@Ivan I love your new version. I would go for it. This way we don't even need the knob in the center and it should be fairly easy for Andrei as well. Just one point more for the needle and moving the rotation center outside the pointer. You probably could make the design a little softer by making a soft corner at the lower right. The corner doesn't need to be that sharp.
And I wouldn't go for a more detailed dial since the game in itself hasn't much detail. Therefore I feel it's more natural to keep the dial simple also. In my opinion we could skip the "x1000". Almost no other game has that. So nobody will be confused from leaving it out.
@Andrei
Your style of dial is outside my capabilities right now. It's more complicated than simply drawing a red triangle as a needle (what we have now).
No big deal. I just wanted to throw in something different and I think Ivan nailed it anyway. :)
The only thing I fear is that we probably can't use his font for the numbers outside the wheel if I got you right. And this is a shame since Ivans design looks not only good because of the superior arrangement and proportions but as well because of the snappier font face.
If you can manage to implement Ivans new proposal I wouldn't even feel the need to turn of the display of this dial wheel. It just looks so much better than the two original dials.
Last edit: Onsemeliot 2015-05-11
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
@Andrei can you currently do any of the following?
1. use an image for the pointer needle
Yes I think I can do that. I'll try to do this, then if I'm successful I'll return to ask for the needle texture with proper info.
I really like your latest dial exactly how it is (although I guess you can remove the x1000 for a cleaner look). However remember that the bad font problem for "km/h" and "mph" remains, so for now I think we'll have to settle with two different dial textures, one for km/h and the other for mph.
Last edit: Andrei 2015-05-11
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
@Ivan [...] You probably could make the design a little softer by making a soft corner at the lower right. The corner doesn't need to be that sharp.
I am not a graphical artist but in my opinion the bottom-right corner should be kept sharp -- in order to complement the sharp corners of the map on the left.
EDIT: Keep in mind that when implemented, the unified dial will be bigger and moved right and down a bit:
If it sits so close to the screen corner I agree the corner of the dial should stay sharp. Even if I would prefer a little more distance I can understand why it might be better to orient it equally to the map. (Maybe we could shrink the hudmap and the dial to the same size and move both a little away from the screen corners.)
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
After looking at some driver view photos, I would suggest "MPH" and "km/h".
I attached various textures that might be useful using the currently used Nimbus Mono font. Montserrat unfortunately is not monospace and I couldn't find a freely licensed monospace font better suited than Nimbus Mono for the layout used by Trigger. Side note: As you can see, the texture space is very inefficiently used. About 50% vertical space is unused and the horizontal gaps between fonts seem to be wider than necessary as well.
I rendered the font again at higher resolution (2048px instead of 512), without outlines. It seems to work better, even with snow levels. @Andrei perhaps with this no-outline, font, MPH and km/h can be drawn live if you can easily test it.
We might want to make use of the font texture more effective later.
@ Iwan please give the needle texture as a 128x128 PNG with the needle on its side from left to right, in the center, like in attached picture.
As for the new consolefont.png I like it. In later releases we should probably add a shadowed font as well for non-dial text (menu, messages, etc.) for an effect similar to what we see in Onsemeliot's screenshot here. But that can wait, I already have my hands full.
EDIT: back to the requested needle texture, of course you can make most out of the 128 pixels and expand the needle near the image border for better quality.
Looking forward to being able to check which looks better. This version also has a thin transparent border, not sure it avoids texture bleeding or anything.
Yes, Ivans needle looks better. This is probably because the background in my original needle was white - which presumably causes the bright halo which really looks ugly. The new version shouldn't have this issue.
I just feel the strong black border doesn't look so good on bright backgrounds and a little shadowing adds some rafinesse to the whole thing. Surely the plain needle doesn't look bad, but it's plain nonetheless.
Last edit: Onsemeliot 2015-05-12
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
@ Onsemeliot I believe you attached the wrong file. In game it looked the same and when I did a MD5 checksum it was indeed identical to your previous texture.
Also note: the game uses this texture as "rev_needle.png".
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I still have a preference for Iwan's texture however, no offense! The reason is that, being flat instead of shaded, it "goes" better with the rest of the dial which is also flat. Your needle would look better put on a shaded non-translucent rev dial, in my non-graphics designer opinion.
Iwan could improve on his own texture by removing the black border at the bottom of the needle, maybe.
You are right Andrei. Ivans needle still looks better in the game. Maybe he can make the black border a little thinner. Then, in my opinion, it would look better on bright maps. Or it might be even better to just make the border 50 % transparent.
