idea alert! idea alert!
larger islands, shaped like the ones on earth, continents, ect.
this would make an awesome world.
mountains, trees.....the posibilities are endless!
we could have WW1 and WW2 Raging beneath the fuselage of our aircraft!
better yet, with larger islands, we could have land vehicles!
tanks, jeeps, trucks, maybe even hovercraft.

If somebody will figure out how to implement gravity simulations, and then apply them to things in the FL engine... I'll be more than happy to implement a world where there are such things.

I honestly thought about doing a city at one point, implemented like ocean is now.

Maybe I should get rid of all but 4 islands... and make each island much bigger, but make it "city-like", so that inside the island you could fly around... or something. I'd have to structure things so that if you could buy a "car" or something, you couldn't drive into the "ocean"...

I'll think about it. I'm still working on the World of Sky for Beta 2, so just give me awhile to work it all out, k?

im just afraid if we make islands too big, with the world of skies, no one will ever buy boats ect....

I guess you could make alot of rivers or something, in that case. Of course, avoiding collisions would be a nightmare.

ok i just had a great idea. about the whole space thing, and teh "nomads" attacking, we could simply put in a mothership over oceana!

the rivers could work, but they would have to be big.... there are some sizable ships.....about nomads, i think they would ruin the mod...i like the fact the'res nothing to do with the original freelancer in this mod... i'd like it to stay that way... i know it isnt my mod to dictate, but i just dont think it would look right....

Hmm. I sure wish we had some sort've SUR export utility... I could make rivers and stuff that would actually look right. Pity we don't have that available.

Right now Oceania's pretty unstable in SP... I'm more than halfway tempted to make two different Worlds of Sky... one for SP only, so that people can't go to Oceania and experience the wonderful world of CTD caused by aberrant spawn behaviors

I'm working on some new implementations of clouds... should be interesting stuff when I get them deployed. I think I've finally found a solution for clouds that'll look pretty good without ridiculous polycounts, while also obscuring vision... dunno just yet, though, and I haven't gotten done testing things. I'll share screenies when I get closer.

The World of Sky is going to be kewl, though... that I can tell you right now

for clouds:
use a light blue nebula, in blots around the sky

How about making a custom starsphere? Find a good image of the blue sky with clouds etc. and make a large elliptoid, taller and wider than high, with the sky as texture. Export it to CMP and make it a starsphere by readjusting the VMeshRef section (just look how the original starspheres are set up, that is how you will havr to do it). Add a \Cons\Fix("Root" subnode Cmpnd and then resize the thing so it is roughly 100k in diameter. It worked for the sun in the background of my mod (a texture on a square) and should work for you, too. If you make the ellipsiod really wide and long, you will even have the effect that it looks like a real sky going itno distance. You know the tunnel-view of the bottom unkown systrem (monkeys/apes planet)? That was done by building a real tunnel as the starsphere. It is proof that you can use other shapes than spheres to get a real perspective feeling...

the idea is there will be clouds that the planes can fly through =D not just a pretty picture

You need a name for the World of Sky, call it Atmospheria

Actually, I *did* customize a starsphere... sort've... I took an existing one with cloudlike textures and photoshopped it, and the result looks OK. But I am definately thinking that I'll do a custom one for B2... it'd be nice to have one for Atmospheria (lol... good name, I think we have a winner)... that looks like a blue sky above, light tiny cloudpuffs near the midline, and ocean way below. I'll take a look at how to do this and see if I can't figure it out.

My cloud implementation is still being experimented with... basically, I'm looking for a way to build some very big clouds that are very complex... and look nice... that doesn't slow people's FPS to a crawl, nor use up more than one object in the System (since we're limited to 255, apparantly).

idea:
make a desert-world, with land vehicles and massive aircraft,as well as zepplin "gunships" like battleships of the sky.

The trick is, not not try and make a sphere. Make a huge half-sphere, with the flat side with a ocean texture, the curved side with a sky texture. Place the whole thing so that the center is about half the distance from top to bottom. Should do very well.