between you, I have a comprehensive answer to my question. I had no idea what Extra Planets did (despite reading the NiteOwlian tweak all those moons ago), or that SW prevented gas giants from being main planets. I've been running SW with Povray planets for some time now. It seems to work just fine, and matches nicely with the Famous Planets blurb on the F7 screen.
I really like the idea behind this oxp - it gets my imagination buzzing! (Hence the Rough Guide to Zarece write up). I feel that this one is fixable, but was worrying about the feasibility of just keeping it to the gas giants, which is what makes it special to my mind.
I can't find copies of Remux or Demux, so the only solar systems at the moment seem to come from SW, Extra Planets, Orbits & Deep Horizons (which I've yet to work out).
Question: is it possible to identify the cloud giant planets (I suspect that they are merely textures - or chunks of coding in the vanilla game) and thus restrict the appearance of the Cloud Cities to the cloud giants?
Otherwise, one would need to go through the vanilla game list (might G1 Oresri & G1 Rilace be gas giants?), the Povray Planets textures, the Extra Planets textures (separate oxp) and the Strangers World textures (separate oxp), producing different lists for each.
First of all, doesn't the OXP intend to add these cities only to the main planet?
In Strangers World, if I'm not mistaken, the main planet cannot be a gas giant. However, additional planets-giants added by Planetary Systems should be easy to identify by texture name. The same should apply to all other planet retexture OXPs, which set a specific texture for the planet from the file.
As for those planets that have a dynamic texture (vanilla game planets, main planets in SW, maybe some others too), then it will not be so easy here. As far as I know, the core game doesn't implement gas giants in any way, it's just that planets happen to look like gas giants. Probably the only way would be to just make a list of such planets.
Also another note to SW: the first time it adds extra planets only when the player launches from the station. This shouldn't be hard to get around, but you'll probably have to sacrifice the ability to save in these cities.
Unless, say, Galactic Almanac does something helping identify the planets, thus allowing a short cut.
Galactic Almanac does identify gas giants (by beacon name in SW and via non-standard properties), but is it really justified to make it a dependency?
(If you suggest just stealing a piece of code or an idea from it that is responsible for gas giants identification, I'm sorry, I misunderstood your sentence.)