Last edit: Onsemeliot 2015-05-12
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I don't quite see it but it's probably the same effect that seems to happen with the font (to me it looks like it has a tiny black border)
It seems that alpha values which are not 100% transparent use the image background color value to fill the semi-transparent pixels... Not sure why, probably the OpenGL method of drawing or storing the texture doesn't support semi-transparency... I remember that one of the methods of using textures in Blender 3D allowed 100% transparency but had the same effect on the "edges" where the pixel alpha value wasn't max or min.
I don't think solving this has to be high priority.
Also, I would hope for this new dial to be the default one in the template config.
Looking forward to having it in the game. :)
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I'm sure it is for the same reason my needle had this halo. But I think it is a good thing to have this tiny darker line in order to seperate it from the background. I just think your needle has still a too heavy outline on bright levels. But this is only a very tiny detail I could easily tolerate.
I'm very happy about this new dial. It does a lot to the style of the game.
I would love to have a real font face in the game making the display of texts much easier. I see absolutely no reason to have this huge texts in the menu for example. I guess it was opportune when there wheren't many maps to choose from, but now flipping through many pages is much less fun than the ability to display more information on one screen with a sharp smaller font face.
How ever: Andreis work is fantastic. I'm very happy you stepped in. For so many years it was just an unrealistic dream to enhance the game itself and now you make it happen. :)
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Moved game binaries to "bin" folder. got a bit carried away, this wasn't really a goal.
To do:
Remove "config.h" file.
Add "vehicles.config" file.
Add menu and credits background images.
Add "install" and possibly "uninstall" targets to Makefile (I will need advice).
Build instructions:
Download the tar.bz2 below, check the MD5 sum, extract to a directory of your choice, CD to it and run:
make
cd ./bin
./trigger
Bugs:
Game can't find the "data" folder unless the working directory is where the executable is.
For example:
./bin/trigger
doesn't work, but
cd ./bin
./trigger
does work. This has to do with the data folder being hardcoded to be "../data". A possible fix is to make the executable figure out what directory it's in, and use that information to solve relative paths.
I would love to have a real font face in the game making the display of texts much easier. I see absolutely no reason to have this huge texts in the menu for example. I guess it was opportune when there wheren't many maps to choose from, but now flipping through many pages is much less fun than the ability to display more information on one screen with a sharp smaller font face.
I'll put fonts on my To-Do list but don't expect it to happen soon. SDL seems to have some TTF support but I can't just jump in without understanding how Trigger actually prints the text now. So it's probably like the tip of the iceberg: not quite as small as it looks.
As for selecting maps I want to add tiles with a small screenshot for each race, but that's not going to happen very soon either, sorry.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Make output, especially noticeable in the last line, is somewhat strange. It does compile successfully though. :)
@Onsimeliot currently Trigger only scales properly with 4:3 aspect rato. You use 16:10. Looks like we didn't write it up as a bug report yet. I'm not sure if it affects fonts but I think it does affect 3D and GUI textures.
km/h doesn't seem to be aligned correctly
(see attached "speed-bounds.jpg") Ideally, the speed number would be right-aligned (in 104, 34 and 4km/h, the "4" would always be at the exact same position) and the right edge of the speed number and the label would have the same x axis value as well. I also attached an image "-pos1" of what I envisioned where the number and label should be positioned (relative to the background) and an alternative version "-pos2", which might be better, as it nearly doesn't overlap with the gear number circle "area".
One trick would be to have the rendered string contain leading spaces (3 total number and 4 total label characters)
If however right-aligning is too complicated, we'll have to figure out a good-looking center-aligned position for speed and label.
This means the former views are gone. Personally I don't mind removing the them. @Onsimeliot are you OK with it?
As for selecting maps I want to add tiles with a small screenshot for each race, but that's not going to happen very soon either, sorry.
I'd love to have that eventually. We have a ticket for the feature as well with some discussion (by non-programmers :) ): https://sourceforge.net/p/trigger-rally/feature-requests/21/ You might want to get started with map images instead of screenshots.
PS: @Andrei, @Onsimeliot are there changes you would want to have in the next version?
@Onsimeliot, I'm sure you want your missing maps and events to be included. Do you have the time to do it in svn or should I do it for you?
I for one want to remove the trademark car textures and names so that the default state of this project is open source licensed. I can do the necessary svn changes and they will probably not cause merge conflicts. I would also update doc/DATA_AUTHORS.txt what do you think?
The Make output should absolutely, positively not look like that. I've never had that problem myself -- what shell are you using?
If however right-aligning is too complicated, we'll have to figure out a good-looking center-aligned position for speed and label.
