Giant planets

This tutorial explains how to resize the planets to make them nice and big. You can do this to any planet model in the game.

All the planets are stored in DATA\SOLAR\PLANETS. For the example of the tutorial, i'll use planet_earth_3000 model to play with.

First thing to do is make a copy of the planet_earth_3000.sph file, and rename it to the size of the planet that you want, shall we say 40000, so the renamed file should look like this, planet_earth_40000.sph

Next step is to open up the file with UTF editor and locate the radius entry and modify this as a float array and change the number at the top to your new radius, in this case 40000.

That's the difficult stuff over with. The next thing you need to do is to make a new entry in the Solararch.ini file located in your DATA\SOLAR folder. You can just copy and paste the entry and rename the relevant sections.

Here is the original entry for the planet we are using,

[Solar]
nickname = planet_earth_3000
ids_name = 60203
ids_info = 60204
type = PLANET
DA_archetype = solar\planets\planet_earth\planet_earth_3000.sph
material_library = solar\planets\planet_earth.txm
material_library = solar\planets\detailmaps\detailmap_rock01.txm
material_library = solar\planets\detailmaps\detailmap_ocean.txm
material_library = solar\planets\atmosphere.txm
material_library = solar\planets\planet_earth\planet_earth.mat
mass = 1000000
solar_radius = 3000
shape_name = NNM_SM_MEDIUM_FOREST_MOON

Which now needs to look like this,

[Solar]
nickname = planet_earth_40000 <----------- Number changed to new radius
ids_name = 60203
ids_info = 60204
type = PLANET
DA_archetype = solar\planets\planet_earth\planet_earth_40000.sph <---- Number changed
material_library = solar\planets\planet_earth.txm
material_library = solar\planets\detailmaps\detailmap_rock01.txm
material_library = solar\planets\detailmaps\detailmap_ocean.txm
material_library = solar\planets\atmosphere.txm
material_library = solar\planets\planet_earth\planet_earth.mat
mass = 1000000
solar_radius = 40000 <----------------------Radius changed here
shape_name = NNM_SM_MEDIUM_FOREST_MOON

Next thing to do is add it to a system,

[Object]
nickname = EW05_planet_1
ids_name = 123456
spin = 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000
rotate = 0, 0, 0
pos = 0, 0, 0
archetype = planet_earth_50000 <------- Make sure you use the new planet model name
atmosphere_range = 51000 <-------- Change the atmosphere setting to the new size
burn_color = 255, 222, 160
ids_info = 123456

Then add a death zone. Remember this needs to be bigger than the planet size but smaller than the atmosphere size.

[zone]
nickname = Zone_EW05_planet_1_death
pos = 0, 0, 0
shape = SPHERE
size = 50500 <-------- New number
damage = 9999999 <------ This number guarantees you get vapourized
sort = 99.500000
density = 0
relief_time = 0