Planet DXS?

Try unzipping this into your dat directory:

http://www.artemiscommand.com/media/artemis/generic_mod.zip

Change the art tag for vessel type 1 to something like this:

<art meshfile="dat/planet.dxs" diffuseFile="dat/planet[x].png" scale="0.3"/>

Where [x] is a number between 1 and 27, each one being a different surface. I moved the planet below the normal playfield plane, so you can't actually run into it (you should fly over it), but it should do the trick, more or less.

That is awesome! Thank you so much!

Me and Vorus were playing around with Planets at one point, the problem with them in missions is you can fly through them. Almost all the way to the middle.

I was wondering how long it would be before someone else thought of doing this too. I had the exact same idea as TreChipman, putting it below the playing field, but I never tried it. Good to know that it does in fact work. (And I could never get one skinned very well either.) I'm hoping that planets become more common in missions, because it's a very cool idea.

Here it is in action (along with my ST:TWOK Miranda mod):









The only real drawback is that the station's tractor beam appears to come out of a point in space directly above the planet's pole, but that's only an issue if you're using the planet as a station. In theory, I think you could probably assign the planet to one of the unused friendly vessel slots (types 2-4 or 7-9) and use it as a stationary object for triggering events and so forth.

We appear to have competition. :P

That looks better than I imagined it, but it would still be cool to see and actually be able to fly around it.

That looks gorgeous. I love it!

Of course in a scripted mission you could have the ship crash if it gets too close.

That's a great idea, Mike-- Either add in a range conditional that halts the ship altogether (although that may be hard to get out of, come to think of it) or set up a helm warning at, say planet radius+500 that warns you to stop before entering the planet's atmosphere, with an additional ship destruction event at planet radius+100. The real trick will be to get the bad guys to play by the same rules...

Wow... That is a fantastic idea! I bet planets will show up in some missions soon...

Hey, that IS a great idea! You could even add more and more damage as the player approaches the planet, if you wanted to do a little more work. And yes, getting other ships to fly around the planet would be tricky.

Here's a thought, can't you force a ship to turn via scripting? You could just orient the ship 90+ degrees from its current heading any time it is within a radius and then direct it to a point that would give it a clear LoS to its destination. I think that would be a decent way to do it. That might also work for the player ship, just keep turning the ship 90+ degrees if they are too close. Not as dramatic as killing them, but it might work. (If I'm right about being able to turn ships with scripting.)

(And a large nebula could be placed at the same location as the planet so that your LRS has at least some indication that something is there.)

TreChipman, what are the chances you'd care to allow us to use those planets in our mod? I apparently stink at skinning planets, because mine always look like crap.

(Ooh! a PS thought! Could you create a texture that is transparent except for clouds, and then put TWO planets at the same location, one slightly larger than the other, and have the clouds rotate slightly faster than the planet? Again, this relies on turning-via-scripting, but how cool would that look!)

You can only set a specific course, not add or subtract 90 degrees from a current heading. There's probably something pretty fancy you could do with overlapping boxes that could change an enemy's heading (via the set_object_property command and/or using the direct command), but that seems like it would involve math and I have a strict "No math on Sundays" policy. However, we're in the right ballpark, I think.

You're absolutely free to use the planets I made for Eric, but be advised that the textures are imported from SFC2. However, I did make a handy template for making your own planetary templates here; it comes prepopulated with about a dozen procedurally generated planet surfaces, and you can add more pretty easily. For example, go here and whip up a bunch of planets, then save the image, convert it to 512x512 an stick it beneath the Terminator layer, save as a .png and you're pretty much done.

Re the turning atmosphere idea-- Very cool idea, and Artemis uses PNG files which support alpha transparencies, so in theory we have all the right ingredients, but I haven't tried that out yet.

Can you do a "get_object_property" of current heading? That should at least make it doable to have spinning planets. (And I'm sure there's some mathematical trickery you could do with that to turn a ship away from a planet. But like you, I'm beyond the point of doing math at this point...)

Here's a code segment I've made for spinning planets. It works as far as I can tell. I've gotten up to seven full rotations out of the planet without any glitches. (It has a turnrate of 0.001) It seems that every 7th or so rotation, it achieves its desired heading JUST before the timer expires, so it slows down and then noticeably speeds up as the next timer kicks in, but it does always spin. (And you could probably fix this by slightly tweaking the "turnrate".)

<create type ="neutral" x="19300" y="0" z="22700" name="Archer IV" angle="359" hulltype="23"/>

<log text="creating planet\n"/>
<direct name="Archer IV" pointX="19400" pointZ="25000"/>
<log text="setting initial heading"/>
<set_timer name="planet1Spin1" seconds="33"/>
<log text="setting first timer for the first time"/>

<big_message title="Planet Test" subtitle1="Does it work?"/>

<log text="Starting\n"/>

</start>

<event>
<if_variable name="planet1Spin1Finished" comparator="!=" value="1"/>

<if_timer_finished name="planet1Spin1"/>
<log text="stopping first timer\n"/>

<direct name="Archer IV" pointX="19000" pointZ="22800"/>
<log text="new heading 1\n"/>

<set_timer name="planet1Spin2" seconds="33"/>
<log text="starting second timer\n"/>
<set_variable name="planet1Spin1Finished" value="1"/>
<set_variable name="planet1Spin2Finished" value="0"/>

</event>

<event>
<if_variable name="planet1Spin2Finished" comparator="!=" value="1"/>

<if_timer_finished name="planet1Spin2"/>
<log text="stopping second timer\n"/>

<direct name="Archer IV" pointX="19300" pointZ="21000"/>
<log text="new heading 2\n"/>

<set_timer name="planet1Spin3" seconds="33"/>
<log text="starting third timer\n"/>
<set_variable name="planet1Spin2Finished" value="1"/>
<set_variable name="planet1Spin3Finished" value="0"/>

</event>

<event>
<if_variable name="planet1Spin3Finished" comparator="!=" value="1"/>

<if_timer_finished name="planet1Spin3"/>
<log text="stopping third timer\n"/>

<direct name="Archer IV" pointX="19700" pointZ="22700"/>
<log text="new heading 3\n"/>

<set_timer name="planet1Spin4" seconds="33"/>
<log text="staring fourth timer\n"/>
<set_variable name="planet1Spin3Finished" value="1"/>
<set_variable name="planet1Spin4Finished" value="0"/>

</event>

<event>
<if_variable name="planet1Spin4Finished" comparator="!=" value="1"/>
<if_timer_finished name="planet1Spin4"/>
<log text="stopping fourth timer\n"/>

<direct name="Archer IV" pointX="19400" pointZ="25000"/>
<log text="new heading 4\n"/>

<set_timer name="planet1Spin1" seconds="33"/>
<log text="re-starting first timer\n"/>
<set_variable name="planet1Spin4Finished" value="1"/>
<set_variable name="planet1Spin1Finished" value="0"/>

</event>

Very cool. Can you not make the timer like 33.4 or something? Does it have to be whole numbers I assume? But either way that is very nicely done, and your idea with the clouds is also great. But can you make part of it invisible like that?

I have no idea if you can use decimals in those variables. But reducing the planet's turnrate to 0.00098 seemed to fix it. (Or at least make it take longer to hit that little "skip" point.

I haven't tried making clouds yet. I don't know how to set transparency in GIMP.

There is also another way to make planets rotate, which is to simply do an "addto_object_property" to the angle of the planet. But I didn't think of that soon enough. I have a feeling it's MUCH easier, I just have to play with it a bit.