Oolite Bulletins

Hi,

would it be possible to put the possibility of textured main planet back in? At least the possibility, perhaps deactivated by default, but so that it can be reactivated without having to build everything from trunk (which I am not capable of)?

I used to use Sung`s planetary textures, and this is a really important feature for me in the game - seeing an actual planet instead of a muddy golfball.

Pretty please?

Lestradae

Lestradae wrote:

Hi,

would it be possible to put the possibility of textured main planet back in? At least the possibility, perhaps deactivated by default, but so that it can be reactivated without having to build everything from trunk (which I am not capable of)?

I used to use Sung`s planetary textures, and this is a really important feature for me in the game - seeing an actual planet instead of a muddy golfball.

Pretty please?

Lestradae

This was a superb feature indeed (we all want it back) but think the most sensible approach (if we want one day to have a stable – with decent performance version) is that the reintroduction of this feature to be after the fixing of memory leaks and the implementation of Frustum culling. I am sure our supreme grand admiral had serious reasons for disabling that feature (that by the way was optional from the beginning)

From my point of view there must be a semi – stable release first focusing in the finalization of shaders and JS implementation.

slightly on this topic - planets textured with a bitmap (ie not procedurally generated ones) suffer from pinching at the poles as a square texture doesn't fit on a round surface. So could the relevant routing cut out a suitably shaped piece of the texture so it fits perfectly?

Hoopy wrote:

slightly on this topic - planets textured with a bitmap (ie not procedurally generated ones) suffer from pinching at the poles as a square texture doesn't fit on a round surface. So could the relevant routing cut out a suitably shaped piece of the texture so it fits perfectly?

There is no such thing as a perfect way to map a flat texture to a sphere. However, this might be interesting. Enjoy the maths. :-)

well, it's not going to be possible to do it perfectly or map makers would have an easy life!

what i mean is that you could use a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollweide_projection to get very close.

That's going to be hard work to sort out so a very simple approximation would be to rotate the texture by 45° before mapping it to the sphere. The diamond shape would be widest where it needs to wrap round the equator and tapers at the poles as is required.