Modding suggestion

I’m all for texture editing as long as it can be regulated in some way… otherwise what would stop people from making xray texture packs by stripping stone down to a transparent mesh. It would hurt any possible stability that the economy might have.

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Let me try and explain how it works, then:

The base version of sedimentary rock has two different tiling materials: one applied to the top and bottom of the block, and one applied to the sides. Both of these are 3x3 tiles, which means they have nine individual textures that go together to make a three metre-by-three metre square that tiles with the next three-by-three square, etc. Most of the natural base materials like rock and grass work in this way; a larger tile size means you minimise obviously repeating details.

Each ‘texture’ in the tile actually has at least three or up to five maps that it needs to render properly - there’s the colour map(which for tintable blocks is usually mostly white), the gradient map(a greyscale version of the tintable texture), the mask map(which indicates what parts are tintable), the normal map(complicated but important, tells the engine how to light the texture), the specular map(best used with the normal map, tells the engine how shiny a surface is), and some materials also have an emissive map which is used to make things glow.

Sedimentary rock uses all of these maps except for emissive, which means that ultimately it uses 90 individual 256*256 images to create the full appearance of the blocktype. Most of those images are just greyscale so they can be packed into individual channels in a DDS file - gradient maps and mask maps are packed into the same DDS, colour maps have their own DDS because they can potentially be full RGB with optional alpha channel, normal maps have their own DDS because they use at least two colour channels, and specular and emissive maps are also packed together because they’re just greyscale masks.

I use Photoshop for most of my texture work, and Zbrush to create most of the normal maps that form the basis of the textures. We also have some tools that help with cutting up and packing the textures, as well as assigning them to the atlases used by the game to assign the different textures to the blocks, but theoretically you can do all or most of the work of making new textures with just an image editor that supports DDS format.

It’s not very straightforward for a beginner, unfortunately - our game is a lot more complex visually than Minecraft.

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So just for the sake of covering bases. Because this is a definite concern though I think its possibly a non-issue because of how the game handles the voxels. Can you xray through blocks by removing their texture or replacing the texture with a fully transparent layer.

No :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Then let the retexturing begin. lol though for someone learning the textures for Boundless it prolly wouldn’t go much faster than a block a day.

This is so fascinating to me. Thank you for your incredibly helpful response! I might try to break this all down and test working on my own texture sometime.