I think it is somet to do with the tga files, possibly cmp or mat files.
I dunno how you do it tho, but you need a program (forgot it's name) to create the textures.

Sticks and Stones will break my bones.
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Lets use a...HUH! Nomad Energy Blaster?!
Blimey i would of liked my chainsaw

Not sure what CELESTIA files are?

But custom planet textures are definitely possible. I've done a couple... but it was years ago...

Celestia files are all jpeg files. Celestia is the software program

The planet's in Freelancer use the .SPH files for the "mesh", this is basically a cube that's textured with a random terrain map on each face. The cube is then expanded into a sphere distorting the hell out of the texture maps. Some of the pictures in this thread will show you what I mean.

Your best bet is to use Argh's Pretty Planets Project which uses a .CMP for the planet that has a square texture map.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

Mephistopholes created a way to do them as well using custom 3db files. I personally think this is easier to do, here is an example

Planet IO
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y155/Wargibbon/Io1.jpg

Planet EARTH
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y155/W ... Earth3.jpg

These use a cylindrical texture and seem to do the job quite nicely

Io texture is amazing. Thanks

Personally I think the results achieved with the Prettyplanet project are worth the little added effort put into it.

Earth
http://moddb.com/images/cache/mods/70/7 ... _44025.jpg
http://70.85.240.179/4020/183/upload/p1605828.jpg
(Sorry I couldn't find perfect images)

This was done using the PrettyPlanet Project, of course overhauled to a nonesensical point (I was a bit insane at making it as good as possible), using a custom built CMP and a 2048X2048 DDS material (BlueMarble project) combined with a 2048X2048 TGA material for a separate, transparent cloud layer (Again from NASA's BlueMarble project), and a second, invisible SPH file for the sole purpose of having a proper atmosphere. Then I added (First shot) the night lights using yet another map (TGA I think). Makes a bit of work, it's heavy (30mb for the MAT), but it gives the results

Excellent work but here lies the problem also, 30mb MAT file. Stick that into a mp server and it will grind to a halt once loads of players are there. That's the only issue i can see doing these new planets using this method. At least with Mephistopholes way of doing it, you can keep the file sizes down, plus making cylindrical textures is easy. Also there's loads of NASA images out there (which is where i got mine) that are already in the correct format, and so simple to add. Gotta say your earth is better than mine tho lol

The file size comes from the TGA. The TGA itself is around 16mb. Remove the transparent cloud layer and you get down to like 15mb. Remove the Lights (Which are 13mb) and you get a 2mb material. Also, I didn't check to see if the Lights could be in DDS format. If they can, I'd have a 16mb MAT file.

I think its good that there's two ways to do pretty much the same thing with these planet textures, talking of file sizes, my planet Io weighs in at 1.63MB for the finished 3DB file. I agree that seperate cloud layers would be nice like you've done, but if you were to make the solar system using the pretty planet concept, the file sizes would be huge, even at 15MB each. I think that needs to be taken into consideration too.

@ FriendlyFire, try shrinking the size of your cloud and light textures, FL will still map them properly it's just that they'll be lower in detail. High detailed textures might look great in renders but in a gaming environment their next to useless, especially in MP.
I use Argh's pretty planet model as well but I don't use the same sized textures as he did, 1024x1024 for something like Earth & 512x512 for anything else, I use 256x256 for clouds/atmosphere. Yes my planets are low detail but FL is a low detail game and my planets don't look out of place in it, and I don't have the headache of dealing with massive mat files *shudder*.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

Well, since in the mod I'm working on (FLCE) is designed on a true 1/20 scale, most planets are 200k in radius, if not more. That means I need to have huge textures, since I just see one or two planet(s) per system. Earth is by far the biggest of them all, most others have a MAT file weighting 2 mb, which is not too heavy considering the material size (2048X2048).

you can pull them out and retint them but if you change them in any other way, you will get a result that will not be pretty

Glock36
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