[Mobius]

By "team" you mean IPAndrews?

[General Battuta]

By "team" you mean IPAndrews?

Actually IPAndrews requested that the whole mod be taken down. I believe the team (for obvious reasons) rejected this but settled on the compromise that TBP assets cannot be used outside the mod without specific permission of the asset creator, which in many cases is or includes IPA.

[Dragon]

Not that you'd like to use most of their assets anyway, their models are of inferior quality compared to most fan made stuff (not to mention buggy) and pretty much everything is replaceable.
Project Zatharas is going to work on improving and fixing some of TBP assets, thankfully they didn't forbid use of their stuff.

[Mobius]

If it was IPAndrews who made that pic then I shouldn't have any problems getting the permission to use it. The method suggested by Herra Tohtori a few posts ago seems more interesting, though: it may be the case of giving it a try.

[General Battuta]

If it was IPAndrews who made that pic then I shouldn't have any problems getting the permission to use it. The method suggested by Herra Tohtori a few posts ago seems more interesting, though: it may be the case of giving it a try.

Made what pic? We're discussing skyboxes.

If you're referring to the Earth skybox in Commander Zane's post, no, HerraTohtori made it, and I assume you are free to use it as all Blue Planet assets are generally up for grabs.

[Mobius]

I got TBP's Earth, but not as a skybox texture: I tested it as an actual background bitmap. I don't know wheter or not the original was for a skybox, but... it shouldn't be that hard to pick up planet textures from skyboxes and turn them into bitmaps.

[Dragon]

I've done this once, it worked quite well.
That could be usefull if you want to make a few missions which take place in one system, so you could use skybox for close ups and bitmap version of the planet when it needs to be visible in the background.

[Woolie Wool]

By "team" you mean IPAndrews?

Actually IPAndrews requested that the whole mod be taken down. I believe the team (for obvious reasons) rejected this but settled on the compromise that TBP assets cannot be used outside the mod without specific permission of the asset creator, which in many cases is or includes IPA.

Consider that I actually asked IPA before his meltdown for permission to use TBP assets in ToF, do I still get protection via grandfather clause?

[General Battuta]

I got TBP's Earth, but not as a skybox texture: I tested it as an actual background bitmap. I don't know wheter or not the original was for a skybox, but... it shouldn't be that hard to pick up planet textures from skyboxes and turn them into bitmaps.

If you can figure out who created it and get their permission, it shouldn't be a problem, so long as you're aware that that image is apparently really technically ****ed up.

[Dragon]

Consider that I actually asked IPA before his meltdown for permission to use TBP assets in ToF, do I still get protection via grandfather clause?

I think that you should, he gave you a premission, so it shouldn't be a problem.
If he changes his mind, he can tell you about it, so if he didn't did it yet, you should be free to use those assets.

[Mobius]

Yeah. Pretty much underlines why I'm not a big fan of planet skyboxes... they pose too many limits.

[General Battuta]

Yeah. Pretty much underlines why I'm not a big fan of planet skyboxes... they pose too many limits.

I think you've got something backwards. The issues we're discussing here have to do with a badly made skybox (the TBP one) that is effectively a bitmap pasted on a plane.

Ideally all FS2 background bitmaps would be removed and replaced by skyboxes, as they can look and behave a lot better. The only disadvantage they have so far as I know is that they require more work to set up.

[The E]

And if you take into account the fact that skyboxes are better in terms of performance, there isn't really much to be said in favour of traditional background bitmaps.

[Dragon]

You can move them around and rescale, which is a plus for me.

[Herra Tohtori]

Yeah. Pretty much underlines why I'm not a big fan of planet skyboxes... they pose too many limits.

Skyboxes have no limitations. The imitate reality as closely as you make the 3D scene to be.

Background bitmap planets have exploits. They enable you to show egregiously falsified views of planets.

Let me elaborate:





Here is a planet as it is seen from four points (P1-P4). P1 is the furthest, P4 the closest point.

The apparent diameter of the planet varies depending on the distance.


As you draw tangents to the planet to determine the apparent diameter, you notice that the lines obviously also limit the area that is visible to the view point. Player in P1 is able to see nearly full hemisphere. The line crossing the area visible to P3 is about 1/3rd of the planet's circumference, for P2 it is one quarter of the circumference, and for P4, the line through the visible area is only about 1/8th of the planet's circumference.

Now if you consider that when you change the apparent diameter of a planet bitmap, you're doing nothing at all to change how much area of the planet's surface is visible. It's still a static image of the planet as seen from the original rendering distance.

Skyboxes automatically take care of this. Not so with re-scaleable planet bitmaps. This is my main issue with skyboxes that essentially take any high-resolution planet image available and just scale it to high apparent diameter in the game. Essentially it's like taking a photo of a car, resizing it and then saying that because the photo is larger it was taken from closer.

Now, regarding the seemingly insane texture resolutions, let's take a look at what sort of area of surface is visible in a single skybox render which has 90 degrees field of view:





The red area is the actual area visible in the "down" render which is the most critical one regarding texture stretching. It's easy to see from here that the visible area is only approximately 1/24th or so from the entire circumference of the planet from edge to edge.

Practically, this means if you have equatorial resolution of 21600 pixels in the texture, you will have 900 pixels to stretch from one edge to another. If you use 4096^2 resolution, that means the texture is stretched by factor of four. That's a rather heavy amount of blur you get to that texture there.

This is basically the reason why such large textures are needed and useful. For skyboxes where the planet is further from the player (and, subsequently, has lesser apparent radius) much smaller textures are sufficient.

[Woolie Wool]

I think the "limits" he's talking about are that skyboxes only work for a single scene. A planet bitmap sacrifices accuracy to allow you to reuse it for many different scenes. Most people will probably not notice anything wrong with them (except for distortion caused by FOV).

[General Battuta]

I think the "limits" he's talking about are that skyboxes only work for a single scene. A planet bitmap sacrifices accuracy to allow you to reuse it for many different scenes. Most people will probably not notice anything wrong with them (except for distortion caused by FOV).

Yeah but he's explaining why they're basically just faking it. You'd get a better result by just moving the camera and rendering a new skybox.

[Woolie Wool]

Not everyone has the skills or resources to do that.

[Droid803]

Nor the processing power to handle such huge textures.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

You cannot legally or morally use TBP assets outside of TBP. The team has forbidden it.

Actually you can if you can find out who actually made them.  In the case of the Earth Skybox I have an idea and if so then they can give permission.  I'll ask tonight if they are online.    The whole issue is he claimed everything and since there are no records of who did what unless the person that did it is around and gives permission we can't prove otherwise.