New thread for my cloud texture issue

The planetary halo is just a sprite - in fact it's a quarter of a circle, which is then multiplied 4 times and rotated to make a complete circle. The same is true of the planetary rings. You should be able to find the halo and ring textures somewhere and modify them if you want. You may like to know that I drew the texture for the rings, as I didn't like the original one the programmers came up with.

-- Steve
Stephen Robertson
I-War series co-designer.

Yeah, that's what I figured, based on the 1/4 image for the textures. The files are in the images/planets folder in the resources. You'll need the FTU2PCX converter to look at them though.

btw - Nice rings, Stephen. They translated well into the game. Just out of curiosity, were the originals the programmers came up with too fat (thick, wide, whatever...)?

*edit*
Btw - Stephen do you know more about this?

One more thing, in the <star> entry: the color of the light is also the color of the flare around the star at a distance. Once you fly in close, the color transitions to what is indicated in the map file.

Why would this be? The <star> light in the LW scene file (which provides the main illumination for the map) does not use a LW generated flare. There is a sun halo texture exactly like the planet halo texture that I would suspect is this flare visible at a distance.



The question is: What info is used to color it? The planet halo simply looks like it's black and white texture. But the sun halo needs to be colored. Where is it getting that color info? Is it possible that the sun flare sprite is being colored by the <star> light literally? The same way all object in the map are colored slightly by the <star> light.

Also, there are only 3 colored sun textures.

sun_blue

sun_red

sun_yellow


What relation do these have to coloring the sun in the map if there are 11 possible colors. Are these being mixed to produce new results (like the planet textures)?

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The star value is luminosity. Flux takes the luminosity value and convert that into a light color and brightness. There is no doubt that the star is giving off light at the correct color, if you fly close to a blue sun, you will turn blue - no matter if the scene file has a white light.

The star value can be very large - like 100. But that results in a deep red colored ball with essentially no extra light or glow.

-Gtrout

I don't know what the luminosity value you mentioned is used for. I've never seen it in any of your docs. I do know, however, that there is no light in a map that doesn't come from a LW scene file. If your ship turns blue close to a star, that's because the <star> light that provides the scene lighting (and represents the star's own light) is blue. Simply use a scene file with the <star> and <fill> light intensity set to zero to see this. All objects in your map will be completely black and unlit. Of course, the background nebula on the skybox still glows and looks illuminated because it's not lit by the scene lighting. It's self-illuminated through the texture. But the skybox itself doesn't give off any light of it's own anyway.

*edit*
Now that I think about it; don't you remember that we already talked about that. I explained how you could have a star that appears one color but gives off light of a different color. Since the star's appearance and light source are totally unrelated (i.e. one is determined by the map file, the other by the LW scene file).

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I think GrampaTrout is going into a bit of astronomy lingo there. By luminosity (and star value) he means the color from the map file.

From what I can tell, the <star> in LWS gives the “primary� light color of a scene. Flying near a star switches the light to whatever color the star is. For example, Firefrost has three stars of three different colors (1, 8, & 11), but only one <star> light in the LWS file, an orange color. Makes sense, since the entire plot in Firefrost is near the orange star.

Thanks, luminosity as color makes sense. And that's good know that it can go so high.

As far as the stars and lights go, light in a map comes from only 2 sources: The <star> light and the <fill> light, which never change. The <star> light provides all the main illumination for the map everywhere, with no falloff. The <fill> light provides the low level illumination on the shaded side of objects in the map, so that the shaded side isn't completely black. (Think of this as ambient light.) The other stars (lights) in the LW scene file are only there to make lens flares to represent larger visible stars in the distance. They don't give off any light (no matter what their intensity setting is). Only lights named <star> and <fill> actually give off light in the scene. If a light isn't named one of those names, it isn't giving off any light. Since you gave color numbers for the 3 Firefrost stars I assume that they're full-sized stars in the map. So if only the orange star has a light named <star> in the LW scene, it's the only main light source in the map. In fact, I've just checked, and the other two stars in Firefrost don't even have representive lights in the LW scene to give names to. There is only one <star> light in Firefrost, and it is indeed orange. Your assessment of only adding a light source where the action is sounds pretty reasonable. And I'd guess that's why they didn't add light sources for those other two stars. But this is all well documented in my post about LW scene geography.

Getting back to my questions: Where does the star flare sprite get it's color info from and what is the relationship between the star's color value and the 3 colored star textures? Does the flare sprite still get colored if there is no light in the scene? That would prove it was getting its color from direct illumination by the <star> light. Which would lend support to the quoted statement that the star's flare is the color of the light from far away, but not up close. Although I'm not sure you should be able to see the flare up close. Or is it a self-illuminated texture, like the stars themselves?

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