So I was looking at some random nebula photographed by Hubble as I occasionally do for no particular reason, and I got thinking: Discovery has such a huge array of new ships, systems and even new NPC factions but every new system has to use the background from an existing one. How difficult could it be to customise a few?
What I'm thinking is to copy some existing starspheres and just change the textures, nothing outrageous. I was wondering if anybody here has done this themselves, and if they could provide a bit of info or a tutorial? And what tools would be best for testing? Also, I'm not sure what the compatibility issues would be with a new starsphere so any advice or just general information would be appreciated.
it would be very intersting. I know Dev on one of his mod (Victory mod?) used to add a lot of background "stars" on his starspheres, but duno how he did that. I guess it is possible. But have no idea how.
thought its a cube - anyway... for those knowing the game "haegemonia" .... its star systems appaear to be roughly the same size aswell as the planets. the texture quality is much better though - might be worth looking into it, maybe you can extract textures from that game - gonne edit some screenshots into that post, if you like - i m pretty sure they use the very same technique - but the orbitals are animated sometimes ( suns, asteroids )
Treewyrm knows how to do it properly? I've been looking at the .cmp files for the starspheres in Hardcmp and they look rather odd from the views Hardcmp gives you. I've also had a look at the texture files themselves which make a bit more sense. I opened some using UTFeditor the same way I'd modify a ship skin and it looks like some of the textures are meant to tile while others just create background effects such as smaller nebulae. What I can't see from the textures or the Hardcmp view is how they fit together so seemlessly in-game.
I think I'll have a go at modifying one just as a trial and error kind of thing.
Alright, here's a couple of samples just to show you what I'm talking about. Basically the starsphere for New York that I've used here is made up using a Clouds tile (comprises most of the background colours) and several different sized nebulae. The two nebulae that I've modified here don't tile, so they're fairly easy to customise. I also had a quick stab at changing the clouds but with odd colour results, probably just due to the original tile using indexed colours. Finally I changed the colour of the larger, tiling nebulae and noticed different mip levels showing through but apart from that, it seems to merge with the rest of the background just fine.
I'll look at sorting out the colours in the Clouds tile but so far this customisation seems pretty straightforward.