[Woolie Wool]

Originally posted by Lightspeed


I completely agree. Yet when you look at FS2's planets you'll see -gas giants -colonized worlds and very few -chunk of rocks

I like it the way it is.

[Carl]

Originally posted by diamondgeezer
When the code monkies get around to implementing bump-mapping (hint hint) might it be possibly to make greyscale maps for planets? You know, so the little ridges and craters and whatnot look 3D. That would be the height (pun intended) of pwnage.

the planets are not models, they are pictures. they are not being rendered in real time by game's engine. bump mapping wouldn't make any sense, an it would in fact make them look more like disks than spheres, and there is no point to bump maps since they can be made bumpy or smooth to begin with, since they are, after all, pictures.

[diamondgeezer]

I'd take offense to that if you hadn't just increased my understanding of game graphics by about 800%. Moving on...

[Bobboau]

actualy, if the bump map had a spherical orientation it would help to make them more sphereical, I've seen a demo of this were a bump map is used to make a flat plae look like a sphere

[Nico]

Originally posted by Carl


the planets are not models, they are pictures. they are not being rendered in real time by game's engine. bump mapping wouldn't make any sense, an it would in fact make them look more like disks than spheres, and there is no point to bump maps since they can be made bumpy or smooth to begin with, since they are, after all, pictures.

yeah, as Bob says, this is not true, bump can work on a 2D map ( coz after all, it's a 2D effect applied to a 2D texture, think about it ), and you can kind of simulate  a sphere with bump maps.
Tho, after being wrong you're right ( ) the effect can be rendered directly on the planet image, so there's little point using that.
Bump is interesting only on moving objects, coz it's processed using lighting data. if the light source around it doesn't move, bump is useless, having the relief directly drawn is better ( that's the case on a background image ).

[Setekh]

Much, much, much excellentness.