This is one reason I was hoping for having starbases work in the GSD as they have the potential for population.

As it's now setup as a tactical/logistics structure it's limited to what those entities can do atleast for the homeworld. Neutral worlds however could have a Moon starbase as you can spoof Sins into creating the starbase with by spawning the starbase constructor.

Moons with population, tactical and logistic slots are simply planets and can be created with the normal mechanisms, ala the different planet sizes noted in previous posts.

To this end I've decided to remove moon as a planet type (which makes sense) and will use Dwarf as the smallest planet type. Moons will only exist in the planet well with dwarf, small, normal or giant planets as well as gas giants. This will still result in the same planet sizes in my cosmos mod but removes the confusion of a moon being a planet.

This is a great idea.

So you could have it like as a resourse asteriod but perhaps with a lot more out put than normal asteroids Yeh. Could it also have abilities which could make it double as say a hangar, refinery and perhaps even a super weapon?

I had an idea a while back to add mines, space port, and biodomes textures to the none terran worlds textures. Maybe I could make some for some moon textures. Another idea I had was to use the mechanism that the mesh's for the planet elevators where all the trafic comes out and goes in to put these things, though I couln't work out how to do it.

Sorry--I lost my "groups" when converting and now can't seem to get them to transfer.  I have to go at it with a slower program and individually piece them together.  It's practically done otherwise.  Grrrr.

I'll plink at it tonight--it's like peeling old wallpaper now.

As to tactical moon structures....

No logistics slots and all is great but how do you limit them?  Will every grav well have a moon (I wouldn't want that)? or do you intend to pre-place them in the map and then price them out of reach so only the pre-installed ones get in?

Um, they'd probably be spawned at random in a map template. Though that would require every planet needing to start out being colonized, I think that's probably more accurate anyways.

Nah, I like randomness so no way will everything get them... The GSD has a lot of untapped potential without modding every single map file created. Study the DS GSD and you'll get a sense as to what is possible.

That would be slick. Would make some nice visual gravy to for moons and could maybe associate certain abilities with different textures.

The planets don't necessarly need to be colonized either for this to work as any valid entity type can be included in a template regardless of colonization (PlanetOwnerIsMilitiaWithChance and NoPlanetOwnerWithChance). So it would be possible to have random moons present even with neutral militia.

I'm also not much of a map maker so I'm looking at what I can accomplish with the GSD without introducing additional maps.

Yeah you can include it, but the game won't spawn orbital structures unless the planet is owned by someone (players/pirate). You can still do it with militia but the planet would have to be colonized, which would increase expansion times as it forces you to bomb the planet first.

The starbase option is more flexible because it doesn't have this problem, but as you know they can only be spawned through a frigate intermediary instead of directly.

You can do either option by just changing templates in the GSD, so it shouldn't be a big problem.

Gotcha, I checked back after you posted this to see how they did the dead trade ports in DS. I suppose I could spawn a frigate that one shots the planet on game start if I really wanted it neutral. Will need to play some and see what might or might not work, Assumptions always get me in trouble

Make a milita-only frigate that has an ability with 1 million range which auto-casts and targets friendly targets (only) and does 100 000 planet damage. Should do the trick.

What do you think of this for a populated small moon texture?

You coul;d make them a starbase.

Yes, that looks nice.

Only on neutral planets would it work pretty seamlessly as you can't spawn starbases without using a frigate spoof. It might look cheesy to see your moon appear out of nowhere unless it could be made to happen extremely quickly.

it is a nice touch having the spots of green cheese showing.

harpo

Yes but could you not have the starbase as part of the planet's template?

What other color of cheese would you expect on a moon?

Are there space mice?

Yes, they are the only things that scare the be-jeepers out of the Space Pony's (and FYI Space Elephants). Luckly their ship has an improbability drive they stole from Beeble Brock and they have no control over where they go.

But mice are cute.

Zombie, I was using Google Sketchup for face creation and editing (craters and the like), exporting them as OBJ and/or 3DS and then importing them to Milkshape to finalize them.

The groups I created in Sketchup were actually transferring over to Milkshape quite consistently.  In the past, groups from Sketchup were pretty poor at this and I usually didn't try to preserve them for export.  For some reason, a few months back, I got them going fine.

So I am halfway through my "blown up planet" and have the crater lips, walls and floors separated for easy texturing.  I have one "chunk" of planet with an external face and an interior one separated and  I have The debris ring done.

There are two chunks left that need a couple of crater layers and inner faces separated out and that's when suddenly my groups aren't coming out anymore.

I can probably break the model apart and remerge the sections but I may have to hand align them and they aren't even edges.  I don't know the tolerance of Sin's graphic engine regarding seams and holes and I don't think I can hand weld all the vertices together.  I have had poor luck with repair tools on things like this but maybe it will help.

Any ideas here?

I love the idea of your "starbase" tactical moons and this would make an awesome "blowed up real good" debris model.  On that note, here's another question...Can explosion debris be made a persistent effect.  As in, it remains in the game?

I don't know if there's a way to make debris stay, though a way around that is to give the moon a fifth/hidden ability that spawns an invulnerable, weaponless, structure that is neutral and has the desired model.

Yes, spawn the debris as part of a particle effect mesh and give it an ultra high lifetime.

I was thinking here that a "Tactical Moons" mod might be a great idea (nods to Zombie and Nova for the work so far).  Code all the starbase spawns and creations into the GSD templates, create the entities and make it easily stackable with most mods.

You could build space monsters, orbital facilities, moons, mega asteroids, giant alien wrecks and all sorts of things into it allowing people to add it to their mods easily and it would allow model makers to regularly contribute without having to recreate entire mods--sort of like an 'add on' pack.

This is the part where it doesn't work. There is only one GSD and almost every mod modifies the GSD. This is why I use bridge mods to stack SOTF with DS to compensate for these shared resources.

Populated moon... Looks nice SZ0.

.

Beautiful

Stunning.

One opinion here--everyone seems to make the binary system symmetrical when asymmetrical is much more natural.

No problem with planets being similar in size but when they are exactly side by side and the exact same widths, it comes across as artificial.

Has anyone considered a dust cloud-like particle effect between them  and maybe even a debris ring around both?

These look really nice and it's good to see they are a little off-axis from each other and have size variation.

Maybe as an add-on.  No doubt it will take some jiggling.  I noticed one mod had an "add these changes" list for each file type so it could be added to other mods.