Oolite Bulletins

CaptKev <-- Those planets look absolutely bloody gorgeous!

I'm sure an OXP with these textures will be a hit on these boards.
(Very subtle hint to get it done, and release it pronto

I'm still quite amazed by the stuff that's being created for this - a completely free version of a twenty-odd year old game, with all input purely voluntary!

Thanks to all of you!

Here's the textures so far, if there are any planet textures people would like me to include (especially along the lines as suggested by Disembodied) then upload them to me. Make sure there at least 1024 x 512 pixels.

The quicker I can get all the textures the quicker I can release the OXP.

Great work Cap'n, another step forward.

Real amazing work,

Keep at it.
Any city planets in the making?

mmm How does one of our Corolius look in front of this planets?

There are some textures here:-

http://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html. The author gives permission to use in free games. Haven't be able to find one of Trantor yet though!

I keep meaning to write a procedural texture generator to produce 2D wrapping images. There are various algorithms for this that produce a variety of effects. By having the colour palette abruptly shift at some point(s) you can get sea/land(/snowy mountains).

Must get round to this at some stage and let you have a play to produce more textures...

Thanks for the support everyone , I've been having real problems trying to create a realistic looking industrialised planet.

The details look way too big when viewed in-game even with a 2048 x 1024 image, back to the drawing board!

I think they are superb, just one comment, there does seem to be a lot of blueish planets, which I guess would indicate water. In this highly inhabited galaxy it probably doesn't matter with all the different life forms out there, anyway at least Mr Whippy will be sorted

I found this:
http://www.bruckner.50megs.com/favorite_links.html

It's somebody's Celestia resource page. It contains links to download a Planetary Textures Generator, a patch for said generator, and a bunch of planetary textures including Mars with canals and Coruscant. There are email details given for the creators of these items, so if they're any good presumably permission could be sought...

I'd check them out myself but I'm at work .

OK... back home now, and the site I mentioned above has a broken link to to the Coruscant file. However, it was a derived work (with permission) from someone at SciFi3D called Topa: here's a link to the original file on that site.

The "Mars with canals" might be interesting to use for a Poor Agricultural, though.

Thanks for the links Disembodied, I did have a look at the 'Planetary Textures Generator' but unfortunately it only generated gas giants.

I have a few variants of Mars already, but I'll checkout the SciFi3D site to see what else they have there.

@TGHC, I've decided to stop at five earth like planets which leaves another eleven for other types, just changing the land/sea ratios doesn't really make them look very different.

Are these any good?

Hmm... an interesting site here. Permission would be required to use the textures but it should be free of charge, at least! (Edit: just noticed LittleBear beat me to this one by some considerable margin...)

And some of the planetary maps here might be useable... Callisto and Ganymede have a sort of scarred industrial look to them.

right. i have a procedural texture generator working now.

It needs a GUI (instead of rebuilding the code each time) to get allow easy adjustment of the parameters

It needs a a better 2D interpolation than simple linear between the nearest 4 points. Although adding extra smoothing on the later passes does stop all the peaks looking too much like pyramids.

It possibly needs some sort of palette generating tool as well, it took me a while fiddling about with polynomials to generate a mars like palette... Otherwise it can always be tweaked in photoshop etc.

I'd forgotten how fiddly all this stuff is from first principles!

And how much fun it is once you get it working!

Anybody got somewhere I can upload an image or two to show the sort of thing it spits out?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24657513@N04/