Actually, right-aligning is dead easy thanks to Jasmine's hard work. I just thought it would make more sense to center-align the speed. I'll try to implement "-pos2" but keep in mind that a smaller "MPH" and "km/h" will not look very good.
I for one want to remove the trademark car textures and names so that the default state of this project is open source licensed. I can do the necessary svn changes and they will probably not cause merge conflicts. I would also update doc/DATA_AUTHORS.txt what do you think?
I am OK with this in principle, but I would hope the "new" car textures are replaced again in the long run (no offense). We can have much prettier cars than this. The attached pictures will show my heavy bias towards yellow+blue paintjobs but you get the idea: those cars look pretty.
PS: @Andrei, @Onsimeliot are there changes you would want to have in the next version?
I am currently thinking about:
Add the new maps by Onsemeliot.
Try to fix the dial scaling problem.
Try to add "make install" and "make uninstall" and fix what Make prints (if it needs to be).
Add background images for menu and credits.
Try to add global vehicles.config file and take away maps' control of the vehicle.
Remove config.h file.
Try to fix "data not found" bug.
Maybe add a second "consolefont.png".
About that last idea, I would like to try out a shaded version of "consolefont2.png". Could you create something similar to the attached "Trigger Rally" image? From what I've seen in the code we can have multiple console fonts, so we can use the shaded version where shading would be nice (such as in menus with a background image).
currently Trigger only scales properly with 4:3 aspect rato. You use 16:10. ... I'm not sure if it affects fonts but I think it does affect 3D and GUI textures.
No, I think the 3D is fine. I tested it in different aspect ratios. It's just the new dial. (The old ones where always proportional as well.)
This means the former views are gone. Personally I don't mind removing the them. @Onsimeliot are you OK with it?
Yes. I won't miss them.
You might want to get started with map images instead of screenshots.
@Onsimeliot, I'm sure you want your missing maps and events to be included. Do you have the time to do it in svn or should I do it for you?
Sorry for my lack of independence. So far I didn't get around to work out how to deal with the SVN. Therefore I would be happy if you could add it to the SVN. You said Northern, Year Zero and Zone are in the SVN already. I couldn't find them in the content list. Therefore they are still in my list.
I for one want to remove the trademark car textures and names so that the default state of this project is open source licensed.
I have always been in favour of this. If we want to have different free textures we can still add them. (But I would consider a more convenient approach for loading different car textures in future. Especially a way to choose the texture in the game itself would be nice and possibly not too hard to code if we alter the way the textures get found and implemented.) I assume you know how to deal with this, Ivan. I'm very happy with your new textures and prefer them anyway over the original proprietary ones. We probably should change the names also. They shouldn't contain copyrighted names.
I would also update doc/DATA_AUTHORS.txt what do you think?
Please, just go for it! Thank you very much for taking on this task as well. :)
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
@Ivan I love your new version. I would go for it. This way we don't even need the knob in the center and it should be fairly easy for Andrei as well. Just one point more for the needle and moving the rotation center outside the pointer. You probably could make the design a little softer by making a soft corner at the lower right. The corner doesn't need to be that sharp.
And I wouldn't go for a more detailed dial since the game in itself hasn't much detail. Therefore I feel it's more natural to keep the dial simple also. In my opinion we could skip the "x1000". Almost no other game has that. So nobody will be confused from leaving it out.
@Andrei
No big deal. I just wanted to throw in something different and I think Ivan nailed it anyway. :)
The only thing I fear is that we probably can't use his font for the numbers outside the wheel if I got you right. And this is a shame since Ivans design looks not only good because of the superior arrangement and proportions but as well because of the snappier font face.
If you can manage to implement Ivans new proposal I wouldn't even feel the need to turn of the display of this dial wheel. It just looks so much better than the two original dials.
Last edit: Onsemeliot 2015-05-11
Yes I think I can do that. I'll try to do this, then if I'm successful I'll return to ask for the needle texture with proper info.
I really like your latest dial exactly how it is (although I guess you can remove the x1000 for a cleaner look). However remember that the bad font problem for "km/h" and "mph" remains, so for now I think we'll have to settle with two different dial textures, one for km/h and the other for mph.
Last edit: Andrei 2015-05-11
I am not a graphical artist but in my opinion the bottom-right corner should be kept sharp -- in order to complement the sharp corners of the map on the left.
EDIT: Keep in mind that when implemented, the unified dial will be bigger and moved right and down a bit:
https://sourceforge.net/p/trigger-rally/discussion/527953/thread/b362438f/a1a4/attachment/change3-3.png
Last edit: Andrei 2015-05-11
If it sits so close to the screen corner I agree the corner of the dial should stay sharp. Even if I would prefer a little more distance I can understand why it might be better to orient it equally to the map. (Maybe we could shrink the hudmap and the dial to the same size and move both a little away from the screen corners.)
