Solar system Planets

[evillejedi]

http://warlords.swrebellion.com/download/planetpack.zip GET IT HERE

I will be updating this soon with new asteroids and maps, if anyone wants to submit anything to it, please emial swwarlords@gmail.com




I am putting together a collection of the planets in the solar system (along with a few custom ones) for the macross DYRL team

I'm wondering how much interest there is in providing the hods for background purposes

the planets are not attackable, however they are

1. roughly to scale (between 500km and 100000km meaning jupiter is too small, but other planets are fine)
2. include animations to rotate (madstate allows retrograde if needed) rotation is vey slow, nearly an hour, but does add a bunch to the scenery
3. have weapons hardpoints for simulating defenses
4. have effects markers for scripted planetary destruction or effects
5. ARE NOT TARGETABLE, THEY DO NOT HAVE COLLISION DETECTION
6. ARE NOT PLAYER CONTROLLABLE, WHAT YOU WOULD DO WITH A 5000KM WIDE PLANET I DON"T KNOW

planets and objects that will be avialable if there is enough interest

==========solar system=============
mecury
venus
venus no atmosphere
venus terraformed

earth
destroyed earth
moon
mars
terraformed mars
diemos
phobos
1 or two larger asteroids
Jupiter
Io
Ganymeade
Europa
Callisto
Saturn
titan possibly
Uranus
Neptune
pluto
charon

==========generic=============

generic blue gas giant
generic red gas giant
faded yellow gas giant
grey gas giant

=========star wars ============
yavin
bespin
tatooine
endor
hoth
coruscant
corellia
talus/tralus
kessel
narshada/nalhutta
kuat
possibly more as I get around to them

post if you think this will be useful

[Skeeter]

You know if planets were able to be player owned then they could be a new resourcing system, for example.



-----------------------
Planet can be held and it generated ru's (mining on the planet) for instance.
-----------------------
Subsystems can be built on the planets where u can add satalites that have auto defence systems.
-----------------------
Planets can be capturable so u can steal a players ru income.
-----------------------
Multiple planet per level is like control points what we were sorta discussing in the SWvsST hw2 mod topic.
-----------------------

[Jaen-ni-rin]

Hey, it's great ide with those planets !!!
It is possible to retexture them and change atmosphere colour to different ???

If yes, we've got Nalthora !! YAY !!!!

[evillejedi]

because of blending issues the planets colors won't be changable, but if you need something specific for nalthora PM me I can probably cook something up

[Tel'Quessir]

I would not mind creating a few planet-based maps for PDS. Basically I intend to to space-station based scenarios; assault/defend types. Planet as background would make it interesting to simulate an orbital defense grid anchored with space stations for an attacking player to get past.

Having super-heavy armaments on planets lend their support to the space battle would spice things up dramatically.

[ubermetroid]

pictures?

[Ragnarokx]

Great, evillejedi. Good news once again.

[Duelron1001]

is there a Vasuda Prime? its kind of a cross between tatooine and mars, but I can't say for sure with out seeing the photos that you are useing as the textures.

[John Sheridan]

This is great, I have been thinking about adding planets to Epic, but not until after I've managed to put together a 1.0 version. Was thinking of implementing orbital facilities and some kind of planetary defense grid as buildable subsystems.

[evillejedi]

pics will be up sometime this weekend for the majority of the planets

[Kinjiss]

I was about to uninstall HW2(need more mem for RTW) but this just might deter me for a while.

[yasotay]

I have been waiting a long time to see this capability as it will certainly add a great deal to the play of the HW2 mods.

[evillejedi]

planet images, a little bandwidth intensive

still need to work some kinks out, though I figured out how to do decent rings (thanks damatta)

Spoiler

[Paladin1]

Eville those are beautiful, nice work mate.

[KushanFarsight]

Eville - AMAZING- Keep it up

[Major_Focker]

:jaw: :jaw: :bow: :bow: Those look awsome! really sweet Evillejedi! i am sooo glad i contacted you.

[fuzzy]

Wow

[Duelron1001]

So which one of those planets can I move too? Oh wait none of them are real, you can tell as there is no displacment mapping :P

I have it to say that it is a nice seeing a ISD passing a planet, reminds me of x-wing allience; those were the days.

