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my recommended way to test is to make a system with around a hundred planets that use the same model/skin. It's a sort of improvised load test. Back to top
Okay... I need to solicit some opinions from everybody...
Right now, the 'atmosphere' types I'm planning on include; Airless Rock, Airless Ice, Methane Ice, Methane Hot, Nitrogen Ice, Sulfur Dioxide, Carbon Dioxide Cold, Carbon Dioxide Hot, Oxygen Wasteland, Oxygen Ice, Oxygen Desert, Oxygen Swamp, Oxygen Ocean, Oxygen Terran, Oxygen Jungle, Oxygen Barren, Volcanic, Assimilated(for Trek flavor), Vongformed(for SW flavor) and Hydrogen. I've gathered well over a thousand textures from various sources... So, please take a look and let me know which ones you like and don't like... And also what you think they look like...I am color blind, which can cause a few problems.
Most of the individual textures are 512x256 and are shown at half size, but a few are really 256x128, and a few are somewhere in between... Due to the huge number of pictures, I'll only post five 1024x1024 previews at a time...each preview contains 32 textures.
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More to follow, after somebody weighs in on these... Back to top
Joined: Aug 04, 2003 Location: Cincinnati, OH, USA
Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:05 pm Post subject:
Well, the quality is all over the place - some look photorealistic, while some almost look like they were done in MS Paint! And there's an awful lot of gray... I guess that's supposed to be realistic or something? That's no space station - it's a spreadsheet! Back to top
@ekolis: Like I said, they came from lots of different sources... Most airless bodies in our solar system are pretty gray, so yeah...realism. Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I kind of like a few of the 'simple' textures...
Another bit of realism: without atmosphere, you always get craters. And unless there's some form of geologic activity, they won't go away...
@marhawkman: Yes, many of the textures I found were not designed to be planet textures... And, a few of them looked pretty good on the models... But you're right, stretching toward the poles is a bit of an issue...
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Anything striking y'all's fancy? Back to top
Numbering is done from L>R T>B I skipped listing airless rock since there are so many of them. But there's a lot that don't look like good planet skins. some would make better asteroids.
I'm not really sure how to subdivide them, since (realistically) some of these would have the same look to the atmosphere. Oxygen/nitrogen/carbondioxide are all colorless gases and such...
Also, what would you consider to be a distinguishing feature between desert and barren?
One thing to consider with craters is that it basically indicates a dead world with no ecology or geology. So I wouldn't go overboard with craters.
Well, most atmospheres are a mix of gases and the color would come from only some of them, or from some particulate matter suspended in the atmosphere... The ones I chose are really just for trying to break things up by flavor... Methane Ice & Nitrogen Ice are basically not going to have real atmospheres to speak of... But they might look different. CO2 Cold could also be called CO2 thin; as in Mars...while CO2 Hot/Thick would be like Venus... We think of Earth as Oxygen, but Nitrogen is the majority... People often call Titan a Methane atmosphere, but again it's mostly Nitrogen...with trace hydrocarbons which give it smog.
Splitting off Barren from Desert is another flavor thing... In Star Wars, Tatooine is a Desert...but some planets (which also have Oxygen atmospheres) are called Barren. They often have darker colors like red or brown, sometimes with craters...the main difference seems to be that Desert has sand and Barren is mostly hard rock... In SW, atmospheres aren't talked about in terms of gases, but what level of life support equipment you need for them. Also, there are a number of planets that appeared in TOS that seemed to have lots of rocks and few plants, but no sand(that we saw)... They also sometimes were reddish in color...
Do you advise fewer 'dead' worlds for the sake of aesthetics or game play? With higher domed values, even dead worlds will support a good sized colony... Looking at our solar system, most of the moons are 'dead' worlds.
Vongformed would look basically like a jungle, but the life would be hostile to most non-native beings... It could be lumped in with Jungle, except that any other Jungle native races would get full, non-domed values...
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Should I continue to limit the images to 5 at a time? Or up it to 10? Back to top
you know a lot of these pictures are redundant right? the last set had what looked like 9 skins(some of them blue shifted) for Io and 10 of Mars. Just colored a bit differently. And many of the others are resized or recolored versions of others.
