Planet surfaces

    I've been planning on this for a while. Seems kinda counter-intuitive to fly through a galaxy and not be able to land on / fly over a single planet's terrain. Only way so far to achieve this is by creating a planet-specific system, which you reach via a converted docking ring-> jump gate. Personnally I think it's a very worthwhile aspect that will enhance gameplay =)

    Now when you say that you're going to do this, are you going to do an entire planet, which would be awesome, or are you doing like the Nomad dyson sphere gate?

    FL engine has limits
    so do such planetary systems
    you cant render full sized surfaces not to mention that it is very hard to texture them

    well, it is possible to put many thin boxs for a flat plane, then have different models for hills and such. It would certainly take time at least...

    or you skip this boxes part and build something completly custom
    and any case you need to create new surfaces and once everything gets too big or too detailed FL gets screwed

    Yeah I know. I use 3ds max to create terrains. The terrains look very nice, however I haven't tested them in-game yet! I will soon post a screenie!

    Well, that surface is 200k square and that is a 4096 x 4096 texture on it. You will run into framerate issues if you use too many textures for alot of smaller surfaces to cover the same amount of area.

    Unless everyone has a user called 'chota' on their PC, and the image magically appears for them in the FreelancerShots folder of that user, that link is not going to work ;)

    Just my two cents: I remember someone (from the old forums) suggesting a background image instead, like the one on the inside of the Dyson sphere. Only difference It'd need to have a drawn sky on the "upper" emisphere. I would prefer a solution like that: still FL-friendly, lot of space to fly in, and most importantly spectacular. It would really give the feeling of flying miles up in the high skies...