New New Planets!

Very nice! What is it? An object placed in the game over the planet avatar? Or did you find some clever way to manuiplate the planet textures?

We always thought you were limited in the size of objects that could be placed into the game by the clipping plane limit in flux.ini. Cambragol discovered that you could change the clipping value to a really high number and not impact frame rates. The engine must be smart enough not to render objects that are less than a pixel in size. The tiny clipping plane limit is totally unneeded.

It makes it possible to put planet (or larger) sized sims into the game. And those sims can have all the features of regular ships. Like docking ports. I suppose a flying Death Star would be possible.

Simply stunning. Awesome work.

Shane, you guessed correctly the first time. It is a an object that has been placed over the planet avatar. I figured out the size of the planets (1050km in radius), then used Epic's Station Environment tools to place the new planet object over the old one. The effect is that it acts exactly like the old planets, plus the new graphical features. Oh and here is the setting to change in flux:

[icSolarSystem]
far_clip = 3e+007

To make a planet really landable, we would need a few objects, such as a landscape area (maybe some hilss or something) and a simple city or station area. These objects could then be put together with the planet object and dockports and a planet is born. You could even make different areas of the planet landable. I plan to make a few detailed moon models, then place moonbases in craters and such. It should make for some very fun scenery and gameplay.

Well, in LDS, everything just zips past. I think it would be cool if the player hit the LDS 3, and the star just creeped along. Give a sense of how huge these things really are. Not to mention the effect of seeing a star fill your view even from halfway out in the system, like Akra and Epitaph would.

Set LDS speeds to the correct proportion of lightspeed and everything will seem much bigger. Lightspeed isnt all that fast on this scale. Be warned, if you do this, you will require a lot of insystem jump points, because interplanetery flight will take hours.