It looks like something that happened to me when I was experimenting with planets that were a lot bigger and further away. Are they kinda flashing around, kinda alternating different areas on and off frame by frame?
Perhaps different graphics cards have different limits or something, I dunno...
What kind of system are you using? It could indeed be due to too big textures. But then again, if my card encounters a texture too big (I've tried that purposefully) it just doesn't use a texture. At least that applies for skyboxes. Meh, I dunno.
Also, is there any way to enable some kind of pop-up to announce arrival of private messages? The small number tends to go unnoticed by me...
I'm sorry for not being more active on the chalk lines of the project.
There's some weird stuff on my part - for example, all the planet models except the ringed one are centered on their north pole, and thus their placement varies slightly from the original, but that's a minor issue (although I should've spotted it...). But those screens about weird planets look like a possible indication of some more serious issue. I don't know if this is media issue, hardware issue or code issue (or more than one of those) but I'll see what can be done to fix it.
One thing you could try yourself is this: The old, low-poly and very chunky planets that came with original Cardinal Spear are still included in the VP pack. Aside from the ringed planet, the new textures should be compatible with them. So what you can do is to extract the old planet models from the VP - they do not have the _HTL -ending in the filename - and put them into your ..Freespace2\Cardinal Spear\data\models\ directory, and rename them to have the _HTL.pof ending.
Example - take planet01.pof, copy it into the mentioned directory, and rename it to planet01_HTL.pof, and it should replace the higher poly Earth in missions that have it.
...By the way, I have to say at this point that not all textures are my original works:
-Earth texture is based on
Don Edwards' Realistic Earth texture set on Celestia motherlode, with clouds added by me and shinemap derived from that by me. The glowmap is based on generic satellite imagery that I have actually forgotten the original source of, but it's also heavily edited by me to achieve the brightness and contrast I wanted to get.
-Moon texture is based on Clementine imagery, originally made by someone called Hermes, and they are also from
Celestia Motherlode. Some small edits are made by me in an effort to reduce the mosaic effect in some areas of the texture, otherwise it's pretty straight rip-off.
-Planet03 is essentially a Mars texture, because it was like that in the original Cardinal Spear and I ended up not having the time to replace it with an original texture... It also comes from
Celestia Motherlode originally, and I believe it was also one of
Don Edwards' textures (Mars Surface). The clouds are done by me, however, as well as some minor colour-toning.
-Planet04 has a similar story; it's a colour-toned Jupiter texture because it was a colour-toned Jupiter texture in the original Cardinal Spear. It is, at it's current state, a complete rip-off of the Colour-enriched Jupiter texture by
gradius_fanatic on
Celestia Motherlode.
Just thought I'd better clear that up at this stage. I did, however, take care to pick textures that did not ask for any kind of request to be used publicly, and also that I would add at least something my own to the images (actually the Jupiter-like texture is the only untouched one).
Planet05 is, however, completely my original creation in it's renewed form. Same applies to Planet06. Originally I had the intent to also make original textures for planets 03 and 04 (in the same way the Planet06) but because I'm a lazy bum I didn't do it when I had the chance and then I went through two Windows re-installations and a data-scavenging operation for reasons unrelated, so these ended up in the release... And also didn't notice the recent PM in time to check through the stuff once more. Oh well, mea culpa.
Perhaps if the problems with the models are more widespread and some kind of patch is required, it would be fitting to also include new, original textures for the planets #03 and #04, but I'll leave that to project leader to decide.
