[Nico]

Originally posted by Bobboau
find one of those nice full range star maps

yup. if you have max5, you'll have a quite awesome "stars only" map to use, and with a pretty good resolution

anyway you can do better than that, matey :

[Setekh]

Show-off

Lookin' good, Phreak.

[KARMA]

the bright background also remind me somehow the backgrounds of homeworld, wich I always found wonderful.
btw in those kind of images the 256 colour limitations could be really a problem

[FreeTerran]

hmm maybe its better if the backgrounds are in tga because of the color limitation ?

[Taristin]

Try something like this  


http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/us/images/mods/snipes/Background.jpg    :D:D

[Fineus]

Not to put a downer on it but it looks very dodgy... (the original stuff that is). Very blurred and such. I know it's only in the first stage but I thought I should mention it. It'll have to look much sharper in the end, right?

[phreak]

yea we need a better background sphere as the current one is only 32 polies.  we can also specify a custom one so you can put multiple images on it, but it doesn't work that way right now.  the changes should be trivial, however.

[Nico]

you know, you only really need a huge pof, that's what I did, works fine.

[phreak]

we can't do that now since if its diameter is over 30km or so it'll get clipped by the far clipping plane.  if its smaller, its gonna look bigger if you have to cover a certain distance.

[Lightspeed]

take a look at the freelancer backgrounds.... some of them really 0wn

okay, someone finish true-color backgrounds and a new pof

Adding eye-candy like that to FS2 would spice things up even more

[Nico]

Originally posted by PhReAk
we can't do that now since if its diameter is over 30km or so it'll get clipped by the far clipping plane.

what? who did that? what for?

[Terorist]

Your run-of-the-mill space telescope false color images don't make very good background images if they're just glued on like this - that's simply not quite what it looks like up there.

Then there are the points that brighter light sources like local stars and planets reflecting that light drown the backround stuff, but let's not take a too purist approach.

(false color image = images where different elements, like hydrogen, oxygen and so on are colored differently to bring out those details in the nebulae)

[Flaser]

What kind of pof did the subspace tunnel use?
How about the skybox?

I believe it is time to replace the said box with a higher poly sphere - as well as adding the ability to layer all the background components.

What are the aims I think of?

You should be able to set a base background image.
You shoulb be able to add suns,, nebulas planets and any other picture onto that layer - and determine their order.
It should still allow the usage of the old (and recently tweaked) star system.

[FreeTerran]

Originally posted by Raa Tor'h
Try something like this  


http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/us/images/mods/snipes/Background.jpg    :D:D

convert it before in 256 colors

[Flipside]

Hmmmm my thought is more that the problem lays in the foreground. I'm not talking area dependant nebulas here, but could you add a general 'fogging' effect to the game, where the Modder specifies Ambient Fog density and Distance and it applies to the whole play-area. That would stop the foreground ships looking so stark against the background
Also, if you did the sphere with two different materials, one for each hemisphere, you could effectively double the resolution of the Background?
Looks really really nice Phreak, shows promise!

Flipside

[Taristin]

Originally posted by FreeTerran

convert it before in 256 colors

Nah. Just make it a Targa file

[Flipside]

Or DDS, which would be a smaller file size with just as many colours?

Flipside

[Taristin]

And how does one do that? Is it a standard extension in PSP/PS?

[Flipside]

There is a Save plugin for Adobe products, theres also a converter proggy, I'll just go get the plugin and post it......

Flipside

Here....http:\\www.aqsx85.dsl.pipex.com\images\DDS.8bi

[kasperl]

3d exploration can read, and possibly write dds files IIRC.