Starspheres again…... dont say use search.

before anyone says use the search function, i did so many times i cant count them anymore, this process has rapidly annoyed me over the months

I found this in a thread from last year and its the simplest explanation ive seen of how to do it, no waffling on for ages just straight to it.

LancerSolurus wrote:
Custom starsphere/cubes

Create a sphere, box, cylinder etc. in Milkshape
Reverse vertices winding so it’s inside out
Texture it properly, the cube will require 6 textures unless you use the same for all sides
A cube map needs to be made as a dds cube texture, put all 6 textures in it (dxtex.exe can be used for this)
Export the cmp and include the materials in it (1 model, 2 exports)
Load the cmp into one of the newer utf editors, this is because you need the drag and drop feature
Grab the VMeshPart node and reattach it to the .3db node that it is a child of (fixes problem of the texture not showing)
Delete any other child nodes of the .3db node, don’t delete the VMeshRef or VMeshPart nodes (VMeshRef is a child of VMeshPart)
Save it
Load up a system ini into your favorite text editor
Reference it in the ‘nebula =’ line, example below

[Background]
nebulae = solar\starsphere\starsphere_bp01.cmp

NOTE : It does NOT have to be included in any other file, not even the petaldb.ini file
PS - any shape can be used but go easy on the texture size, especially if you use cube maps

That is the complete method of making a custom starmap

ive been trying to follow this and i have done it to the best of my ability but the damn thing still doesnt show up ingame.

I cant upload the cmp file because its 34mb and media fire is being a prick as always.

ive uploaded the image I want to use, and heres a video of what it should kinda look like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgQsJRV4A4

heres the texture itself.

and heres what my cmp looks like in UTF Editor.

please help me, for the love god i just want to do this so i can get on with something more interesting, its not even funny anymore. :@

the texture itself is quite big 4096x2048, and tga format. :S

[EDIT]
im also not using max because i dont own it. im trying to use ms3d.

I just tried again with a smaller texture size and it still didnt work.

make a sphere (im guessing its size isnt important because there are no transform options when i make it, so I just drag it until it fills the screen, it has 16 stacks and 16 slices)

Revert the surface normals.

which makes the inside of the sphere show the texture now.

export it as a CMP

export the MAT and add it to the CMP

then put it in the systems star sphere section here

go ingame see that it did nothing.

where am i going wrong.

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.