Also... I think the stock game already has solar system planet skins. *looks* Yeah Earth, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Callisto, "Moon_Earth", Europa, Ganymede, Io, Titan, Neptune, Pluto, Saturn, Uranus, Venus.
What's the goal here? Just to have variety? Or are you trying to come up with an aesthetic code to make the planets distinguishable at a glance the way they are in most mods. (IE purple planets are methane, airless are grey, etc...)
Anyways, the main reason for not wanting to overdo craters is they make the planets look kinda lifeless sometimes. If it's an inhabited world, it's not lifeless. Also some of your images have HUGE craters, which won't look right in game since they'll be flat, unless you make a planet model that isn't a marble. IRL massive craters are extremely rare. P4.4 is about as big as I would expect to see craters on an actual moon. Anyways, craters are fine for airless rock worlds. But from your description that would seem to be a minority component of the galaxy. Back to top
Yes, there is great redundancy...but keep in mind that I'm not suggesting they all get used. The point of the previews is for you guys to give me feedback on which ones you think are the best.
More specifically, the redundancy of some textures are showcasing the different ways to present them... A lot of the original textures were square. Especially if the texture had craters, it needed to be "wide" to look right on the models. Look at the last three of P15. The first of the three is the original skin "doubled" to make it wide... The second is only the top half of the original, while the third is the bottom half... On some of the others that didn't have craters, I even did a fourth preview which stretched the original into a wide shape.
(I should also note that a few skins weren't seamless, which led to them being "mirrored." Most of these I discarded, but I left a few of the less awful ones in.)
Stock does have Real planets, but most of mine are higher resolution. I'm not 100% sure I want to bother including them, but I thought I'd let people offer opinions on which ones they thought looked best, just in case... Some of the skins that are real may be used for generic planets rather than specific planets...
For instance, Io. Io itself is an example of the Sulfur Dioxide type world... But some Ice worlds might be volcanically active... Triton has nitrogen ice volcanism... Presumably, a methane ice world could have that, too... Io & Mars are widely used by others as 'alien' planet textures, it seems... Again, there's no need to use all of the skins in the mod, only the ones we think are the most appealing.
Variety is certainly one goal. An aesthetic code is also something to shoot for. As I mentioned, I'm color blind. So, if i don't ask for help deciding which to use for what, I might end up mixing my blue & purple skins, or my red & green skins, etc..
I don't have the skills to make craters part of the models, but if somebody wants to, that'd be awesome.
If we colonized the Moon, it would still look dead, except for lights on it or something... But there isn't a way to apply that in the game.
So called "dead" worlds are but one of many types... But... There are LOTS of oxygen types, but that's for home world flavor. We'd want any oxygen world to be in the "Goldilocks" zone... IRL, there are lots of "dead" worlds (albeit mostly in the form of satellites) and plenty of Gas Giants... Though there's lots of types of terrestrial worlds with atmospheres, I figure they'll make up a max of 50% of the objects in any given system...
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Yeah, that bit with the cropping and stretching and mirroring is part of what I was saying about redundancy. But to elaborate on that, the ones where you cropped the skin to make it smaller, are probably only really suitable for a tiny planet/moon. They'd not have much detail and on a huge world it'd stick out. Maybe for those, if they get used at all, do some tricks with rotation? Example: P18:20 enh I'll just show you... http://marhawkman.deviantart.com/art/P18-20b-519076794 Teh end result on mine doens't really look good, but it was something I did in 5 mins. I could get it to look better if I spent a bit more time making things line up.
I suppose we could update the stock "real planet" skins with the best of what you found.
So what do you want the various types to look like and how should they differ from each other? Also we could probably use some models from stock or MMP for at least some of this.
Any object more than a certain size will naturally acquire an atmosphere. If through no other means than capturing the solar wind. BUT, that could by the standards of SE5 be "airless" since it's a feeble atmosphere that can't support life. It depends on the size of the object though. The larger the planet the more gas it accumulates. So the idea of a large body that has NO atmosphere, and thus no wind to erode craters, is far fetched. For small objects? Sure, it works.
Some of this last batch look really nice for ice/terrestrial worlds Back to top
I think I see what you're talking about with rotation. . .that might be something to try, but only after we know for sure which textures we actual want to use.
