BPlanets

[Commander_X]

[...] code changes or using plists and providing the vertex/fragment shaders?

There are some "code" changes at the moment, but not on Objective-C sources, only in shader (oolite-default-planet.fragment) source.
Very likely will need to go to my first (1. (easy) bringing uniforms) point above, which will consist of "soft" Objective-C changes, in order to expand the set of uniforms an entity is getting from planetinfo.plist (I'd bet nobody here would enjoy seeing only planets with the "terran" palette I hardcoded in the shader until now).

[Redspear]

Them clouds are those provided by the OOTB (out of the box) game.
Here's a more cloudy example:

Ah, that explains it: whispy thin...
Kinda looks like smog more than clouds.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

[Cholmondely]

Does BPlanets add moons - or does one need an extra .oxp for that? It is compatible with any of the other Moons oxp's?

Does BPlanets add extra planets - - or does one need an extra .oxp for that? It is compatible with any of the other extra planets oxp's?

[Commander_X]

Does BPlanets add moons [...] ?

Does BPlanets add extra planets [...] ?

No, and no.
The main purpose of this would be to bring in different/better(?) textures (or for the re-shading option, means) to enhance the look of the planet entities.
The "different texture" path (consider it dead) -- was meant to bring more variety for the default set of the planets (again, similarly with PovrayPlanets). The size of these textures (for only one galaxy) makes it really challenging to distribute.
The more recent "re-shading option" (again, it's mainly an attempt -- W.I.P. if you're that optimistic) might be used as a base for extra moons/planets OX[PZ]s.
As a quick example, this is what Lave would look like with the original "_color" (slightly adjusted/reorganized) values from the planetinfo.plist, and a different coverage ratio:

[Cholmondely]

Do you need any help with this? You would need to teach me how to do it, but I'm happy to give it a stab (One presumes that one can download the relevant software onto the dreaded AppleMac).

[Commander_X]

[...]
Do you need any help with this? You would need to teach me how to do it, but I'm happy to give it a stab (One presumes that one can download the relevant software onto the dreaded AppleMac).

Hah, I wished I'd "written" the picture above

I hit a blocker I'm not sure how to overcome. Any help would be useful, but some intensive knowledge of 3d-math and glsl programming principles, mostly.

A quick overview of the blocker would be:
1. in order to avoid stretching over any axes of the generated texture, I'm using a 3d noise algorithm
2. all is well and dandy colour/specular/roughness wise
3. the blocker is that all the (glsl) examples I could find on doing normal map out of texture presume the texture can be sampled, and/or is 2d generated; these don't work here, and all my hacking/adapting attempts miserably failed

[Commander_X]

[...]
3. the blocker is that all the (glsl) examples I could find [...]

For the curios, the two main resources I looked as for example are here (shadertoy) and here (stackoverflow).

If the curios are also adventurous, we can take it over PM. No compilation should be needed, just a (sort of) OXP approach (using an overridden shader out of the AddOns folder).

[Cholmondely]

If you think that there is anything that I could do to help, I'd love to.

My various oxp projects have all run up against programming brick walls of one sort or another. Maybe designing planets is easier and less fraught!

[Commander_X]

A quick story about how this evolves.

More than 4 months ago, I finally decided to take my chance at a GPU passthrough in a Windows 10 VM on my Linux workstation.

<technical rant>
To make the story longer, the reason I took this decision was that I noticed that my Windows 7 partition didn't want to boot after I changed my AMD CPU (with one that had an integrated GPU on it). I could live with this until I couldn't: due to some older configurations, I have a large amount of diskspace configured as NTFS filesystems. Unfortunately, the only known and reliable way to fix the NTFS filesystems is by using Microsoft's chkdsk program (no open source Linux tools available for the task).

So when some of the larger size installed games (Elite: Dangerous and Eve Online being some of the culprits) started giving errors during their updates, I found I had to get access to a running Windows instance to chkdsk and fix the damage. That was the moment when I noticed that even the USB installation image of Windows 7 wouldn't boot on the new hardware. Booting a Windows 10 installation USB image just to get access to the chkdsk became the norm.

Until the day I asked myself why wouldn't I replace the Windows 7 installation with a new Windows 10 installation. Of course, the answer was that I wouldn't want to invite any uninvited guests in my system. Well, that turned out not to be a problem: because _the only_ reason that Windows instance is to be installed would be to give me access to the single tool I need not very often, there would also be no reason for that Windows instance to _ever_ access internet. Thus the whole setup occurred with the network cable unplugged. Then, before and after plugging it back in, I made sure the network card is disabled, and stays so.

To end this part of the story, installing Windows 10, also revealed that the HDR monitor that _never_ allowed me any HDR experience in Windows 7, is doing it without any restrictions in Windows 10. The conclusion that my VM should also be a Windows 10 one came naturally. And the network setup under Linux was way easier to prevent _it_ from getting to the Internet, but allow _me_ to exchange info over the network (mouse and keyboard integration, being the most necessary).
</technical rant>

Back to this Oolite topic.
All dandy and nice, I can seamlessly move my mouse around my Linux X session, and my Windows 10 VM output, bonus, the HDR monitor works HDR under the VM as it is not able under X.

Alas, when I tried to run Oolite on my new integrated AMD GPU I left for Linux, this is what I've got:


The same, on the NVidia GPU (even previously on Linux, or in the VM under Windows 10) would look like this (expected):


It took me these 4 months to finally realize what didn't match on AMD in the shader I was trying to tweak. A very long of this time was taken by my doubts that I missed some magic drivers for the integrated AMD GPU and that the open source versions didn't raise up to the needed level.

I ran the Windows version under Wine, with the same result. Moreover, any other game I usually run under Wine, would flawlessly run without any visual glitch. I had to start revisiting the shader code, after I installed the SDL2 Oolite branch, and the issue was present there, too. The second screenshot above is actually taken on the integrated AMD GPU after i figured out what the fix was.

So right now I'm back to trying to find a way to do the right thing with the normal map in the shader.

Meanwhile, I also found a way for my Blender attempts to better mimic a gas giant. This is a Blender screenshot, with the big one being my result and the lower ones references (the colour palette is directly taken from one of the NASA's Jupiter mp4 they have; also I didn't put any "storm" in at this time):


So BPlanets is not dead, but its advancing is very slow.

[Cholmondely]

Meanwhile, I also found a way for my Blender attempts to better mimic a gas giant. This is a Blender screenshot, with the big one being my result and the lower ones references (the colour palette is directly taken from one of the NASA's Jupiter mp4 they have; also I didn't put any "storm" in at this time):


So BPlanets is not dead, but its advancing is very slow.

Did you see this?

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:

And see further down that thread for more

[Commander_X]

Meanwhile, I also found a way for my Blender attempts to better mimic a gas giant. This is a Blender screenshot[...]

Did you see this?

[...] I made a gas giant texture making program called gaseous-giganticus [...]

And see further down that thread for more

Yeah, blender != gaseous-giganticus.
While the "golden gas giant" of them all is Jupiter, we still have 3 more gas giants in our solar system that don't seem to need the whole swirling Jupiter comes up with.