Oolite Bulletins

Yummy, it looks good enough to eat!

One little thing... shouldn't the agricultural planets be able to sustain life? There's hydroponics, but the cost to turn it into a planet's main export would make it most unlikely.

@Lestradae, Yes I'll have a go at making the OXP. I'm going to use 16 different textures for each of the 16 planet sizes by using a value from 0 to 15 held in a array.

@Cmdr. Maegil, agreed, I was hoping to have 8 fertile planets and 8 barren, then assign them to the appropriate system.

Yes I'll have a go at making the OXP. I'm going to use 16 different textures for each of the 16 planet sizes by using a value from 0 to 15 held in a array.

VERY Cool

I was hoping to have 8 fertile planets and 8 barren, then assign them to the appropriate system.

<devils advocate> Wouldn`t you need 16 each for that? </devils advocate>

Very happy!

L

PS: Oh, and Kev ... how does one put a link into the signature I`ve been wondering for ages ...

Like this:-

Thanks!

Lestradae wrote:

<devils advocate> Wouldn`t you need 16 each for that? </devils advocate>

PS: Oh, and Kev ... how does one put a link into the signature I`ve been wondering for ages ...

Not quite sure what you mean, but I can assign any texture from 0 - 15 to each planet regardless of it's radius.

LB beat me to it!

CaptKev wrote:

@Cmdr. Maegil, agreed, I was hoping to have 8 fertile planets and 8 barren, then assign them to the appropriate system.

For at least some definitions of "barren", would it be possible to make it more slagheap/factory and less unspoilt Moon/Mars? Any chance of keying textures in to planetary wealth, too, so we could get a Trantor/Coruscant world-city type for the rich industrials and something a bit more Airdrie-esque for the poor ones? Or is that stretching things too far?

No reason why not, I just need the appropriate planet textures.

Since you’re thinking about this stuff, I should probably point out that while planets can’t have shaders or effect maps now, they will at some point. In particular, this will probably include an effect map that’s like a glow map but only visible on the night side, for city glows. Specular maps (to distinguish water and ice from land) and bump or normal maps would be relevant too. The “natural colours”, “night lights”, “water/land mask” and “elevation/bump” textures here would be ideal, once scaled down to power-of-two sizes. (They also happen to have the right projection, which shouldn’t look “pinched” when mapped onto planets.)

@Ahruman, thanks for the link and information, not sure if you know about this site, which has some good stuff as well.

I saw that one, but wasn’t paying enough attention so I missed that it has ready-made normal maps.

Very nice stuff indeed!

I remember that occasionally Celestia has been mentioned here. I recommend that all the fans of real-world solar systems should check it out.

I've been using the LunarCell plugin to generate planet texture maps (with not too much success), does anyone know of any alternatives to this?

this isn't much use to anyone, but 'rendermonkey' (a windows only shader development program) has an 'Earth' shader included in its examples folder, it has the glowing city lights on the night side of the planet as well as some specular ocean effects & moving clouds etc, unfortunately its written in whatever the DirectX shader language is (HLSL?) and not GLSL but i guess the maths and the theory will be the same if anybody can translate between the two languages

Unfortunately it didn't run of my machine, maybe it's for ATI graphics cards only. But I did have a rummage around in the textures directory and saw the earth maps you mentioned.