A big hello to everybody out there!
It is a minor issue but for completeness sake I will adress it nonetheless. The short description is: Sometimes planet textures are swapped within star systems.
It all started when I saw planets with habitable textures (continents and seas) which were Class 0. I got confused and looked into the /gfx/planets directory, where I found planet texture files. C00.png to C09.png seemed to be uninhabitable planet textures and Class_14.png to Class_27.png had textures with seas and continents. I thought these were for inhabitable planets.
After more investigation I now think planet textures are created by a far more complicated pattern. It seems - I hope I am right about this - that:
- when a planet has Class>0 the texture is custom created using parameters from TerrainColorShemes.xml
- when a planet has Class=0 a random texture from C00.png - C09.png or Class_14 to Class_27.png is used.
Having found out this I replaced all planet texture files in the gfx/planets directory with textures from uninhabitable planets. The result was that the galaxy looked better than ever! *bliss*
Until I found systems like this one:
The image has been photoshopped for better visibility because the two planets were opposing each other. The left planet has a texture with sea and continents which seems to have been generated for an inhabitable planet. But there is no atmosphere and the class is 0. The right planet has the texture C05.png (the pluto texture - its the original, i did not replace this one) has atmosphere and class=6.
This does not happen very often (about once in a large map with occasional stars and common planets setting) and seems to apply to class 5-7 planets only. I cant remember a case where the planet rating of such a system was higher than that.
Speaking of planets, I found something else: The size of Class>0 planets is sometimes really small, although the mod documentation somewhere on the site says that there is a minimum size for these planets of 25% (I think) of star size.
Regards,
Stephan
