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Author Topic: Creating user objects  (Read 4621 times)

Plasmic Physics

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Creating user objects
« on: April 14, 2017, 04:09:45 AM »
Hi all. I want to recreate a ring installation from the Halo franchise. The way I want to go about it is to divide the ring into twelve segments, which are tidally locked to a barycenter around which they orbit. Each segment is essentially a planetoid with a set of custom maps. What I need, is to know how to create my own maps. I don't just want them to look right, I actually want their shape correctly defined by the height texture map. Any ideas?

Physics_Hacker

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Re: Creating user objects
« Reply #1 on: April 14, 2017, 02:57:41 PM »
Hi all. I want to recreate a ring installation from the Halo franchise. The way I want to go about it is to divide the ring into twelve segments, which are tidally locked to a barycenter around which they orbit. Each segment is essentially a planetoid with a set of custom maps. What I need, is to know how to create my own maps. I don't just want them to look right, I actually want their shape correctly defined by the height texture map. Any ideas?

If you're using US Legacy for this, there is no way to use heightmaps, and if you're using US^2 there's no way to actually put your own textures or heightmaps so how do you plan to even do this...?

Plasmic Physics

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Re: Creating user objects
« Reply #2 on: April 14, 2017, 07:35:56 PM »
Really? There's no way of creating a map?

tesco

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Re: Creating user objects
« Reply #3 on: April 15, 2017, 07:07:39 AM »
Really? There's no way of creating a map?


Not that I know of no

Plasmic Physics

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Re: Creating user objects
« Reply #4 on: April 15, 2017, 06:59:01 PM »
Oh. Well, that's unfortunate. I thought that it was just a matter of typing a few hundred lines of code in Notepad, change the file extension, and move it to the correct folder.

Physics_Hacker

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Re: Creating user objects
« Reply #5 on: April 15, 2017, 07:33:19 PM »
Oh. Well, that's unfortunate. I thought that it was just a matter of typing a few hundred lines of code in Notepad, change the file extension, and move it to the correct folder.

There may be some way of force-changing it behind the scenes but certainly wouldn't be easy at all, as not only would you have to have to have it implement that map, but you would also have to have some way of making US2 apply that on each planet you would want it on instead of all or none, which that plus any technical problems you might have basically turns this into one heck of a hacking attempt, since no, there is no way to do it currently and there are no modding tools to make it happen yourself without legit force-changing stuff, which in itself would be very difficult because the source code isn't available and probably never will be.

Tl;dr if theres some way of doing it that I dont know of it would probably be considered hacking and would also be almost impossible.

Now, I have heard (probably from the roadmap) that much later on they hope to implement custom model importing, whch I assume will also let you import the textures for said models, in which case it would only be logical that they would add planet texture changing at the same time, so the devs themselves may make it happen, we'll just have to wait. And if you want to know how to actually create the map that you would want to use in the first place, thats a whole other subject that may be better to just pm me about because I do have some knowledge of that.

Plasmic Physics

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Re: Creating user objects
« Reply #6 on: April 17, 2017, 01:53:30 AM »
'Hack' is such an ugly word, I prefer the term 'creative manual override'. Calling up a map is not an issue, it can be done on a case by case basis by overriding the User created ubox file. I could try to reverse engineer the source code, if I can locate one of the existing maps.

Physics_Hacker

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Re: Creating user objects
« Reply #7 on: April 17, 2017, 06:44:10 PM »
'Hack' is such an ugly word, I prefer the term 'creative manual override'. Calling up a map is not an issue, it can be done on a case by case basis by overriding the User created ubox file. I could try to reverse engineer the source code, if I can locate one of the existing maps.

Even so, essentially thats what it is ..But as far as I know the only real premade map there is is a heightmap (which you could find the location of, I'm sure) and the devs would probably argue against even that but I know that the "generated" heightmaps have a very limited range because I once had a moon and a planet that had the exact same heightmap. As far as colors go though the only way I know you could change that is to make planet files like the soar system planets with maps preloaded with color, though I'm not sure how difficult that would be.

Plasmic Physics

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Re: Creating user objects
« Reply #8 on: April 26, 2017, 01:49:30 AM »
Actually, I can't seem to locate the preexisting height-map.