Star Systems

[harmsway]

Dan, or Hot Dog

You created a bigger yellow sun and place it on your download page. Now it seems to me that this only replaces the default star our sun. Now what if I wanted to created a new star system like one similar to Upsilon Andromedae. Only I want a bluish star. Can this be done without changing our own solar system sun? Or do you have to drag and drop the new one in before loading Orbiter? If this is the case it would be better to have several Orbiter directories, one for each star system.

Oh by the way, how do you change the star color?

I just created a beautiful planet but do not know how to get the water to have a reflection. The pltex.exe tool ask for another file but I don't know just how to create this. Can you help?

Hot Dog, My son reminded me that Tatooine should have two stars. However I not sure it's possible to have a binary system in Orbiter. Is this correct?

Gene

[harmsway]

I'm thinking that I could use the same BMP of the planet to created my mask. This then overlays
the original texture to keep the land from reflecting. However I can't seem to get any reflection on
my planet at all so I am confuse as to what to do. Does anyone have more instruction of the pltex
tool?

This is my first attempt to do any type of add-on.  Help if you can.

Gene

[DanSteph]

Gene,

Your right the texture will owerwrite the original so you must have two install
or a small *.bat that swap both texture before you play.

If I recall well the texture is made from a colorised layer and an alpha layer
the alpha define the shape of the sun and the colorized define the colour.

It would be possible to make a double sun texture but they alway will appear
in the same relative position and they will be each very small because the bilboard
where the texture is maped onto is very small (billboard is a square formed of two
polygon that always face the player and where the texture are mapped onto... often
used in game for tree, sun and such object.)

If you have photoshop it's easy to modify the alpha and color channel for other program
I don't know.

Hope this help ?

Dan

[harmsway]

Thanks Dan,

Good news I do have photoshop. Yes this is great help. Now I just need to get help on planet
reflections.

Gene

[Hot Dog]

H Gene,

Sorry for the delay.

I had some real life things going on and it seemed like being on another planet being away from
Orbiter!, LOL

Yes, when you change the sun's texture, it will effect all the enviroments in that Orbiter installation.

If you do try to make the Sun look like Krypton, it will look like Krypton in Terra System or any other
in that Orbiter folder.

The only way I know to change the star's color is to change it's .dds file with your new one.

Dan's site has the Larger yellow sun texture available as a example.


In the Terra System, Panion is supposed to be the 2nd star in the system, but it cannot illuminate
on it's own and appears as a planet. If you notice the masses for Terra and Panion together are
roughly equal to our sun. It is my understanding that Orbiter cannot have 2 illuninating bodies in
play at any one time yet.


Doing "surface textures with reflections" is done by using a "spetacular map" that matches
the "surface terrain map" contour exactly and in size and dimention.

A spetacular map is a black and white map.

Please see the Blue Mars link here to see an example of a spetacular map.
http://www.space-graphics.com/bluemars.htm

When running the pltex and dxtex program that comes with Orbiter, all the following have to be in
one folder;

1) dxtex.exe

2) pltex.exe

3) Surface terrain map in .bmp format

4) spetacular map in .bmp format Same size and dimention as the surface map. (the white portion
of this map is for water, black for the rest)

Enter the commands as follows into the pltex program.

1) "Name of surface bmp" - Enter

2) "y" (yes for transparancy) - Enter

3) "b" (for binary) - Enter

4) "Name of spetacular map" - Enter

5) "1" - Enter (for min)

6) "7" - Enter (for max) for a res 7 texture.

Rename the texture to "Planet_water.tex" "Planet" being the name of the planet you are doing.

Try this and see how it goes.

[harmsway]

Thank so much, I really didn't have a clue how to do it. I'll give it a go and let you know how it
turns out.

Gene

[harmsway]

Hot Dog

I tried my hand at it last night and it work as stated. Very cool....It's a lot of fun making your own
worlds. Well I'm off to create some more planets, build some surface bases and develope my first
add-on.

Thanks
Gene

[Hot Dog]

Great.

There is no limit.

These links might help.


http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/spaceart/planetcylmaps.html

http://www.planetscapes.com/maps/cylmaps.html

http://www.planetaryvisions.com/Tex_Maps.htm

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/PlanetaryMapping/

and one your son might like,

http://home.comcast.net/~brons/NerdCorner/StarGen/StarGen.html


I hope to have a Galactic Enviroment some day and connect all these solar systems.

I could do a lot more now with the Terra system from what I've learned.

As you know, some of the worlds are a bit "basic"!

I left them in since all the maps came as a complete Star Wars set.

I 'll leave those improvements to Stargazer.

Cheers,

Rich

[harmsway]

For my fist solar system I am gonna have to settle for worlds that are "basic" too. Otherwise I'll be
forever learning/developing and never posting my work. For now I'm working on something as nice
as the Upsilon Andromedae System but nothing as near as large as the Terra System. Currently I
have three planets. One of them is an earthlike planet with lots of water and atmosphere. My land
texture is quite nice on this planet.

Still to be done;
- Need to build two or three more planets and a handful of moons
- Need to add surface bases to a couple of planets
- Need to add clouds layer to "earthlike" planet

Troubles;

- When I land on any of my planets Orbiter becomes unstable and the screen begins to flutter
- Not sure how to arrive at LongAscNode, LongPerihelion and MeanLongitude

Gene