EoC planet objects?

I was already thinking about this, but I know nothing about adding glow channels to normal lightwave objects, let alone eoc Planet objects. This might be something Shane could handle though...any ideas Shane?

I have no idea. I assume you mean city lights which show on the night-side of the terminator?

Can't be done without a luminosity map; that's for certain. So we know we would have to add another texture map to the planet object.

Problem is the planets require their surface names to be very specific so the engine can apply the different textures. I wouldn't think adding a texture with a different name to the planet object would work.

A secondary object might be added to the planet objects... a sphere of single-point polys with the glow texture added to them. Or even a transparent sphere with a glow map. POG could place them around each inhabited planet. But how would the program dynamically size them correctly? It would have to pull information from the map files... and I doubt we're able to do that.

And, of course, it would have to rotate with the planet... that's another can-o-worms.

I built a planet model that uses the luminosity surface for its main surface. I just assigned the PlanetLOD0_0.lbm texture to the luminosity channel? of the 'Planet' surface. It seems to display textures normally. How would one go about indicating which colors are supposed to glow or illuminate? If that is possible we might be able to make flux assigned textures serve as a glow texture.
Or is the whole texture supposed to glow?...if that is the case, then I guess it is not working..

Flux identifies glowing surfaces by their LW assigned surface name. So you'd have to rename the planet surface (can't remember off-hand... <glow> or something like that... IIRC, it's in the Graphics SDK).

However, if you rename the texture to get the glow the engine won't pick up the planet textures. You'll be left with blank glowing planets (if it even works at all).

A slim chance exists that you might be able simply add <glow> to the end of the planet surface name (resulting in planet<glow>) and the engine might pick that up. But I bet not... and even if it did every planet's texture would glow. There'd be no way to control which planets glow and which do not.