Found some nice free planet textures to be used in-game: http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/packs/planet/index.htm . Anyway, in addition to those on http://www.celestiamotherlode.net those should offer enough variety in-game don't they . You need the Genetica free viewer to create a high-res texture out of the gtx files but afterwards I think you can save them to jpg or whatever in order to use them for the engine.

hm strings and mike, how's the new 3D engine affecting the planets display in system view? I was wondering if the old freeorion-inspired and -copied system is to be replaced by a true 3d mesh display (botf didn't do that though it had ship display in the general ui..). If the current system is more stable and faster hence staying, then my second question would be if that freeorion system is in any way dependant on c# resp. if such a system could be easily implemented in mfc, with regular cpp too?

This thing might be interesting to get rid off the old static planet renders and pictures currently being used in alpha4 since it's impossible to track all the copyright down for all of these 1000 planet pictures. Not that we're violating anything directly but most if not all pics are renders of free textures from various websites but it wasn't exactly said there that the pre-renders with all the nice effects upon the textures were free too..

I've contacted this guy called Jestr on Celestia since he has posted a lot of Star Trek related stuff on there. He got back to me and said he doesn't mind us using anything he's made for BOTF2. He has some Star Trek inspired planet textures, some models too but they're too high poly at the moment. 500k poly DS9, anyone? They are really detailed and well-made models though, and I think they could be worth the effort to down poly for some great looking game models. I wanna do it but I should focus on the engine

Link to Jestr's page on Celestia motherlode:
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catal ... eator_id=5

I actually had a chat with Mike recently about how he animated the planets in the system view cause I too was thinking about replacing them with true 3D textured meshes. In the end though I didn't mention it because Mike said he wrote some custom code to animate them, and I don't wanna duplicate the effort unnecessarily, especially since they look good already, plus they are stable and working.

You will have to ask Mike about the specifics of his animation implementation to see if it can be ported to MFC easily or not. If you want them to be replaced by true 3D textured meshes however, we still have to investigate how well XNA (or even just DirectX) fits with the MFC API, that would be the hard part, once that's solved, rotating true 3D planets are easy

okay, thx for info. I think I'd go with the last option (since botf had 3d ship mesh display fast and stable - well mostly - in the tech database too) and a "fall-back"-option for linux/WINE compatibility and also if XNA proves incompatible with our current mfc infrastructure. Though this all still has time, it might be a good idea to start investigations soon (with participation of Sir P. of course in order to test things quickly in the code) since one maybe stumbles over a few design things that better be considered from the very start of coding the engine than afterwards when the engine stands and maybe isn't adaptable anymore in a reasonable time..

Thanks for the links, right now I'm in need of some high-res planets.

Strings - did you ask Jestr specifically for permission to use his stuff for Supremacy/BOTE or BOTF2 in general? I would love to use some of his planets/galaxies for Allegiance.

BOTF2 in general. He wasn't that bothered.

Awesome, thanks.

http://www.trekmeshes.ch/phpBB2/viewtop ... =2045#2045 . This could be a nice tutorial for making good planet meshes and atmosphere maps..