Frameless glass

ikr, nothing says it has to be clear. Maybe useful if the dev’s posted some screen shots of what they are limited to, maybe some color/texture/frame combinations available,and do some voting. just an idea so we can get an idea.

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You don’t need frames on glass. It can be a slight off color but still see through. It just needs a slight tint to it for normal colored glass. Then it would be possible to use other items in the game to create color dye to turn them different colors. Really isn’t that difficult to make them look good.

The back end coding side of it all is a different story but making things look good visually isn’t really that difficult when there are thousands of games that have used glass in a variety of different qualities and uses.

For me, the only reason to ever make glass is to use it in a recipe to make something else. I will never use the current glass block in the game cause it looks ugly.

That’s called opacity. The game engine allows one bit for opacity. 1= fully opaque (solid), 0= no opacity (transparent). There is no level of in between.
This is not a case of “oh golly it’s simple!” It’s much more complex, and lots of tricks and techniques have been tried.

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Minecraft, for example, does the same thing: block texture textels can either be opaque, or completely transparent, but not semi-transparent (tinted).

I do wonder if we could pull off a borderless variant of the Minecraft texture - maybe by having the “streaks” clustered near the edges of the texture

The game could support semi-transparent textures, but judging from what Luca’s been saying, that would probably involve an engine overhaul (I doubt we want to wait that much longer), and even then would still be a decent performance hit (which might make things like PS4 support more difficult, and require more tradeoffs with other graphical features)

Actually Minecraft does have tinted glass in many colors. However the way the Boundless engine was created it doesn’t have the ability to do that. And that’s fine. The absence of tinted glass is not gonna break the game for me. We just need to learn to build without it. I’d much rather have the game run smoothly then try and implement something that could potentially drop my FPS.

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Doh, so it does :+1:

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Havok, that’s why I said from a coding back end it’s a different story. The idea of frameless glass blocks is a simple one. Implementation may not be. I don’t need to be corrected on the reality of this.

Having smaller frames down to almost completely unnoticeable is by far the easiest solution to implement. That sounds more like an art texture thing than a coding issue.

If this is a game engine thing that they need to make a modification to, then the question that needs to be answered is how expensive is making that change. Is it worth it? Is the cost higher than putting in something of more content for all of the players to enjoy? Does it push release date back significantly since it’s a game engine change? Does making the game engine change open up for future possibilities with future content to make them better game features?

Product development is never simple. Which is why I mentioned the back end coding part in my post is why it probably is complicated to do.

i think it could look better if its same but less dense
flatter glass glass is to thick in boundless

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Totally agree. Having the frames so far apart is one reason it looks so bad. If glass blocks only had a frame on one side it would look significantly better and would be much easier to see out of cause you wouldn’t be looking through two sets of frames.

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Looks like something that they’ve played around with a fair bit, and sounds like the current texture is a compromise on that point, too

Might be interesting to play more w/ custom mipmaps (thick at a distance, thin up close)?

Possible. They already have the tech in place for how Warps and Portals work with the blurry edge. They can do the same with glass windows and it would work out just fine.

Doubt that’s applicable to blocks. Portals/warps are closer to props (e.g. premade models like doors/etc) from my understanding. Blocks do have something similar with texture blending though, and it’s pretty darn expensive to compute already, IIRC

Here’s an idea of what one sided framed glass could look like.
22230A09-DDF9-47CE-AF0B-82FD16B57962

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yep i think it could use a secondary frame but closer together
like an actual real window then the wood wood look like sticks with metal brackets

any changes of pulling that out off ya magic hat @Cookviper

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I use the thin frame glass texture and it’s great!

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I’ve seen it mentioned a couple times now, about the glass frames or the blocks disappearing at a distance, and not rendering. I’m like “YES”, that’s a good thing. Glass does disappear at a distance anyway. So if it looks like it is not there sometimes, that’s the Best. It’s the point of a window. I don’t want to see a bunch of frames so i can say there must be a window. Realistically it would look like a giant hole.

This would make peoples underwater homes look sooo much better to. It would be obvious that there is a window there because the water isn’t coming in.

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I’m with Zina here. I think the frames disappearing at a distance is a GOOD THING.
Make the frames thinner and let the mipmaps take them out when you’re farther away.

–Oh, and we need to be able to have half-thickness glass blocks.
We don’t need all the possible chisel shapes, but half-thickness is a MUST.

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I’d love to see the option to have glass blocks morph together like the sign modules do so we could have large walls of glass.

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This would be good, except that complex shapes would be …difficult.

I have a dome shape over the top of my build. I can’t imagine an intelligent way to make that work.

You’d have to combine it with different blocks to make it look well. That’s what I’d do.