Adventures in texture land.

After checking in the new camera and grid code for the project, I spent the the afternoon trying to figure out how to get the different colors onto our ships including a cool glow effect.

Here’s what I came up with.

Through a much frustration and a little magic from the “Advanced 3D Game Programming” book, I finally got the texture ops to work.

Scott helped me convert Alex’s battleship map into a .tga with an alpha channel.

The white parts have no alpha. This may come back to bite me (as you’ll see later), but I’m plowing through with this.

First I just tried this:

SetTextureColorStage(g_pDevice, 0, D3DTA_TEXTURE, D3DTOP_SELECTARG1, 0);

Notice how you can see space and other parts of the ship behind it? That’s where I think having the alpha channel hurt me. Now I had to worry about the alpha channel.

Adding a line to support the alpha didn’t work too great. I got the parts of the ship filled in, but they weren’t colored. Check this out:

SetTextureAlphaStage(g_pDevice, 0, D3DTA_DIFFUSE, D3DTOP_SELECTARG1, 0);

Finally, after mucking with the flags for many minutes, I came up with the combination that works:

SetTextureColorStage(g_pDevice, 0, D3DTA_TEXTURE, D3DTOP_BLENDTEXTUREALPHA,

                     D3DTA_DIFFUSE);

SetTextureAlphaStage(g_pDevice, 0, D3DTA_DIFFUSE, D3DTOP_SELECTARG1, 0);

Boy, that was enough for today. I’m not finished yet though…

I’m working on getting a cool glow effect on the ships now. Scott’s helping me out with the glow maps and Ian sent me a link to some cool technology that’ll help. Think TRON2.0

    http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/io/4000/D3DTutorial_EffectsNV.pdf

Joe