You just have to let all other mods use them, even write a tut on "how to make your own"

Once again you have shown why you should be a god

[Jaen-ni-rin]

That's a pitty they haven't got atmosphere ...
But they're great.

[Evaders99]

Like something out of Freelancer.. you can almost reach out and touch those planets

[evillejedi]

heh if I got a little support from someone that understood shaders better I think we could develop a fall off glow effect to make a atmosphere haze, but it would require some doing (essentially exploiting the bloom effect by adding a set atmosphere color to wherever the object is lit)

I'll have pics of mecury, saturn, earth and moon, venus, pluto/charon, neptune and uranus soon, possibly the new large background asteroids and stuff, and a few SW planets

heh, evaders, if you put them in the playable map you will find them quite non-solid, there's no collision detection (that would require hacks to the games dlls to override a set size limit of 40km)

when I'm going to post these I will include sample maps, the starfield and ring generator functions and all of the objects necessary, along with the maya planet template for maya 5 (allows for the animation and hardpoint placement)

essentially the maps will be pretty simple, but you can copy in your own resource/nebula sections you will be able to add this planet pack to any mod without overwriting stuff (most of this will be included in warlords too) and mod groups can include any part of the pack into their mods as needed (hopefully keeping the same names between objects so updates are rather seemless if I decide to expand the pack after an initial release)

the only real issue is that maps that use the planets will need to make sure the player has the objects that the map references or the game will crash on load

[ThorinDP]

So...you can fly around planets?

[Zatch]

@ThorinDP: You can fly around and through planets, so they're mainly there for decoration (place them outside of the map boundaries so players can't fly through them.) Planetary defenses require very long range weapons so they can fire from outside the map boundaries, but it's doable.

@evillejedi: About collision boundaries: have you considered placing several large asteroids just inside of the planet mesh? That way you have a roughly spherical collision boundary, as long as the asteroids are close enough that no ship would pass through. Not sure how much this would lag the game, though, since I'm sure you'd need tons of those asteroids...

Another option, though, is to create an object with 0 polygons and a large collision boundary about the size of a large asteroid's and then place them along the planet's surface at regular intervals. Again, probably still a big performance hit, but I haven't experimented at all...

[evillejedi]

hmm its an interesting concept, but here's the problem, even with a maximum collision mesh size (40kmx40km) you would have to generate 22000 of them to replicate the sphere, the issue also is that if you place a planet on a map (so that ships can fly to it) you quite literally have a solid wall that takes up half the screen. heh people will definately appreciate how big things are when you see this stuff in game (scrolling in the sensor manager by 100's of KM only changes the apparent size of the planet by 1-2% ), for example the shots of the moons of jupiter and even mars were taken from almost 9,000 km away

also zatch, for future reference, more than 2000 asteroids pretty much makes the game unplayble, pebbles you can push about 25K before you get a slow down, but pebbles are not targettable

[A7K]

well if you cant go bigger why not go smaller(SORRY IF IM COMING OFF LIKE A RAMBLING IDIOT) if you cant upsacle collision meshes why not downscale verything else and use smaller maps and all i thinks its possible correct me if im wrong tho.


APOC

[Zatch]

Only problem, then, is rescaling every ship and then adjusting their speeds to compensate, as well as adjusting all of the NLIPS ranges, TOIcons, etc... It's a truly massive effort, and the results don't really warrant it.

[Duelron1001]

compermise, make the planet smaller. Really playing HW with life sided planets (as in players wanting to be able to move arround them) is not practical. Freelancer did the same thing, all the planets seem way to small to be real and after looking closer you can see that even the cities are scaled down.

[evillejedi]

that is why I am providing the template, if people want playable planets they'll have to make them themselves (this was only intended for backgrounds, I don't need playable planets so I'm not goign to spend the time on them) If I ever figure out a practical way of doing it then I'll post the method, but really this is a side project from warlords and was intended to help out the DYRL macross team, the rest is just charity to the community

[Duelron1001]

having planets in game (and scaled down that is) would provide players with some new ideas for tactics, more so if the planet could sheild your forces from sensors...

