Screenshots

[Commander_X]

Lave is most famous for its vast rain forests and the Laveian tree grub.
Now with external diffuse, and normal&specular map [*]

[*] Code changes required

[another_commander]

Very intrigued to test this...

[Commander_X]

The new PM I just sent might help deal with the intrigue.

[another_commander]

Thank you sir! Much appreciated.

[elite-player]

Lave looks so cool.

[phkb]

Wow. Just wow.

[another_commander]

[spud42]

outstanding as usual..

[Cmd. Cheyd]

Wait a min... Is there support for shady planets now?!?
I might get lured back if there is....

[Cody]

Wait a min... Is there support for shady planets now?!?
I might get lured back if there is....

<chuckles>

[another_commander]

Wait a min... Is there support for shady planets now?!?
I might get lured back if there is....

What, you mean like this?

[Commander_X]

Wait a min... Is there support for shady planets now?!? [...]

From a technical perspective, support was in since quite sometimes back (a_c might know better the version, I think he tweaked the internals to allow for the generated planets to have both diffuse and normal/specular maps). All the recent change did was to allow for _external_ normal/specular maps too.

<sighs>If only there were someone able to replace and enhance the tremendous work which is Povray Planets with something even more tremendous ...

[smcameron]

If only there were someone able to replace and enhance the tremendous work which is Povray Planets with something even more tremendous

What are you guys doing for gas giants? I made a gas giant texture making program called gaseous-giganticus which works pretty well. It produces cubemap images (not sure if those can be used by oolite, but if not the kerbal space program modders have come up with a procedure to make them equirectangular.) It's not fast enough for real-time generation, but fine for offline (typically takes a few minutes).

This is a fairly typical result:

[another_commander]

Gas giants are treated no differently than other planets, provided that the right textures are present. The Povray Planets OXP does include some GG textures and they are in cubemap format (straight line type), which Oolite supports. You can see below an example of what it currently looks like. For conversions between cubemap and equirectangular I have found this site very useful, but will definitely check out the KSP guys' thingy, as well as your software for creating GG textures.

[another_commander]

Here is one of smcameron's gas giants rendered in Oolite. This is converted from images planet-texture0-1 to 0-5 and then switched over to equirectangular format. I have to say, these gas giant textures are really nice.