STRING( 'fff4a460' ), ['prop'] = STRING( '/env/common/props/markers/M_Path_prop.bp' ), }, (...) ['Land20-9'] = { ['type'] = STRING( 'Land Path Node' ), ['position'] = VECTOR3( 699.73333740234, 77.709899902344, 324.26669311523 ), ['orientation'] = VECTOR3( 0, 0, 0 ), ['hint'] = BOOLEAN( true ), ['graph'] = STRING( 'DefaultLand' ), ['adjacentTo'] = STRING( 'Land19-9 Land21-9 Land21-10 Land19-10 Land19-8 Land21-8' ), ['color'] = STRING( 'fff4a460' ), ['prop'] = STRING( '/env/common/props/markers/M_Path_prop.bp' ), }, }, }, },
Copy the information up to the very end into Notepad or any other text editing software. We need to clean up the 'INFO:' tags in order to make it useful to us. Once inside Notpad use 'CTRL + H' to search for 'INFO:' and replace it with an empty string. This will result into the table of information that we need.
Replacing the 'INFO:' in any text editor into an empty string
From here on we need to locate the _%map%save.lua file that corresponds to the map that we generated the markers for. In the article the markers were generated for the map 'Cinder'. Navigate towards your map and make a backup, then open its '_save.lua' file.
_Open up the _'%map%save.lua' file, in this article that is 'cinder_save.lua'
We want to replace the entire master chain with the contents of the log that we tweaked. This is slightly error prone but can be easily done. Copy the contents of the tweaked log to your clipboard. Select from the opening bracket of the Masterchain all the way to the closing bracket, remove it and then paste the contents of the clipboard.
Todo: ERROR: copy from the { of Markers = {, instead of from the masterchain itself Select and replace the contents in your text editor
Once changed save your file and open it in the Ozonex editor. If all is good then you'll see your freshly placed pathing markers right there in the editor.
TODO
For more information on how pathing markers are used:
If you've used this resource for one of your maps feel free to make a post below: I'd love to know about it!__
There are numerous water brushes available in Supreme Commander. Sadly, one of them appears to be not functional.
At the moment of writing this can only be done in the GPG editor. You can find the water brushes by selecting the Water layer and then choosing the 'Water brush' option on the toolbar, this will change the tool window.
In the tool window you'll notice there is a combo box with three options, a pair of brushes and their according strength / size at the bottom.
Flatness depicts how rough the sea and its reflections is. You can use the red brush to make it less rough and the blue brush to make it more rough. By default all of the water is rough.
A visual comparison with rough water in the top left and partially flattened water in the bottom right
Typically waves are generated by the wind. One can visualize that a lake is partially covered from the wind by some mountain by flattening it slightly. Or one can visualize that there is barely any wind at all by flattening all the water. Generally completely flattened water looks strange - users are not used to water being completely flat because its rough on almost every map out there.
This is only a graphical effect - it does not affect the simulation.
Foam depicts how much wave crests / foam should be generated. You can use the blue brush to decrease the amount of foam and the red brush to increase the amount of foam. By default, all of the water generates foam.
Water of the map Paradise, with foam in the top left and without foam in the bottom right
Whether or not foam is generated depends on your water normal maps. The alpha channel of the water normal map determines whether foam should be generated. For more information about this see the article on water normal maps:
This is not functional. Technically, it is not being used in the shaders that render every single frame. One can only imagine what it was supposed to be used for. You can change the depth manually by changing the heightmap of the terrain directly.
%installation-folder%/gamedata/effects.scd/
To strengthen our understanding of the article it is nice to see how the assets are used in the rendering pipeline. For this article, the following bits of code inside the water2.fx file are particularly interesting.
// file: water2.fx float4 HighFidelityPS(...) : COLOR { // (...) float3 up = float3(0,1,0); N = lerp(up, N, waterTexture.r); // (...) }
The value inside waterTexture.r is the value we're painting with the flatness brush described earlier.
We need the red brush (the one that deducts) to decrease the roughness of the water: by default the value is 1 and through linear interpolation we therefore completely use the computed normal N at that pixel. And because every pixel will have a slightly different normal N, the water will appear rough.
