I was just curious about the method used to create the skyboxes in Vendetta. Did you use a 3rd party app like bryce?

Thanks for the info.

The skyboxes are created realtime by the game. We have a whole system that takes a number of nebula textures, star textures, realtime stars (point sprites), texturemapped spheres (planets) and either A) cooks parts together to form the high-detail realtime version with 3D rotating planets, or B) cooks everything together into a skybox for lower-end computers.

It was necessarily to roll our own system, since the skybox is generated based on your position with the solar system. So, when you fly to a new sector, the positions of objects within the system are recalculated (nearby planets, distance to the sun, etc) and the skybox re-rendered with that data.

It also makes the graphics a lot more lightweight, since we just store the component graphics instead of the actual cooked-out skyboxes. To have all the unique skyboxes we currently have, that would require over 7,000 different sets of skybox textures, which would obviously make for a large download.

The whole system, skyboxes, sectors, and so on.. were all designed so that we could extend the universe with minimal impact on the client.. our eventual goal with the "exploration" addon.

Cool, never new it worked that way before... Thanks Inc!

I've never actually seen a planet rotate, but maybe I just haven't stared at it long enough...

/me goes off to stare at a local planet for 2 days.

-Calder

Person,
Make sure its not a moon.
Make sure your texture res is up the whole way.
You'll notice it in seconds.

The backdrop graphics option will need to be set to extremely high for rotating planets.

01_background.lua
backgrounds.lua

Yeah, some of us have actually seen that code :)
They're posted on..
http://www.waylon-art.com/portfolio/backgrounds.html
...and are really interresting reading, actually, even if they don't give up much Really Usefull Stuff.