[Aesaar]

Welcome to the world of community assets, where everyone benefits, at the expense of feeling special because you have stuff no one else has.  It's better this way.

The best of FSO isn't the best because of exclusive assets.

[LordPomposity]

"My mod must be unique in all aspects" has been the downfall of more projects on here than I dare count including many highly anticipated project.

You misspelled "most".

[Droid803]

Well I mean like if someone uses one of these and makes a campaign/story arc prominently focusing around the planet Blah, I don't want someone playing my campaign and going "Hey look, it's planet Blah."

Don't think there's ever been a mod centered around planet Blah. Except for *real* planets like Earth...and you can't exactly go "oh hey, that EARTH looks exactly like...EARTH!"

[Aginor]

I don't know, I think Legate Damar is partly right.
I wouldn't want to use Saga's Vega prime for something else in my Saga mod. Because this planet is featured prominently in the game, you fly near it in quite some missions, it is featured in cutscenes and it is talked about all the time during the Vega missions.

Of course I wouldn't have any problem with a mod in the BSG universe or something using it, because in that universe it isn't established already. So that case would apply to most mods here, since they aren't in the WC universe.

Hell, IIRC Saga even used the example cloud background from the seamless skybox thread for BOTH of its atmospheric missions and nobody said "uuuhhh how lame, they use those generic clouds." (ok maybe somebody did but I couldn't care less). Those missions turned out pretty great.

[redsniper]

If a player is so hung up on how a planet was used in one campaign that they can't exercise enough imagination to see it as another planet in some other campaign, then that's their problem. Blue poseidons didn't ruin WoD for anyone. Seeing the Eze or something in more than one campaign isn't going to instantly suck the fun out of your experience. It's like seeing the same actor in more than one movie, seriously. Hell, retail only had a handful of planet bitmaps. Surely those got reused a bit within one campaign.

[Aginor]

if you put it that way... yeah.
I certainly wouldn't mind as long as I also see something new in mods / campaigns from time to time :-)

[Legate Damar]

Well in Karajorma's FAQ it says that experienced players can notice subtle stuff about backgrounds even when in the middle of a dogfight

[Droid803]

Well, to be fair, I did go out of my way to find new planet bitmaps for DE... Mostly from Celestial Objects.

[Aginor]

btw: Can anyone point me to an example of a big star bmp with solar prominences and such things? I'm thinking of doing a mission near a star and the normal star bmps just scaled bigger don't look nice I think.
The ships would of course use some special sort of funky Sci-Fi filter to avoid pilots going blind. A side effect of this filter is that you can see the star like in one of those pictures here:

http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=Solar+prominence&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=de&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=z5mjT5O4KuTk4QTT1eGtCQ&biw=1024&bih=539&sei=0pmjT-PbLISLswav5aXmBQ

I think I can do the color I need myself so color doesn't matter.

[General Battuta]

Use the sun skybox from BP2

[Aginor]

I'll look into it.
I've googled it and found the end video of BP2 on youtube. The sun doesn't look too bad but... strange somehow... I don't know if that is youtube's fault though.

[General Battuta]

Postprocessing does some ugly things to it. Herra built it to be visually realistic rather than to resemble the kind of false-color sun I think want to go for.

When your mod comes out I'll be sure to not play it and google the end cutscene 

[headdie]

Right i am guessing your problem has been something like


If that is the case then after some experimentation it looks like the culprit is the glow file associated with the star.  this cant be removed due to table parsing but by directing the table file to one with a uniform transparency I got this



I have attached the files so you can take a closer look, the images all go in effects, the rest go where you would expect.

p.s. sorry for the shocking quality of the base image, it looks like it has been dramatically resized and it has left artefacts in the image.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[attachment deleted by a ninja]

[General Battuta]

You can create sun bitmaps that don't have glows.

[Aginor]

@Battuta:
Wow, I just noticed how bad my previous post must have sounded. A bit like "pff, I don't care for your mods, give me your assets"
I promise I will start playing more FS2 mods soon. It's just that I never liked the original FS all that much (always been a wingnut) which is the reason why I only played WCS, TBP and one or two others until now. There are sooo many campaigns and mods and I fear I don't get the story of them since I know nothing about the universes they play in.
Sorry General, I didn't mean to offend!

@headdie: Nice, I like it.

[headdie]

I tried removing the glow line from the stars table and the engine errored at me over it, so a glow file of some sort needs to be there.

[General Battuta]

Yeah but there are a bunch of stars in BP that don't have glows. I'm not sure exactly how Herra did it but I bet you could figure it out pretty fast looking at the files.

[BlasterNT]

There's also stuff from http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/main.php, for more sun bitmaps. 

And this: http://www.mediafire.com/?gw28g5ctlgvty from watsisname

[Gregster2k]

re. unique assets argument: IMO, it's not the assets you have, it's how you use them.

It's true that a thing can become overused to the point of 'immersion breaking tiredness' (you notice it because of how often people use it) but then again, what about the stock FS2 content?  Mods used to be made only with vanilla content back in the day.  Use assets well and you will get acclaim for your ingenuity, rather than being blasted for "goddamnit not that thing again."

[Knarfe1000]

I´ve downloaded the package but I don´t know, where to install the dds-flies.