Starspheres again…... dont say use search.

yea kinda like laputa, I do really like that movie.

maybe the game doesnt like the dimensions of the texture im using, but to map a sphere it needs to be twice as wide as it is tall.

maybe i could try cutting the texture in two pieces and putting each on half a sphere. I might try this.

And yes i know you cant reach the backgrounds, but the backgrounds are there to create the illusion of atmospheric flying.

It also creates a good sense of scale making the world feel much larger than if it was 3D rendered, there will be clouds added using freelancers nebulae as well as the background as well as flying stations and other nice things.

The game is set in the sky, so I feel have no need to render any ground at this moment in time.

Im thinking the capital of each nation would have rendered ground for the capital city, otherwise no ground will be rendered beyond a starsphere image.

[EDIT]
well i discovered that there is nothing wrong with my texture as it worked when i imported it into one of the image planes of ew01 like you said CK.

I just wonder why i cant get mine to work…

all it is is a sphere as FF pointed out so succinctly

:S

Just tried a few more things and it still didnt work, totally the most annoying process to ever be conceived

Quarks wrote:
Wow, that looks great!
I really hope you manage to make a working starsphere of it.

Have you tried to put your texture on one of the spherical vanilla backgrounds?
That was the only thing that worked for me when I was investigating on this topic some time ago. Although my textures always were meant to tile up/down and left/right…
I never hat any luck exporting one myself, too.

Thank you, you are seeing it with myself also for the first time ingame, I was very surprised, it looks fantastic.

I havent tried putting it on an existing sphere background yet, but like you said I may have to if i want my own star spheres, making one from scratch is turning out to be impossible.

Xalrok wrote:
This is what I did with custom starspheres:
-Export the CMP from Milkshape as you did above.
-Export the MAT from Milkshape separately.
-Open the CMP in the UTF editor.
-Delete the Hardpoints node.
-Open the MAT in UTF editor.
-Copy the Material and Texture nodes into the CMP from the MAT.
-Save, reference in the system ini and test.

The empty hardpoints node is usually what breaks the model.

Can you show me one of yours in utf editor so i know what its supposed to look like. because i followed this to the letter and it still doesn’t work.

hm, the screenshots above with the image working have 24 bit tga.

also I use TGA because the quality is much much higher than dds in my experiance using the two over several years. though the file size is pretty substantial as a result, so its something i will have to look into again as i make more of them.

also I did put the file size down to 2048x1024 in the screens above, because i thought that maybe 4096x2048 might be a bit heavy for freelancer.

I have identified a problem.

my sphere in ms3d before exporting is about 2 times larger than starsphere_li01.cmp 's sphere.

when i export it (no matter what the scale slide bar says) it is always about 100 times smaller than it should be.

how can i fix this? doesnt matter what i put the scale bar to it comes out 100 times smaller and completely useless. i only found this out when i accidentally opened HardCMP instead of UTF editor and loaded up the file and i had to scroll loads of times to be able to get it decent size in the window, and then i loaded up starsphere_br01.cmp, and found i had to scroll out, not in to get it in my window propperly.

so it turns out its not user error after all.

any help? :S

i have ms3d version 1.8.2 and cmp exporter V.03

does anyone have the latest exporter for the cmps then? i looked last night and search didnt turn up anything more than i already had without going through a endless forum thread.

[Edit]
because if I try to get around the bug by doing that loading settings thing, the model doesn’t appear at all anymore.

FriendlyFire wrote:
… Make the sphere 100 times larger in MS3D?

makes me kinda mad to say this, but.

this worked, this combined with everyones help meant i finally just now got the star sphere to work ingame.

I drew the sun onto the background and it looks weird here, so i think i’ll have to render the TGA again without the sun, perhaps move the camera so the perspective is above the mountains rather than on the same level as them.

what do you all think, I REALLY appreciate everyones help on this. once again another stumbling block discovered and overcome.