What should things look like. . .? Hmm. Well, like I said, any planet that has little to no atmosphere should have craters. . . Unless there is some geological activity which gets rid of them. . . Of the types I have purposed, I figured that Airless Rock, Airless Ice, Methane Ice & Nitrogen Ice types would be effectively non-atmospheres. . . The Ice types are perhaps more likely to have surface activity that would get rid of craters. . . IRL, Airless Rock & Airless Ice often look the same. But I figured we'd go for a generally lighter color on the Ice ones. . . And I figured on darker colors for Methane & Nitrogen. . .purple or blue or whatever. If Io is the archetype of a Sulfur world, then it would have little atmosphere, but probably be geologically active enough to have few if any craters. . .with yellow being the main color.
Oxygen Ice of course would be arctic type worlds. . . Oxygen Ocean as planets with relatively little landmass or none at all. . . Oxygen Terran would be Earth like. . . Oxygen Jungle would be lush green worlds with probably more land than water. . . Might split that up with another sub-category; Oxygen Forest. Oxygen Swamp might or might or look like it had lots of water, but water should look muddy/murky. Oxygen Desert; arid and sandy. . . Oxygen Barren; arid and rocky. . . Oxygen Wasteland would be like post-nuclear war or something. . .the sort of world the Daleks would start on. Or, polluted/urban like the Malon might have. . .
We already talked about Assimilated & Vongformed. . . Volcanic would likely be partly or entirely lava covered. . . CO2 Cold would be like Mars. . . Now, the .X model format doesn't support Opacity Textures. If it did, we could do some pretty cool cloud layers for the Oxygen types and some others. . . Since we can't, I've found some PNGs of cloud cover that can be applied to any of the skins that don't already have them but might should. . .
CO2 Hot would be like Venus, and Methane Hot would be similar. . .but for Tholians & Pyrians to start on. . . These types would be thick atmospheres. . . And while .X doesn't allow Opacity Textures, it does allow Transparency values. . . So, these types could have a cloud layer that is partly transparent, allowing us to see either the scorched surface, or another cloud like texture. . . I've tested it a bit, and it can look pretty cool. . . This could be done with Gas planets as well, but I don't know whether we would want to or not.
So, are you suggesting that we shouldn't have any Large or Huge planets that lack atmosphere. . .? That would be realistic, but. . . Would that cause an error if you build an Atmosphere Modification facility on a Huge Oxygen Terran world, but your species is set to Airless Ice as native atmosphere type?
The first skin on the last row of P20 is an interesting texture. . . It's for a tidally locked planet. Any ideas on how to implement that in the game?
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In a way tidally locked is easy. Just set the rotation speed to 0. But in another way it's near impossible, you can't control which side faces the sun, unless you only spawn it in a customized solar system that always puts it that way.
I'm not saying you can't do airless/huge(assuming it's not completely airless), just that, for that situation, expecting it to not have natural processes that remove craters is unrealistic.
Also... Ice worlds would naturally form an atmosphere any time they get warmed. I'd expect them to have melt/refreeze cycles that remove craters, even if they don't have proper weather. Back to top
NICE! there are several in here I'd skip because they look like a map square and not like a planet. The entire last row of the last preview for example. And the first two in the row prior. Back to top
Well, IRL, gas planets may look different, but hydrogen is by far the majority of their atmospheres... So, in a way, Hydrogen is the only atmosphere type needed... Oddly enough, though, the two stock races that live on Gas Giants both have CO2 as their atmosphere type... Technically, I guess you could have a "breathable" layer that was virtually any type of gas... But I don't know that there would/should be any effect on the color of the planet... What do you think? Back to top
Well, realistically, planet colors aren't as tightly linked to atmosphere type as they are in the game. Gas giants it's mainly the upper cloud layer that you can see. which is probably not where a civilization would live. But, for gameplay purposes, it works best to make them visually distinct.
So what do you have for your chart that you put into atmosphere types? Back to top
Chart? I hate to sound dense, but I'm not sure I understand what you're asking... Are you asking about color coding of Gas planets? If so, I had originally figured on only having one atmosphere for them - Hydrogen. I figured their huge size would help clarify that they are Gas Giants. Back to top
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And there's an awful lot of gray... I guess that's supposed to be realistic or something? 
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