Just a note for folks who don't go over to the 3D Modeling section very often... I've been working on a little project to make some new planets, including some simple templates that anybody with moderate Photoshop skill should be able to use to make their own.

Basically, the objective here is to make planets that have better surface details, clouds and other things but not at severe polycounts, plus some "stars" that have alpha-channel transparency effects and glowmaps that make them look much like the stars in FL.

I'll be releasing the first planet + templates and other information sometime over the next week, for modders who're interested in the idea of much higher quality planets that won't require graphic genius to achieve. This is a "minor" beauty fix for the game, but I think it may be worthwhile, as I've developed some methods that should allow for much greater details without huge hits on framerate, as well as allowing modders to build systems closer to "scale"... which is another topic, which I'm going to open in another thread here in a second