Modeling tutorials and such

[MrTwosheds]

As of 1.3.6.4w ken has fixed a problem that caused folks wanting to make new sky domes no end of trouble and making any dome that had more than one object or texture, look like it had been shreaded once loaded into a map.
This is fixed! which is great news, however Dome Land is still a very strange place...
What i have discovered is that transparent textures (png) do still behave a bit strangely, probably got something to do with what gets rendered first.
So if you wanted to make a double dome, for example, one with a transparent cloud layer and stars behind it, you might get somewhat frustrated to find that it is not as simple as putting one dome over another... What you need to do to make this work, I think, is make sure the object with the transparent texture is the first one in the xsi (from the top of the file viewed in notepad) otherwise it seems that it will be drawn behind the first object irrespective of its actual position in the dome model.

Another thing, is to make sure all the objects have there pivot in the same place, this is where the dome is viewed is from, you will view any object from its pivot point, if its still in the middle of a planet you won't see that planet.

Domes also need to be quite small, bits extending out of the visibility range will disappear.

Pictures will follow when I've made something worth looking at. Giant scions in the sky anyone?

[Nielk1]

Domes are probably pretty simple.

As it is, the dome is actually far smaller than your visual range in most maps. This creates some unusual situations, the ability to falsely set the distance for some of the math such as render order might help fix some other issues but I don't know.

Glad to see multi-part domes though, thought I am guessing the scroll speeds on the textures are universal to all textures so making a space dome (to cover the lower hemisphere) and a planet to be in orbit of on the side would result in the starfield scrolling while the planet spun to the side. On that note of the double scrolling issue, and ideas?

[MrTwosheds]

Yes everything scrolls if you turn it on, but you can alter the apparent speed and direction a bit via uvmapping.
It has got me wondering about animated domes and if there is any way to activate an animation.
Its also got me wondering about dome lighting, I see from the placeholder lights in 1.3pack that they are controlled my mission files somehow, most of the console commands no longer work, It would be nice to find out how to alter domelights again.

Interesting thing about the render order thing is first I had the transparent cloud dome inside the star dome but it only rendered in the fadeout at the bottom of the star dome (as if it was outside) animating the distance fog above the terrain, looked quite good!

[Red Devil]

i'm not able to enable/disable them though the console, either; just turn them off via dome.type.

i can set their rgb, azimuth, and altitude values via the console using this:

dome.light.select lightnumber

dome.light.description R G B range attitude

example: dome.light.description 0 0 127 500.0 1.0


dome.light.position azimuth elevation distance

example: dome.light.position 90.0 60.0 600.0

[MrTwosheds]

I seem to be only able to alter the color of dome.ambient, Presumably domelight0.
From domelight0

///These are placeholder odfs. Please do not remove///
///Values are read from atm mission files///

Trn files?
If so what entries are needed to set them?

I just realised that it isn't just transparent things, the order of the objects within the xsi determines what gets drawn in front of what, irrespective of their actual position in the model. Being infront of something else does not mean you wont end up being behind it in a dome loaded into bz2.
This is actually rather useful as it means you don't have to worry about things intersecting with each other.
Eg you can have a cloud dome, a massive gasgiant planet right up close and a stardome without any of them cutting into each other when viewed in bz2.

[XxHAMADEHxX]

I found out that converting a texture to a vector image in inkscape is a good way to upscale textures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlsf3f_ ... 21B6AAE42C