When we decrease this value we'll slowly graduate towards the up vector. Surrounding water will move towards the same up vector and therefore there is little to no difference between the normals of the neighbouring pixels. In turn the water appears less rough.
// file: water2.fx float4 HighFidelityPS(...) : COLOR { // (...) // calculate the normal we will be using for the water surface float4 W0 = tex2D( NormalSampler0, inV.mLayer0 ); float4 W1 = tex2D( NormalSampler1, inV.mLayer1 ); float4 W2 = tex2D( NormalSampler2, inV.mLayer2 ); float4 W3 = tex2D( NormalSampler3, inV.mLayer3 ); float4 sum = W0 + W1 + W2 + W3; float waveCrest = saturate( sum.a - waveCrestThreshold ); // (...) // Lerp in a wave crest refractedPixels.xyz = lerp( refractedPixels.xyz, waveCrestColor, ( 1 - waterTexture.a ) * waveCrest); // (...) }
The value inside waterTexture.a is the value we're painting with the foam brush described earlier. The value inside waveCrest is computed according to the alpha channel of the water normal maps. By default, the waveCrestThreshold is 1 which allows water to not have foam at all.
We need the blue brush (the one that increases) to decrease the foam on the water: by default the value is 0 and through the computation done (1 - waterTxture.a) the resulting value is 1. By default all the water will have foam assuming that the water normal maps have support it. If this is supported than the waveCrest value will be different on all pixels and ranging between 0 and 1. In turn this generates white shapes on top of the water that can be seen as foam.
An environment map from the OpenGL tutorial series on learnopengl.com
An environment map is essentially what it describes: a mapping of the environment. It is commonly used to fake reflections. You can use it to answer questions such as 'if I look into the mirror, what is it that I see?'.
Environment maps are typically generated beforehand: generating these from scratch for every frame is extremely expensive and would stall any game to a hold. Only recently, with ray tracing and de-noising technologies, are we able to partially compute these reflections in real time.
Environment maps are also commonly named cube maps or sky boxes. The former because you can imagine, given the image above, that you can fold it into a cube. That cube is always rendered last - behind everything else. The latter is because typically it is a sky that is being rendered.
Water in Supreme Commander extensively uses environment maps to allow the reflections of the water to match the environment. Unit reflections are also taken into account - these are generated dynamically. Both of these effects can be especially seen when you flatten the water.
A piece of water that has been flattened - clearly showing the environment map used for reflections
In the tool window we can see that the default environment map is:
/textures/engine/waterCubemap.dds
When we load it in we can argue that it is cloudy on almost every single custom map out there. The various sides of the environment map are available in the various different layers.
The default environment map opened in Gimp
The game provides a bunch of environment maps by default. These are used throughout the default skirmish and campaign maps. Assuming that you have extracted the textures properly previously, you can find them at:
%InstallationFolder%/textures/environment/
Inside you'll find a bunch of environment maps:
There is no easy way to view these through the Windows Explorer. I'll show a few of them as an example.
EnvCube_Desert01a,dds
EnvCube_RedRocks08a.dds
EnvCube_Tundra03a.dds
The images appear to be of low quality but remember - water doesn't reflect them equally. In practice it is more of a look-up map for coloring the water than accurately reflecting the environment.
Select the Water layer and then click on 'Water Properties' in the toolbar of the editor. The tool window will respond and change into a 'Water Properties' window. For this article we're interested in the 'Texure Maps' and particularly in the 'Environment' texture.
At this point I assume that you have extracted all the textures the game has to offer, as described in the frequently asked questions (FAQ) section of the introduction. Click on the '(...)' button next to the environment texture and navigate towards:
Choose any of the environment maps available and start experimenting with them.
A visual comparison of the changes to the surface of the water. Especially visible when the water is flattened
You can store environment maps inside your map folder. For stratum textures, decal textures and props there is a specific location where these should be stored. For water there is no hierarchy that you need to use in order for the game to find the files. It is good practice to store them inside the 'env' folder that the other textures require in order to function.
If you know more on how to format the environment maps such that Supreme Commander can interpret it properly, feel free to contact me and I'll update this article.
Water with and without environment reflections
The editor or the game cannot find your environment map and therefore uses the default texture to make sure at least some texture can be loaded and shown. The default texture doesn't have the correct layout and therefore there are generally no reflections.
