Badlands Mapbackground

As most of you will have noticed map backgrounds recently became a very popular aspect of Legacy modding. And since the stock ones are no real beauties I decided to give it a try. Now this is the theory or at least it’s the problem we face when we try to create map backgrounds: The background in Legacy is basically just a box (also called skybox in other games). This box has exactly six sides and each has a texture of the size 1024*1024 assigned. Now what if we want a Nebula to span more than one side of our cube? In theory this can be achieved with any image editing program, but if you want to create a fluidic space background for example with a consistent nebula, this will be very difficult and time consuming. Now in 3ds max we have the option to create a “reflective” material for an object; so we can render the whole scene in max on a material. Now let’s get a little bit more practical: We create a box and assign our reflective material to it. Then we create the map background using a sphere or any other object of our choice outside that box. The next step we do is we adjust the lighting and finally we render the scene on our cube. Max will create 6 different textures then (one for each side of the skybox). Everything we need to do then is to rearrange those textures in an image editing program of our choice and put it in Legacy.

I know this probably sounds very complicated and difficult for most of you, but I hope I could help those who have some basic max skills to understand the principle. If there are any specific question like how did you set up the material exactly feel free to ask on stl-central.com. I will be glad to help you.

Screenshot of the TB3 sol directory

Yesterday I as a little bit bored. Actually I was that bored that I decided to do what I should have done already months ago, but I never had the motivation to do it: I sorted out the maps in Trek Battles 3 and decided in every single case (140+) whether we want to keep it or not. And then I renamed all of these maps to the standard Legacy naming: Deathmatch maps are preceded by dm, coop-wave maps by mp, etc. So I opened every of these maps and saved them – 140 times. I think this should be world record in map editing…at least for Legacy. Everybody who thinks he has edited more than 140+ maps within 3 hours may post a comment below. I also attached a screenshot of the first maps in Trek Battles. You will notice that we already included the winner’s maps of the contest: Star Station India, the Drakas System, the Bronch Expanse and the Crytax system.

So my real name is Marius, which is, apparently, not a very English name. Actually it is German (originally Latin) and, yes, I also am from Germany. I was born 1991 and right now I’m almost 18 years old, which is the age of everything here in Germany: driving, drinking, etc. I have spent the last eleven years attending school and due to the weird German school system I’ll do so for another two years, before I can enter university. And seven of those years I spent with learning English, four learning Latin, and one learning Spanish. My favorite subjects are Physics and English (still my English isn’t flawless, but I suppose it never will be). And when I eventually passed my final exams I intend to study aerospace engineering or mechanical engineering. In my spare time I read a lot of books, meet with friends, or – which  is pretty obvious – I mod for Star Trek games. Another part of my modding career is my position as site manager at Legacy Files. I joined the team there in March 2008 at took over IKS’s position a few months ago.

Two and a half years ago, in March 2007, yopyop and me founded nEw-GEN (which has been “rebranded” NG|mods recently), since then I am the maid-of-all-work here. I model, texture, map and script everything that needs to be done, so it may be that I’m kind of stressed some times. When I start little modding projects of my own it is likely that they never get finished or it takes ages until they are – probably because I can’t decide what to do first. Although I’m familiar with almost every aspect of Legacy modding, I prefer to do programming and scripting, I don’t know why, maybe because of the logic and math skills it requires. The most of the time I spend with modding I create content for Trek Battles or compile all the stuff other team members created.