The in-game picture shows very well another general issue with planet textures. You beautifully see the edge, where the left and right edge of the PNG are glued together on the planet surface. It's like a seam that breaks the texture.
In order to avoid this, planetary textures should always be like tiles in the horizontal direction, so that the left edge fits perfectly and seamless to the right edge. (Not so, however, for the top and bottom edge, which should create the illusion of a polar area, because they are deformed and transformed into one pixel only.)
See the textures I have posted above as an example. They are seamless.
Commander McLane's right, painting out the seam makes a whole world of difference (no pun intended) to the finished planet texture. It's quite easy to do, just swap the left & right positions of the two halves of your texture map so the seam now runs down the middle of the image. now just grab your painting tools and paint it out!
You are right. I did lost myself to much in texturing and forgot to make it seamless. The new textures I have will be seamless. I'il do it with Photoshop CS.
What did, by the way, happen to the Skyscraper planet and Borg City planet textures?
Perhaps they could be used for alien High-Tech worlds? And I happened to like them
I am pretty sure that the rich inhabitants of a rich industrial world would prefer to live not in a giant industrial area, but somewhere where there is at least a little green. Don't you think so?
Not nescessarily - assume the guys living down there are "Blue insects" or "Bony green birds" - perhaps they would like to live in a self-created hive mind environment, i.e.?
My point is, however, that the inhabitants of a rich industrial world who can afford it, most likely would prefer to live in an environment that suits not only their needs but is also pleasant to them.
Of course what seems pleasant to you depends on who you are. But my guess is that for most races in Oolite a planet completely transformed into an industrial plant would not be a pleasant natural environment.
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To make things more complicated: Perhaps we should not only take the planet's economy into consideration for texturing it, but also its description string (meaning it has to be done by hand). Just imagine you see a planet with this industrial texture on the F7-screen, and below you read that it is "fabled for its vast rain forests".
The rain forests could be under the City Skin (as in Asimov's Trantor in the Foundation Series). Only the top people of the Empire lived on Trantor and very pleasent it was too! Temperature, Climate etc were all artifically controlled under the Skin. Because these people had lived in Cities for centuries before the whole planet was enclosed they were terrified of "the outside". - "What you mean it might rain on me unexpectedly? - Arrgh the horror!" What an argirgultual race might consider pleasent might not be at all pleasent for the mega-urbanites of a Trantor type world! If you are born and live out your life under the City Skin, being in a non-enclosed area would feel wired and disturbing.
EDIT : Hand Coding would be a bit much! But somthing like Tech =14, Gov = Rich Industrial, planetnumber lessthan 100 do use trantor1, (with trantor2 /3 or whatever used for other planetnumber combinations) would give good variety without having to hand code every system.
Last edited by LittleBear on Tue Mar 18, 2008 2:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
OXPS : The Assassins Guild, Asteroid Storm, The Bank of the Black Monks, Random Hits, The Galactic Almanac, Renegade Pirates can be downloaded from the Elite Wiki here.
All true and good points, but it wouldn't hurt, on some industrial textures, to have a few splashes of green here and there: small, clipped, and in some sort of geometric enclosed space. Could be parkland or pleasure-domes or nature reserves. I'd keep them under tight control, though: after all, "vast" is a relative term! In Scotland someone might talk about Rannoch Moor being "a vast stretch of MAMBA country" (miles and miles of bugger all); whereas to an Australian, it would just be a back garden...
Only the top people of the Empire lived on Trantor and very pleasent it was too! Temperature, Climate etc were all artifically controlled under the Skin. Because these people had lived in Cities for centuries before the whole planet was enclosed they were terrified of "the outside". - "What you mean it might rain on me unexpectedly? - Arrgh the horror!" What an argirgultual race might consider pleasent might not be at all pleasent for the mega-urbanites of a Trantor type world! If you are born and live out your life under the City Skin, being in a non-enclosed area would feel wired and disturbing.