One cause is that the textures that you unpacked are at the wrong location. Make sure that the paths are: Good: /textures/environment/EnvCube_Desert02a.dds Bad: /gamedata/textures/environment/EnvCube_Desert02a.dds
For more information on environment maps:
For more information on how one frame in Supreme Commander is rendered:
This is part of a series on making maps in Supreme Commander. You can view the other parts at: <TODO>
Water that is pixelated has been a common discussion between map developers in various Discords, fora and other chat applications. As an example:
This is a bug within the editor: some setting is off and the high fidelity version of the water isn't generated properly in turn. This happens both in the editor and, because it uses the same code to generate the water, in game too.
A clear example is the map 'Open Waters':
The top left corner has the smooth, correct version of the water. Where as the bottom right corner has the incorrect, pixelated water.
Typically this can be fixed by just saving the map again. There are cases when this doesn't work however. In those cases you have to change some setting of the water, such as notch up the water slightly, just to notch it back down to the value it was before. I assume some state is corrupted, disabling the generation of high fidelity water. By changing the settings all of the state is replaced and then high fidelity water can be generated both in the editor and in game.
You can adjust the height water property in the GPG editor by enabling the water layer, edit the water properties and then change the surface height just to change it back again.
Considering the engine is from 2007 this is likely intended behavior instead of a bug. Which makes it impossible to address directly, we can only circumvent it. The behavior only applies in game - the old GPG editor and the new Ozonex editor do not have this issue.
Lets start with an example:
If you look closely you'll notice that the top part of the island is pixelated where as the bottom part is sharp. If you zoom out further the rest of the island is pixelated too. If you zoom in further all of the islands shores are sharp again.
I suspect this is an optimization from the engine- graphic cards weren't as good in 2007 as they are now. Rendering high fidelity water at such heights is, generally, aesthetically the same as rendering a lower quality version of the water. One can describe it is as a Level of Detail (LOD) for the water.
The change of water is visible because of the surface color of the water in combination with the color lerp. The water at the shore has a constant color applied to it. Because bits and pieces of water dissapear when you zoom out, the color at those pixels jump slightly. This causes the pixelation to be (clearly) visible. As an example:
I've increased the contrast of the shores to clearly show that the water is still being changed, but that the change is less visible. the change is aesthetically the same when the water has no surface color at all near the shore.
The color lerp stands for 'Color Linear Interpolation' which takes the depth as an argument of its function. The min (no depth, at the shore) and max (deepest point of the water) are then used to interpolate the surface color which is then added to the color of the water. I'm not going in depth any further because that is beyond the point of this article :).
You can adjust the color lerp min water property in the GPG editor by enabling the water layer, edit the water properties and then change the color lerp min property. The lower the properly the less visible the change will be.
Oh - that kind of spilling. I thought you were talking about economical spilling, e.g., spilling to allies.
How is the spilling lagging the game? I'd love to know more about that, seems that it wouldn't be that expensive to compute each tick.
Bring on the data .
And I do use the harbinger's reclaim ability - it's very, very useful. The context is surrounding Rainmakers, so therefore not completely related to a normal game or ladder.
I can't find any message being made with the words 'bottleneck' or 'cleared', can you be more specific?
@Pearl12 I spoke with both Speed2 and Balthazar about this, it doesn't appear to be promising. The data in the console command ren_ShowNetworkStats does not appear to be accessible, and without that no comparison can be done.
Balthazar mentioned that the following snippet may show that you are the one that is slowing down the game:
ForkThread(function() local time1, time2 = GetGameTimeSeconds(), GetSystemTimeSeconds() WaitSeconds(1) time1, time2 = GetGameTimeSeconds() - time1, GetSystemTimeSeconds() - time2 LOG(time1 / time2) end)
But it may not be reliable.
Another approach is to keep track of the current sim rate of a game on a per map basis. In the long run, but that would be a long run, players with good CPU's will have a better average than players with a poor CPU. Since players with a poor CPU (or throttling) will always slow down the game at some point, where as when you play with only good CPU's this wouldn't happen.
