I just thought about something....
I saw on multiple planets some "light maps"... In fact these are maps that simulate lights coming from cities when you look at the dark side of a planet.

Well I wondered Argh.. Do you know how to do this? I think it would add even more realism to the Earth.

Y'know, I was planning to talk about this soon anyhow, seeing how Silvik's already doing it with his TIE Uni stuff. I just haven't had time to get to Imperratodd's alien cruiser-ish thing, where I was going to use this.

Basically, we can use glowmaps with defined alpha areas in the FL engine. To do so, define a texture as DcDtEt. No Ec is required. Then define the colored alpha as a seperate DDS texture. Yes, we don't have to use grayscale- just do the lights as a seperate Layer in Photoshop/GIMP/PSP and then cut/paste into a new, same-size picture with black as the background.

With Pretty Planets, I definately plan to include colored alphas like that. Among other cool uses, you could define white areas under the "clouds", so that, viewed from the dark side, planets would appear to have gently-glowing areas where clouds are partially obscuring the light pouring out've hidden cities... pretty cool stuff.

The uses of this can range from the subtle to the flamboyant. Best of all, this method makes it virtually impossible to goof up the amount of alpha being applied- what you see is what you get, basically. The only downsides are:

1. DcDtEtTwo doesn't work. Tested.
2. It requires that an object have two different textures applied during every render. Which could get rather... expensive... in terms of framerate, if we're talking about having 20+ objects on screen with Et textures. Pretty minor problem otherwise.

Great to know that! I'll try it tonight with a picture I have that shows city light and world light (Like the blue-black light coming from the seas, etc...) and see how good it shows up.

Do I have to redo the model and apply the texture to the Earth, or can I simply edit the mat file?

All you have to do is edit the MAT, and add another Texture node for the glowmap. Remember, Et's can have color in them, and use the relative levels of white for their alpha- pretty slick, really, and very much easier to work with than grayscale maps. Works just fine with DXT1 with no mipmaps or alpha channels...

See now if you two joined the EOA we could make a space balls mod

ROFLMAO.

Sorry... um... what did you say?

Oh nothing...

couldn't a greyscale copy of the terrain features be used as a glow map to give the hills some depth in shadows...? it wouldn't cost much memory-wise

Well, if it was the same Glowmap that was being used to define night-side "city lights", then no, it probably wouldn't be too costly- it'd be less than double-cost with DXT1, because of its good compression. Dunno whether it'd look very good, though. If you're looking at the night side of Earth from space IRL, you don't generally see much of the planet unless it's being lit by the Moon, except for the cities and their glow scattered on clouds. Dunno whether this would really be a very realistic effect or not, honestly. I haven't even tested a Glowmap that large yet, so... um... more testing is needed before I can really testify how that will actually work. FriendlyFire was nice enough to explain how he did his neato graduated atmosphere, so I'm going to test that with the penumbra and see how that goes...

Friendly_fire - is that an actual ingame screenshot? The background makes it look like its rendered in a program... if it is in game, I am truly amazed!

It's in-game. I've had the pleasure of testing the method used

Yea it is. I used a custom starsphere to make it looks good

I've only got one Question, HOW do you get them into game ?

I used your MS3D file and reskinned it with a map of Jupiter (thx NASA), it looks great in milkshape, and after some huffing & puffing with the Glass texture, it looks okay in HardCmp, and thats where it gets a little embarrassing as I can't figure out how to code them into the game.

Rebalance 3.5 Dev. Team
rebalance.blue-ion.net

@Bejaymac:

1. Sorry for the late reply, I've been away, getting Toolkit done.

2. To put it in the game, substitute its code for the code of any given Planet you wish to replace. Basically, you just have to code it up like a Station. Here's a practical example:

[Solar
nickname = planet_earthgrncld_4000
ids_name = 60203
ids_info = 60204
LODranges = 0, 10000, 250000
type = PLANET
DA_archetype = solar\PrettyPlanets\PrettyPlanet.cmp
material_library = solar\PrettyPlanets\PrettyPlanet.cmp
mass = 1000000
solar_radius = 4000
shape_name = NNM_SM_MEDIUM_FOREST_MOON

Got it now? It really ain't hard