Making a star/planet/skybox megamod

need advice on how to make it.

from Sins Forums

after playing many mods made by this games community i have decided to start work on creating a mega mod that will include a huge amount of new planets (both more skins for existing types and new types) new stars and skyboxes. basically i want heaps of visual variety. 

i have a few questions, is there a limit to the amount of skins a planet type can have? is there a limit to the amount of planets you can have? thats all. 

I am currently looking up how to mod sins, i already have an texture editor so i can edit planet skins and create my own in the near future.

modding
5,289 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Well, in the planet entity file, you can only have 5 "meshes"....by meshes I'm simply talking about those first blocks at the beginning of the file where you set the mesh, icons, and string to be used...you'll notice that planets in vanilla don't actually have multiple meshes, but may have different icons, names, and types of dust or asteroids (asteroid belt is a great example of this)...

That being said, if you had 15 different textures that all represent "terran" planets, you could just have 3 planet entity files (terran1, terran2, etc.) where each had 5 different meshes...in your galaxy scenario definition, each of those 3 entities would be listed as orbitBodyTypes, but you could then have a planetType (call it Terran) that lists all three different types of terran planets...whenever you make a map, you'd refer to the terran planetType, which would randomly select from each of the 3 entities (and from there one of the 5 random meshes would be chosen)...

As far as number of planets, I don't think there is a hard limit...however, this game cannot utilize more than 2 GB of memory, so be careful having too many textures...you can save a lot of space by compressing them, but still you will be limited by how many planets you can have simply by this restriction...

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

blair fraser told me that there is a 512 NAME limit for stars and planets back when I was creating my string editing /translating tool that burnt me out and was never completed

harpo

 

Galactic Civilizations III