[RELEASE] Povray Planets 1.0

[CaptSolo]

And what of indigenous intelligent life-forms on these gas giants? None, perhaps, or maybe plant based as some hypothesize. I must peruse your file, amigo.

[Cody]

<grins> I've tried to keep it simple - switched gas giants away from obviously inapt descriptions.

[pagroove]

Yes the gas giants. It would be ideal if these where not main planets in Povray. Or that the main planet was a moon of the gas giant.

[Astrobe]

I guess it's not easy to swap a planet with a moon, but the main station doesn't have to orbit the main planet, does it?

[CaptSolo]

I quietly entered The Ancient Space Mariner at Celaqula main. It was crowded but I spied an empty stool at the far end of the bar. While waiting for someone to take my order, I took notice of the old spacer sitting next to me. He wore a huge sombrero cocked so far forward that it covered most of his face, and he seemed to be asleep. The barkeep finally came around giving me a look and a nod while wiping the remains of some liquid off the bar. "A Teaatisian vicious brew, my good man." With a jerk, the fellow I had been casually observing woke up.

"Teaatis! Who said Teaatis?" "Well, I'm afraid that was me." I replied. "I just ordered a Teaatisian vicious brew."

"Impossible!" said he. "What is impossible?" I asked, naturally curious since that world is well known to me.

"How can they brew anything on Teaatis? It's naught but a huge purplish gas giant!"

[Cody]

<sniggers> Seems to be working okay, then - cool.

[Cody]

Solo (and anyone else) - if you should spot any pairs of textures which would benefit from a switch, let me know.
For example, along the Seventh's northern throughway, I've switched Rainza and Zarausxe - much better.

[CaptSolo]

Yes the gas giants. It would be ideal if these where not main planets in Povray. Or that the main planet was a moon of the gas giant.

When I was tinkering with re-texturing System Redux's planets, I simulated Isinor as the moon of a gas giant. I positioned one of SR's moons some ways beyond Isinor and made it huge. But it didn't have the quality of Povray Planets so the whole project was abandoned.

[Cody]

Or that the main planet was a moon of the gas giant.

Could be done with Povray planets - there are enough textures that 191 of them could easily be duplicates.
It would need the gas giants to appear larger though - much larger.

[Redspear]

It would need the gas giants to appear larger though - much larger.

As I think you know this is something I've looked into.

Planets and moons 3.3 times bigger is well tested now (by me at least) and would give one of the larger moon sizes (from standard redux for example) a size approaching that of a small planet. So the coriolis station would look big but likely not that much bigger than it does in the standard game.

However, if you were not interested in the ship rescaling work that I did (i.e. the 'cramped' range in ship sizes and large size relative to the stations didn't bother you) then there is room to double the increase to a factor of 6.6 which should give a pretty good result.

You could go bigger of course but (if using similar methods to the rescaling experiment) then it becomes easy to overshoot targets when using the torus drive. At x13.2 (or 6.6 with part III of the experiment included) for example, targeting the station is actually rather tricky.

If, on the other hand, you don't care if the witchpoint appears relatively near to a gas giant then you could make them much bigger. Could be interesting jumping into a system and seeing it dominated by a gas giant (might look a bit silly if you orientated towards the star though...)

[gsagostinho]

I don't think this OXP is still being maintained (hopefully I am wrong!) but Gerebied on Galaxy 2 has some texture problems (one side is not matching the other):

[Cody]

Is that a different Povray? Gerebied looks like this on my machine.

[gsagostinho]

Strange. My version is 1.1, with a license stating:

Copyright: Andrew Bramble (submersible) 2013
License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Attribution: Some textures bundled here are those originally provided by 'Famous Planets v2.5' and are included with permission from P.A.Groove

The script file states:

this.description = "Combined Povray Planets / Famous Planets 2.5.1 textures for Galaxy 2";

So maybe this is one of the planets added by P.A.Groove. Nevertheless, the problem is indeed with the Povray package regardless of the source of the image, as the mismatching of the texture is clearly obvious just by looking at the png file gal-2-Gerebied.png

[pagroove]

Probably an old non-cubmapped texture. I believe there was a tool to fix this. But I'm out of the loop for long now. But I believe it should be fixable. I recognize it as an FP texture.

[Cody]

I believe there was a tool to fix this.

PlanetTool? Is that still available?