I've looked into it, so far haven't found a way to retrieve all the current sim rates of all players. I tried with:
GetSessionClients() Retrieves ping, authorized sources, ejected by, and how long the player has been 'silent' with regard to packages - but no sim rate
GetSimRate() Retrieves the current sim rate, regardless of your own (maximum) sim rate
GetSimTicksPerSecond() Always returns 10
You can make it map (size) or player number dependent. I just need access to the data in that console command. It is in the client, just maybe out of reach.
For this article Photoshop is used. The tasks in this article can be done with Gimp too, according to the internet. I personally do not have experience with Gimp and therefore cannot write on an article on it.
Normal maps are used throughout games to create a sense of detail on entities. The geometry of an entity is generally limited - geometry used to be relatively expensive to process. Today, in the (more) modern age, geometry is no longer a limiting factor and normal maps are replaced with PBR maps - which is topic that needs an article or 10 on its own.
Supreme Commander uses normal maps extensively in order to provide the world with detail. There are two types of normal maps used throughout the game.
The typical purple normal map commonly used on units and as a strata normal map
A more uncommon format for normal maps, used for decals to add in detail into the terrain
A bump map is in its essence a single channel map that describes some offset to a surface. It is used in various applications:
Within Supreme Commander height maps are essentially the same as bump maps - they both use only one channel and are therefore interpreted as a gradient between black (value of 0.0) and white (value of 1.0). A difference is that height maps use 16 bits per pixel, where as a bump map generally only uses 8 bits per pixel.
The bump map that we'll work with
When you have a bump map then the job is a breeze. Open the bump map and save it as a .dds within Photoshop. A window pops up, the following parameters are relevant:
The format of the dds file. The format BC3 RGBA 8bpp | interpolated alpha will result in the format of a purple normal map. The format BC5 RG 8bpp | normal map will result in the format of an orange normal map.
Allows you to convert a texture into a normal map of either kind, given the format. Either normal map options work - their exact computation differs slightly. For this article describing the difference is too much.
Determines what value should be used as the height. Generally bump maps will have the same value in all three channels. Generating from a diffuse texture on the other hand can significantly change the results, depending on the option set.
Essentially what this option is asking is how it can convert the given texture to a texture with only one channel - and then use that channel to construct the normal map.
A slice with a purple normal map on top of a slice with the orange normal map
The orange normal maps used in Supreme Commander are overall quite severe in their bumpiness. The orange normal map used in this article will be barely visible when placed as a decal. You can fix this by increasing the contrast of the bump map before generating a normal map from it.
This task is a bit more involved but can be done through a series of steps. We again assume that we start off with a bump map. Essentially both representations of a normal map have the same data that is stored in different channels. The steps are:
A slice with the original bump map ton top of a slice with the orange normal map with the manual approach
The results are quite different and this manual approach is generally preferred over the automatic approach.
There are numerous DDS formats out there and it is easy to get lost in the jungle. This section tries to shed light on this jungle to guide you through. Credits go out to @Balthazar for sharing his knowledge on this topic.
An overview of common uses of various DDS formats. With thanks to Balthazar
Two major factors play a role in choosing the correct format. One is the amount of applicable compression reflected in the file size, the other is resulting quality (loss) over the compression. Choosing the correct format can, for example, significantly increase the load time when loading in maps with custom textures.
There are two formats, one without an alpha channel and one with a 1 bit alpha channel. The former is commonly used for any albedo (diffuse) textures that doesn't require an alpha channel. Seraphim Specular textures are also a good candidate for the former.
There is only one applicable format. Due to the explicit alpha format pixels that are completely transparent are discarded. It is therefore especially useful for textures for the UI, emitters or simple props that have basic transparency.
There are two formats but only the more common one is used: DXT 5 ARGB 8bpp | Interpolated alpha. Due to the interpolated alpha format completely transparent pixels are kept. This is useful for textures that do have an effect even though the alpha channel may be completely black. A common example is water, which utilises the alpha channal as foam rather than transparency.
Other more common usages are Seraphim albedo (diffuse) textures, other specular textures and normals. Generally if you are unsure, this is the most safe option to choose.
The alpha channel is a common source of optimization. We'll shortly go over the various options to provide a better understanding of what they involve.
There is no alpha channel. Commonly this means the texture is completely opaque .