After looking at some driver view photos, I would suggest "MPH" and "km/h".
I attached various textures that might be useful using the currently used Nimbus Mono font. Montserrat unfortunately is not monospace and I couldn't find a freely licensed monospace font better suited than Nimbus Mono for the layout used by Trigger. Side note: As you can see, the texture space is very inefficiently used. About 50% vertical space is unused and the horizontal gaps between fonts seem to be wider than necessary as well.
I rendered the font again at higher resolution (2048px instead of 512), without outlines. It seems to work better, even with snow levels. @Andrei perhaps with this no-outline, font, MPH and km/h can be drawn live if you can easily test it.
We might want to make use of the font texture more effective later.
@ Iwan please give the needle texture as a 128x128 PNG with the needle on its side from left to right, in the center, like in attached picture.
As for the new consolefont.png I like it. In later releases we should probably add a shadowed font as well for non-dial text (menu, messages, etc.) for an effect similar to what we see in Onsemeliot's screenshot here. But that can wait, I already have my hands full.
EDIT: back to the requested needle texture, of course you can make most out of the 128 pixels and expand the needle near the image border for better quality.
Last edit: Andrei 2015-05-12
I would vote for this needle since it adds some decent shading. It's an image anyways.
Last edit: Onsemeliot 2015-05-12
Looking forward to being able to check which looks better. This version also has a thin transparent border, not sure it avoids texture bleeding or anything.
Last edit: qubodup 2015-05-12
Here are the screenshots of the partial implementation.
Personally I like Iwan's version more because it looks cleaner.
Yes, Ivans needle looks better. This is probably because the background in my original needle was white - which presumably causes the bright halo which really looks ugly. The new version shouldn't have this issue.
I just feel the strong black border doesn't look so good on bright backgrounds and a little shadowing adds some rafinesse to the whole thing. Surely the plain needle doesn't look bad, but it's plain nonetheless.
Last edit: Onsemeliot 2015-05-12
@ Onsemeliot I believe you attached the wrong file. In game it looked the same and when I did a MD5 checksum it was indeed identical to your previous texture.
Also note: the game uses this texture as "rev_needle.png".
Sorry for that. I didn't see the file was saved into an other folder.
Last edit: Onsemeliot 2015-05-12
Good work, the halo problem was fixed.
I still have a preference for Iwan's texture however, no offense! The reason is that, being flat instead of shaded, it "goes" better with the rest of the dial which is also flat. Your needle would look better put on a shaded non-translucent rev dial, in my non-graphics designer opinion.
Iwan could improve on his own texture by removing the black border at the bottom of the needle, maybe.
You are right Andrei. Ivans needle still looks better in the game. Maybe he can make the black border a little thinner. Then, in my opinion, it would look better on bright maps. Or it might be even better to just make the border 50 % transparent.
Last edit: Onsemeliot 2015-05-12
latest try
Looking good, although it seems as if the bottom of the needle creates a new border out of nothing (see Lab Rally screenshot).
EDIT: I think this is an OpenGL issue, so maybe time spent to 100% "fix" the texture would be wasted.
Last edit: Andrei 2015-05-12
I don't quite see it but it's probably the same effect that seems to happen with the font (to me it looks like it has a tiny black border)
It seems that alpha values which are not 100% transparent use the image background color value to fill the semi-transparent pixels... Not sure why, probably the OpenGL method of drawing or storing the texture doesn't support semi-transparency... I remember that one of the methods of using textures in Blender 3D allowed 100% transparency but had the same effect on the "edges" where the pixel alpha value wasn't max or min.
I don't think solving this has to be high priority.
Also, I would hope for this new dial to be the default one in the template config.
Looking forward to having it in the game. :)
I'm sure it is for the same reason my needle had this halo. But I think it is a good thing to have this tiny darker line in order to seperate it from the background. I just think your needle has still a too heavy outline on bright levels. But this is only a very tiny detail I could easily tolerate.
I'm very happy about this new dial. It does a lot to the style of the game.
I would love to have a real font face in the game making the display of texts much easier. I see absolutely no reason to have this huge texts in the menu for example. I guess it was opportune when there wheren't many maps to choose from, but now flipping through many pages is much less fun than the ability to display more information on one screen with a sharp smaller font face.