Anyway back to modding HW 2's UI so we can have multiply campaigns; gw evillejedi on this one, i still say that you should be a god

[maxdamage]

I gave up creating planets due to the fact that when texturing in Milkshape 3D spheres or geo-spheres,the edges of the sphere or geo-sphere stretches as seen in the pic.

I used a nebula as an atmosphere to give the impression of an atmosphere with swirling gases,etc... and one way getting your attention when your ship flies too close for comfort.

maxdamage

[evillejedi]

the nice thing about the template (granted you need maya argh) but you simply make a 2048x1024 or 1024x512 planet texture and it is already properly UVed, set the radius as a multiple of 1000km and hit export (then just rename the madstate and mad and change the planet name in the madstate)

[maxdamage]

The source files that I use are from NASA's website and they are about 516 x 387 pixels then I have to resize them to
512 x512 for them to work.

maxdamage.

[evillejedi]

heh I should post a quick tutorial on making planet textures in photoshop, I found a method that is extremely easy and has results like this in 20 ish minutes

http://warlords.swrebellion.com/stuff/night.jpg
http://warlords.swrebellion.com/stuff/corellia.jpg
http://warlords.swrebellion.com/stuff/coruscant.jpg

[maxdamage]

evillejedi would you be able to make your tutorial compatible with Paint Shop Pro as thats the program I'm using at the moment?

maxdamage.

[Tel'Quessir]

Textures look very good - lets play Harpoon on the "maps"

Looking forward to see orbital defense batteries fire tracer out from the night side of a planet.

[evillejedi]

the tutorial is rather general, as long as you can create custom brushes it is essentially all fiddiling around from then on

heh here's an interesting factoid, to make tracer fire correct the projectiles will have to be moving at at least 1000 km second if not faster and have ranges in the 10K km range, though it would be a neat effect if it can be pulled off, if there is enough demand for specific planets to be non-background I may make specific ones available, though the issue is more about duplicating the same hod with a differently scaled model (for the macross team and my purposes the planets need to be true scale)

[ThorinDP]

I never knew there was an actual body of water on Corescant. It must be several thousand feet below the cityscape.

[evillejedi]

actually its on the surface unlikely enough(its mentioned in a lot of books), essentially it is there for the evaporation to keep the planet from drying up (the entire bottom is essentially poured concrete) and I'm pretty sure there are factories and stuff below it, if you can imagine the entire ocean is elevated and artificial, the notion of coruscant as an entire city planet is slightly off, it is pretty much that there is city on every available piece of land with exceptionally over built areas like imperial city where there's a kilometer of abandoned buildings between the street and the surface

[Mikali]

Sounds good.

[fuzzy]

kilometer of abandoned buildings between the street and the surface

What if they collapse?

[evillejedi]

they pretty much drill pilings through them into bedrock so if they collapse its not an issue, there's just a lot of abandoned dark and dank real estate down there

[ThorinDP]

Only the most daring adventurers go down there. Gangs live down there, as do a lot of wierd creatures. You can also find the odd shipwreck, believe it or not. Like a hovercraft crashed into a building, or an abandoned piece of construction machinery.

[The5thElephant]

The lower levels of Coruscant are EVIL. Think of it as the red-light district of the red-light district.


Amazing work evillejedi, can't wait to see some more.

[AMARDA]

:jaw: :bow:
I LOVE

[yasotay]

very nice work evil. Sure hope to have some maps with your work someday.

[evillejedi]

heh soon, xmas caused a work stoppage

[maxdamage]

If you read the Star Wars novels X-Wing:Rogue Squadron 1 to 4,Coruscant is described in saying that the whole planet surface is ferrocreted and is one whole city.

maxdamage.

[maxdamage]

Heres a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and PSP to create planets...
LunaCell

maxdamage

[Tel'Quessir]

First instant noodles, now instant planets

[evillejedi]

http://warlords.swrebellion.com/download/planets.zip

I can't gaurantee it will 100% work, this is a preliminary release (its a bit big too) and is only solar system planets. but there should be test maps