There is an alpha channel that can determine for each pixel whether that pixel is opaque or transparent - only the two outer extremes are available. This is generally also referred to as a binary mask.
The alpha channel is directly utilized to optimize the dds file overall - any pixel that is completely transparent is discarded. This means that if you save a file in the DXT 3 format information will always be lost if there are transparent pixels.
The alpha channel is stored and is not used as an optimization technique, e.g., no information is lost when a pixel is transparent.
For more information on why the terrain uses a different type of normal map:
For more information about the DDS format:
In an attempt to find more valuable resources that we can use to expand the communities creativity I contacted www.textures.com and asked clarifications on their license.
I did this in close contact with both Morax and Biass in order to make sure the email was of proper quality and to ensure that I am not doing something on my own accord that could potentially damage the community.
This blog is the result of that. In its essence basic textures from their website can only be embedded with individual maps and mods.
This is allowed, given some limitations and restrictions.
You can review the license at:
The response from customer support is:
If a user makes a map, and this map contains one of our regular photo textures, then that would be allowed. The texture needs to be used in the map (no bundling of generic images that are not used, ie as a texture library), and our website needs to be mentioned as the source of the texture. Again, only regular photo textures may be bundled in this way. Our special content (including 3D brushes) may not be bundled with maps and mods.
Therefore you can use (regular photo) textures bundled within a map to:
At the moment of writing custom props, emitters or other entities cannot be used when they are attached to individual maps. Because of that you cannot bundle them with a map.
You are allowed to change the textures to your liking. With or without modifications of any kind you will always need to mention the source of the (original) textures. See the next sub-section for more information.
If a map or mod uses textures from their website in any capacity, form or (modified) state then a small section must be added to the description of the map or mod:
One or more textures bundled with this project have been created with images from Textures.com. These images may not be redistributed by default. Please visit www.textures.com for more information.
Any content that is not used by the map or mod cannot be bundled with the map or mod. This is to prevent (hidden) texture libraries of any kind.
Any special content such as 3D brushes are not allowed to be bundled with a map. This includes, but is not limited to, the following sections:
Generally you can assume that if an asset costs more than one credit it is off limits.
This is not allowed.
I'm sorry to disappoint, but bundling our 3D brushes or other special content (3D Scans, PBR Materials, Decals, etc) with an map editor is not allowed. We consider a map editor to be a graphics program, so clause 6.3g would apply.
To be more specific, adding in textures from their website in any (modified) state to the repository of the map editor (which is both a game engine and open source) is not allowed. As an example, adding in brushes based on their textures to the repository is not allowed.
Developing a map with the editor that uses textures from their website is allowed, given that these textures are inside the map folder, individually bundled with the map and used in the map. See also the header 'Bundling with individual maps and mods' for more information on the limitations and restrictions.
You can review the license with regard to open source software at:
No anchor is provided on the page, search the page for 'open source' instead.
Also, our content may not be distributed under any Open Source license at all (see 6.3h of our Terms of Service).
Almost all repositories of Forged Alliance Forever are open source and therefore textures from their website, in any (modified) state, can not be used for new props, decals, or other entities that require some form of textures.
As an example, texture packs that contain new brushes for the editor but are distributed separately from the editor is not allowed.