How ever: Andreis work is fantastic. I'm very happy you stepped in. For so many years it was just an unrealistic dream to enhance the game itself and now you make it happen. :)
Changes 4
Done:
Moved game binaries to "bin" folder.got a bit carried away, this wasn't really a goal.To do:
Build instructions:
Download the tar.bz2 below, check the MD5 sum, extract to a directory of your choice, CD to it and run:
Bugs:
Game can't find the "data" folder unless the working directory is where the executable is.
For example:
doesn't work, but
does work. This has to do with the data folder being hardcoded to be "../data". A possible fix is to make the executable figure out what directory it's in, and use that information to solve relative paths.
Download:
http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=g62d18f4824e90616999663201fb84f8bd428831bd
MD5 sum:
Last edit: Andrei 2015-05-12
I'll put fonts on my To-Do list but don't expect it to happen soon. SDL seems to have some TTF support but I can't just jump in without understanding how Trigger actually prints the text now. So it's probably like the tip of the iceberg: not quite as small as it looks.
As for selecting maps I want to add tiles with a small screenshot for each race, but that's not going to happen very soon either, sorry.
The new font and the new dial look good.
Only on my system the dial is disproportionally scaled and km/h doesn't seem to be aligned correctly.
I'll look into the scaling problem for the dial. It's interesting how the map on the left doesn't seem to be distorted and the dial is.
Make output, especially noticeable in the last line, is somewhat strange. It does compile successfully though. :)
@Onsimeliot currently Trigger only scales properly with 4:3 aspect rato. You use 16:10. Looks like we didn't write it up as a bug report yet. I'm not sure if it affects fonts but I think it does affect 3D and GUI textures.
(see attached "speed-bounds.jpg") Ideally, the speed number would be right-aligned (in 104, 34 and 4km/h, the "4" would always be at the exact same position) and the right edge of the speed number and the label would have the same x axis value as well. I also attached an image "-pos1" of what I envisioned where the number and label should be positioned (relative to the background) and an alternative version "-pos2", which might be better, as it nearly doesn't overlap with the gear number circle "area".
One trick would be to have the rendered string contain leading spaces (3 total number and 4 total label characters)
If however right-aligning is too complicated, we'll have to figure out a good-looking center-aligned position for speed and label.
This means the former views are gone. Personally I don't mind removing the them. @Onsimeliot are you OK with it?
I'd love to have that eventually. We have a ticket for the feature as well with some discussion (by non-programmers :) ): https://sourceforge.net/p/trigger-rally/feature-requests/21/ You might want to get started with map images instead of screenshots.
PS: @Andrei, @Onsimeliot are there changes you would want to have in the next version?
@Onsimeliot, I'm sure you want your missing maps and events to be included. Do you have the time to do it in svn or should I do it for you?
I for one want to remove the trademark car textures and names so that the default state of this project is open source licensed. I can do the necessary svn changes and they will probably not cause merge conflicts. I would also update doc/DATA_AUTHORS.txt what do you think?
Last edit: qubodup 2015-05-13
The Make output should absolutely, positively not look like that. I've never had that problem myself -- what shell are you using?
Actually, right-aligning is dead easy thanks to Jasmine's hard work. I just thought it would make more sense to center-align the speed. I'll try to implement "-pos2" but keep in mind that a smaller "MPH" and "km/h" will not look very good.
I am OK with this in principle, but I would hope the "new" car textures are replaced again in the long run (no offense). We can have much prettier cars than this. The attached pictures will show my heavy bias towards yellow+blue paintjobs but you get the idea: those cars look pretty.
I am currently thinking about:
About that last idea, I would like to try out a shaded version of "consolefont2.png". Could you create something similar to the attached "Trigger Rally" image? From what I've seen in the code we can have multiple console fonts, so we can use the shaded version where shading would be nice (such as in menus with a background image).
Last edit: Andrei 2015-05-13
No, I think the 3D is fine. I tested it in different aspect ratios. It's just the new dial. (The old ones where always proportional as well.)
Yes. I won't miss them.
You know I made Screenshots from all maps but with the new dial we probably should redo them.
Sorry for my lack of independence. So far I didn't get around to work out how to deal with the SVN. Therefore I would be happy if you could add it to the SVN. You said Northern, Year Zero and Zone are in the SVN already. I couldn't find them in the content list. Therefore they are still in my list.
Events:
Single races:
I have always been in favour of this. If we want to have different free textures we can still add them. (But I would consider a more convenient approach for loading different car textures in future. Especially a way to choose the texture in the game itself would be nice and possibly not too hard to code if we alter the way the textures get found and implemented.) I assume you know how to deal with this, Ivan. I'm very happy with your new textures and prefer them anyway over the original proprietary ones. We probably should change the names also. They shouldn't contain copyrighted names.
Please, just go for it! Thank you very much for taking on this task as well. :)