EoC planet objects?

Shane and Grandpatrout, did you both give up on fixing the planets already? I once tried to do it as well, but I don't know very much about models, and I was just not having anything show up. However, I wonder whether the way in which the sphere is made might matter when applying textures? I.e. how the sections are formed or arranged? How about spheres of 10 or 100 meters?

It really would be nice to have better planets. It would go a long way to making the game look better since the ships and stations still look fantastic!

I run a new model through every week... so it progresses; but I have it on 'simmer-mode'. Currently I have much on my plate.

Expect a breakthrough in a week or two.

Well Shane, that is very good to hear. I have done a lot of work on 'beautifying' the game and those blocky planets were the last thing standing in my way of perfection. My hat will be off to you if you can figure it out. Keep us posted on any progress, as I am obviously eager to know!

I was fooling around with this since I layed my hands on a copy of lightwave 5.6. I discovered that the size of the planets is a sphere with a radius of one meter. Everything lines up perfectly, however, the spheres still are displayed without any perceivable textures. There is a kind of coloration that matches what the texture should be. Planets do not have a light wave setup file, probably because they are different than most objects in the game. Unlike ship models and stations, which have specific textures, the planet model is used for models of moons, planets, gas giants and even suns. So a wide range of textures is applied to them by flux itself I think. I am guessing that the key to getting the textures displaying correctly might lie in how the sphere model's surface is prepared? I know little about lightwave, but it seems there are a lot of options to how textures are displayed on a model and maybe one of these is determines how to make the textures disply. Just my idea...
or...maybe it is something like the name of the surface in the model must match up with a name that is being called by flux?

I'd come to the same conclusion, but gotten sidetracked enough that I'd had no time to work on it lately (for the past week). Here's the challenge:

A LW object always has at least one surface name attached to it. This texture name is what is being used to identify that it is a planet (and that flux should apply textures dynamically according to the geog map information for that body).

So, during the loading sequence Flux sees an object which is supposed to be a planet/moon and then finds the planet type (1 for rocky, 2 for gas), it then loads the appropriate textures into the buffer, calls the planet object and replaces the planet object texture(s) with the ones loaded from the geography information. It then creates the object and places it at the right coordinates.

I say "texture(s)" above because I believe there are three specially-named textures to the planet object. Lightwave 5.6's crowning feature was layered textures; it seems reasonable that PS used this to their advantage when writing the program. And it certainly would explain the required texture information in the map files. One texture would exist for both 'body' textures in the geog file and one for the clouds. The opacity of each texture is also set by the geog map file information.

The trick is finding the right name. We can try names until we're blue in the face... and we might get lucky. But we probably will not. There are a huge number of variations PS could have used when naming these textures. We don't even know how many characters were used in the texture names.

At present, our most hopeful course of action would be to contact an EoC designer. Steve Robertson might know... Or Craig A. Clark, who we know has at least some of the EoC graphic assets. If either gentlemen would be willing just to tell us the format of the texture names we could do this.

What do you think? I've spoken (in the LW forums) with Mr. Clark before... shall I make the attempt?

I came to all the exact same conclusions as you. Though I don't know much about lightwave, I saw that I could name and layer textures. So I assumed that PS would have done that, and named them something we obviously don't know. I opened the planet LOD files with a hex editor and noticed one name....'dplanet'. But making a layer called dplanet hasn't helped thus far. So I guess it comes down to asking a developer what the names were.
I have never contacted any of the EoC designers. If you could, it would be worth a shot at least. Otherwise we might never know.

PS Are you the same Shane as I see working on the Freehauler project?