For completeness the full email conversation with customer support:
The initial email send out to customer support
Dear support of Textures.com, The purpose of this email is to ask questions with regard to the licensing surrounding the assets you provide on your website. The context of this email is a community that grew around a custom made client for the game Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. You can find more information on this community at: - https://www.faforever.com/ As a community we've grown over the past years and we keep trying to grow. The majority of contributions are open source, and the other half can be publicly accessed but is not open source. That being said, I do not represent the community in any form. The purpose of this email is to gain information and explore possibilities. Our custom map editor The community has made a custom map editor over the years. We use brushes to sculpt the terrain of maps. The better the brush, the easier it becomes to achieve some effect. For more information on the editor: - https://github.com/ozonexo3/FAForeverMapEditor The editor is not an engine, but it is not far off. The editor is open source. Are we allowed to bundle brushes from your website such that all our content creators can easily access these new brushes? Specifically we're talking about these brushes: - https://www.textures.com/browse/3d-brushes/114539 Our custom assets to the game As a community we want to keep striving towards adding new assets to the game such that our content creators can toy around with these and come up with refreshing ideas. This can be anything from bits and pieces of code, props (models, textures) to decals (textures). For more information see: - https://github.com/FAForever/fa This project is not an engine, it does facilitate an engine (the game itself). The project is open source. Are we allowed to bundle (un)modified versions of your assets into the project to facilitate new strata (terrain textures, generally unmodified), decals (generally modified textures) and props (both modified and unmodified textures) of all sorts? This would allow content makers to use the same assets throughout various maps, mods and other forms of contribution. Content in maps and mods Users in the community can upload and maintain their own maps and mods. In turn, these can be downloaded by other users to play with. Maps and mods are, at the moment of writing, not open source. However, downloading a map and / or mod involves downloading some folder hierarchy in which assets (such as textures from your site) can be found without any hassle and this can be done by any user from the community (with a copy of the original game). Are our content makers allowed to have such assets inside their maps / mods, assuming they are being used by the map / mod? And does this require a disclaimer including a reference to your website? Feel free to ask if you have any questions, With kind regards, (Jip) Willem Wijnia
The initial response
Hi Willem, Thanks for your email. I'm sorry to disappoint, but bundling our 3D brushes or other special content (3D Scans, PBR Materials, Decals, etc) with an map editor is not allowed. We consider a map editor to be a graphics program, so clause 6.3g would apply. Also, our content may not be distributed under any Open Source license at all (see 6.3h of our Terms of Service). Unfortunately we cannot make any exceptions, it would be too confusing. Other users would see our materials being distributed with such a map editor (for example), and assume this is allowed. Kind regards, Marcel www.textures.com
Requesting a clarification on the response
Hi Marcel, Thank you for your honest reply - I understand that no exceptions can be made. I do need to dive a bit deeper into the section of content on maps and / or mods - just to verify. I don't feel you've concretely answered this in your response. On your website you describe in your license the following: - https://www.textures.com/faq-license.html#anchor-3dmodel It mentions 'game levels' and '3d models' but it also explicitly mentions the act of selling - our maps (game levels) and mods (3d models, new units) are not sold. They are free of charge to anyone who has a product key of the original game linked with their Steam account. Do our maps and mods fall under this part of the license, allowing us to have maps with custom textures from your website given that the message has been provided in the documentation? The reason I am asking is because I am making a tutorial series on how to add in custom content into maps, such as strata textures and decals. If this isn't allowed then I will reference that your website is not an applicable source and carefully explain why that is. With kind regards, (Jip) Willem Wijnia
Answer to the clarification
Hi Willem, Bundling brushes with a map editor is not allowed, even if you give them away for free. 6.3.g or our ToS refers to 'bundling', it makes no distinction between selling or offering for free. If we would allow this, then anybody could take our entire collection and bundle it with their paint app / 3D app, editor, engine, etc. Do our maps and mods fall under this part of the license, allowing us to have maps with custom textures from your website given that the message has been provided in the documentation? Ah sorry, I did forget to answer that. If a user makes a map, and this map contains one of our regular photo textures, then that would be allowed. The texture needs to be used in the map (no bundling of generic images that are not used, ie as a texture library), and our website needs to be mentioned as the source of the texture. Again, only regular photo textures may be bundled in this way. Our special content (including 3D brushes) may not be bundled with maps and mods. Kind regards, Marcel www.textures.com
Permission to make this email public
Dear Marcel, Thank you for the quick and elaborate response! As a last question, can I make this email public on our forums so that other people will not ask the same questions to you in the near future? That will save us both time, one way or another. With kind regards, (Jip) Willem Wijnia
Response, permission granted
Hi Willem, Sure, but I would post the relevant bits only, so as not to confuse people. Kind regards, Marcel www.textures.com
Joining in the discussion here - what you are asking requires some hefty engineers (expertise) and a ton of time. Solutions, such as the UI freeze when pausing are here not because we want them to be but because there is no alternative that is valid given the constraints.
An lead engineer on Supreme Commander mentions the majority of functionality that you mention - they didn't do all of it because they didn't have the budget nor the time (and perhaps: lacking the experience / expertise) to get it all done. And they had more expertise, more time and more budget than we do. For more information on the video: