Homeworld : Blue Planet aims at transposing the Blue Planet fan-universe as depicted in the Age of Aquarius and War in Heaven mods for FreeSpace 2, into a Real Time Strategy setting, using the Homeworld 2 engine. This mod is a Total Conversion using assets made by the Freespace Upgrade Project, the Blue Planet Team and the HW@ Team, with the authorization and support of their respective authors.
Wallpapers
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Description
Since I just got me a cool 1080p screen, here are a few HWBP wallpapers in full 1080p glory. To share.
Did you make that background with one of the background tools?
Nope. This is a skybox I converted from FSO. Basically 6 huge faces "ships" standing some 10k km from the center of the map.
Real HW2 backgrounds can't achieve this level of detail. You are looking at either 2048² or 4096² textures for each face here.
I suspected as much (giant in-game objects). Did you have problems with shadows and other lighting? Also, why not use one object (cube) with faces to the inside, and no collision mesh?
I ask because I'm interested in creating backgrounds myself, and I already know (and dislike) the limits of normal HW2 backgrounds.
I once wanted to make it from sphere segments, because if you'll use a detailed (Homeworld-like bright) texture on skybox, you'll see the cubic shape of the background.
I had to make several faces instead of a single cube object because I had issues with ships spawning outside of the cube instead of where I put them in the map file, despite having removed the CM. I could have tried to find a way to make one-object skyboxes working, but cutting it into 6 faces works just as fine.
As for the rest, I didn't have any issues with shadows (HW2 doesn't cast shadows from ship to ship, only shadows cast by a ship on itself), but I did have issues with lighting when using improved shaders. This was solved by making a new, simplified shader for those face "ships", a feat I thank pecenipicek for.
As Pouk said, usually if you make a skybox, you'll see the seams between the faces. However, my skybox uses a non-standard UV-mapping made using this technique Hard-light.net in order to obtain a seamless skybox. I can provide you with a HW2-compatible example if you wish.
Would love to know how you did it with the new shaders since every time I try to apply a cube map, the texture always comes out pixelated.
If you can use objects as skyboxes does that mean in theory you could add in "Animated" nebula and other phenomena to the skybox as well? I saw something like that on the Star Wars: Warlords mod and the creator had the planet tattoine as a background object, looked kinda nice I've gotta say.
Oh yeah and awesome work by the way :D!
Unfortunately, the technique I use ("ship" faces) don't enable for any kind of animation, since the HW2 .hod format doesn't support animated textures. I also do not plan to use modelled planets, as the skyboxes I convert from FSO already have planets as part of them.