[Nighteyes]

as the title says, I'm wondering why background nebula are turned off when "full nebula" is enabled...
now that we can control the density of the fog, we have the possibility to create much more diverse backgrounds, with thinner poofs for the full nebula its easy to simulate the look of space dust in asteroid fields, thin clouds in atmospheric missions and so on...
currently the only way to have a background with full nebula is with a skybox, and IMO its much more easy to just create the background with nebula bitmaps, and I don't see a real reason why they don't render and the skybox does.

*this screenshot is with full nebula turned on

[Zacam]

I like this idea. Though it could also be possible to paint those nebula to a texture map, basically a double layer starfield pof that has the stars on the outer layer and the backgrounds on the inner layer.

Problem with that is A: Really big map if you have a certain quality to preserve, though in some cases that can end up smaller than the individual files put together and B: it's easier to customize and adjust the appearance when it is in the background editor than when it is in a flat map and C: until missionparse can use Texture Replace on the skybox model, different BG files means yet another pof file.

[Nighteyes]

yes as I said its possible to just do it all in the skybox, but thats a lot of work and hard to make it look right, and it means you will need to use the box skybox pof with 6 2048x2048 textures.
another neat idea I had is a "render to texture" button in the background editor, where it would take the background you made and save it as 6 TGA images all ready to be placed on a box pof, seamless and easy, so that bitmap heavy missions would be less stressful as 1 skybox... but I assume its much easier to just enable the bitmaps

[DaBrain]

[...]and it means you will need to use the box skybox pof with 6 2048x2048 textures.[...]

No it doesn't. A skybox doesn't have to be a box. You can use whatever you want in there. It's really no problem to build you skybox exactly the way FRED/FSO does.

If you create your skybox in your 3d application, you have lot more control over the fillrate use of it (overdraw, think in this direction -> http://www.humus.name/index.php?ID=266).
Another advantage is that you can have animations in your skybox. For now you only have rotation (dumb rotate), but once we have a working material system, that might allow animation keys, you can pretty much do what ever you want.
(i.e. with uv/texture translation alone, things like this will be easily possible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzeMkKKBhXM&feature=player_detailpage#t=70s)

Btw nice shot!

[Zacam]

The MediaVPs starfield is a single 2048^2 image, so....

[rscaper1070]

I think Herra made a double sky sphere already. It has an outer for stars and an inner transparent sphere for nebula.


Edit: I couldn't find the thread but I found the file...

http://www.mediafire.com/file/7j2d1unbujl1d5d/1208471584_nebula-starfield.7z

[Zacam]

Correct. I was for packing it in for 3.6.10 but we were not using it for anything. I suspect it may make an appearance in the next MediaVPs, especially if I get the texture replace to parse and work with it.

[Commander Zane]

That is an excellent screenshot.

[Nuke]

skycubes aren't really that hard to render in a 3d program. that ****ty skybox that i made (and that i see in so many freespace videos on youtube) was rendered in truespace of all things. just stick 6 cameras in the middle of your scene with a 90 degree fov and pointing along the orthogonal axes in each direction and render it from all of them. sky spheres are a little more complicated, i dont think you can (easily) do a direct render to from a scene in max. but as far as i can tell background images are just drawn on quads, which have been rotated around the center with normals pointing at 0'0'0, sized in x and y and i think subdivided by variable, and textured with the various bitmaps. why not take all that generated geometry and have fred generate a pof file to go with the mission? granted you can also render to texture but at some quality loss.

[Nighteyes]

guys your missing the point, there is absolutely no reason why the nebula bitmaps are turned off by default when using a full nebula mission, you don't want nebula? don't use them, but if I want to use them I should have the option, instead of going around the problem by making an appropriate skybox...

*it would also be nice to have the option to use more than 3 nebula poofs, so you can have dense looking ones for a real nebula, and wispy looking ones for dust

[DaBrain]

Agreed, the option to enable bg nebluae should be added.

I wouldn't turn this on by default. There is no reason to waste fillrate and rerndering time the background when the full nebula is too dense to see it.

[Cyborg17]

So we can have skyboxes in full nebula and control fog density.  That's pretty awesome.  Are we able to control the fog color?