[Flipside]

LOL Well, you need to download the latest .exe, the one from the 32Bit colour thread works well, so does Bobb's new missile trail build

The POF that comes with it requires one bitmap, any size up to the limits of your graphics card, just use Modelview to change the texture name. Oh yes, and read earlier for how to activate the backgrounds in Fred.

One last thing, remember you can use .JPG files with the new build, but you need -32Bit -t32 in the command line

Flipside

I'm currently trying to create a skysphere that uses 3 Bitmaps, but having some scaling problems, I might have to use just two

[FreeTerran]

it isen't an pof in the zip

[Fineus]

http://www.aqsx85.dsl.pipex.com/Ships/SkyBox2.zip

I think that's it... but do we have to add it to the ships.tbl and such? Explain for my stupidity!

[FreeTerran]

ok thx i will try it

[Fineus]

Well, my curiosity compensated for my lack of understanding. I got it working.

Lets assume you have the latest build from Phreaks signiture.

Take the zip link I posted above and place the files in the /data/models directory.

Now open the FSO version of FRED2 and create a mission (or load another one and remove all its backgrounds). In the backgrounds selection box you'll notice a field at the bottom right. Into that enter the name of the model file you just placed in the /data/models directory (omit the .POF extension - this is added automatically).

Save the mission when you're done with it.

Open and play!

And a great job to all who worked on this, it looks fantastic!

[Fineus]

How cool is this?!

[FreeTerran]

the bg looks **** but now take my 4 awesome screenshots

here is number 1.

[FreeTerran]

here number 2

[FreeTerran]

now the 3th.

[FreeTerran]

and the final one

[Fineus]

Someone really needs a FSO catagory of screenshots!

[Fineus]

Does anyone have a high-poly sphere with only one map on the inside? The one in the link I downloaded is much more jagged (and therefore won't look as good I imagine...)

[FreeTerran]

make for the second texture an green pcx 256 colors file i think this will work

[Fineus]

It didn't

[Taristin]

I made one with 400 polies, but the mapping is horrible. I can't get a decent UV map on it...

[KARMA]

Bu I don't think you need an ultradetailed sphere, or am I wrong?
btw for the screenshots it seem that a single 1024x1024 map isn't enough to cover all the background sphere, and probably even 2 maps aren't enough, with images of the complexity of star photos you risk to see odd grain effects, as flipside said.
you should try with 4 or even 8 maps in my opinion, lithunwrap can help a lot to unwrap the sphere, and probably the best solution would be to have one (or two) star photo covering a relatively small portion of the screen, with a tileable starfield background covering all the other areas.
This could require some work, in order to don't see the borders of the star photos

[StratComm]

ugh, please no tilable backgrounds... I think having the original starmap there still and having that shine through is a much better alternative to that.

[Flipside]

The problem comes when it gets to scaling all the Bitmaps. It's just a question of getting all the scaling sorted out so that the stars look the same size on every texture, easier said than done, I'm not very up on this kind of UV Mapping, Box or Planar is no good unless you are dividing your sky up into bands, and then you come across the scale problem So It's circular mapping, which tends to stretch the textures in unpleasant ways

Any advice anyone?

Flipside

[an0n]

Am I the only one who thought "Event Horizon" when looking at FT's shots?

[StratComm]

The best skybox for simply mapping a picture to is inherently a cube.  That way you just need 6 maps of equal scale and everything lines up fine.  However, with a cube, unless your textures are done VERY well, you will run in to things like being able to see the corners (the map I called out for being a box really wasn't, but you can see the line across which the map was mirrored clear as day) and some scaling issues related to distance.  The sphere option fixes that problem, but opens a new can of worms in the mapping, as you can't really get a clean spherical map out of a normal picture.