REM-Mod/DATA/SOLAR/PLANETS/ls_sol/HD_TEXTURES.md

SOL HD textures

The HD pack replaces the diffuse textures of all eight planets and Earth's Moon, plus Sol's skybox. Each body has six independent 4096 × 4096 BC1 faces with 13 mip levels. The sky has six 4096 × 4096 BGRA8 faces with 13 mip levels. Mipmaps are filtered in linear light. The other moons, dwarf planets, rings, sun and system layout retain their existing assets.

The source maps are reprojected onto Freelancer's cubed spheres without mirroring the poles. Earth combines a geographic surface map with its cloud-opacity map. Materials use a neutral detail texture instead of repeating the retail craters or cloud noise over the photographic maps. These are diffuse textures: they do not add geometry, terrain displacement or a separately moving cloud shell.

Body	Source dimensions	Installed faces
Mercury, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn	8192 × 4096	6 × 4096²
Venus cloud envelope	4096 × 2048	6 × 4096²
Uranus, Neptune	2048 × 1024	6 × 4096²
Moon (LROC 2019 color map)	16384 × 8192	6 × 4096²
Sky (NASA Deep Star Maps 2020)	16384 × 8192	6 × 4096²

Output dimensions are not the same as observational resolution: the Uranus, Neptune and Venus maps contain less fine detail. Solar System Scope's maps include artistic color tuning and filled gaps, as described by their author. The NASA sky preserves the published J2000 star positions and the existing Sol ecliptic orientation; it is a display-exposed sky, not an exposure simulation.

Rebuild

Requires Python, NumPy, Pillow with its BC1 DDS encoder, and OpenCV with OpenEXR.

python tools/build_sol_hd_textures.py --download
python tools/build_sol_hd_textures.py --planets --jobs 3 --resume
python tools/build_sol_hd_textures.py --sky
# Close the game, then install:
python tools/build_sol_hd_textures.py --install
python tools/verify_sol_hd_textures.py

Sources are cached in tools/texture_sources/. Exact URLs, credits and hashes are in sol_texture_sources.json and texture_build/source_manifest.json. Build products, read-back previews, validation reports and runtime screenshots are in tools/texture_build/. Installation backs up all replaced files under tools/backups/sol-textures-<timestamp>/ before copying the staged outputs. Restore those files to the same relative paths to revert. Files newly added by the HD pack can remain unused after restoring the original INIs and libraries.

The original make_planet_textures.py and make_sol_skybox.py remain available as procedural alternatives; running them over the live pack replaces the HD maps. planet_looks.json is updated so subsequent system rebuilds retain the HD materials.

The renderer also needs the local source changes: RemGfx/rg_sky.cpp keeps 4K sky faces instead of reducing them to 2K; RendComp/Plugins.cpp recognizes the Sol material names as gas/cloud or Earth materials. The installed renderer configuration also enables 16× anisotropic filtering. Build Release/x64 RP8 and RendComp and copy their DLLs to GAME/EXE. The installed pack occupies about 1.1 GiB, plus the renderer's GPU copies; loading and memory usage increase.

Verification (2026-11-11)

Release/x64 RP8 and RendComp builds passed. All 54 planet faces and six sky faces passed container, format, mip-count and material-reference checks; the planet face-edge checks passed. Unrelated system data and solar archetypes were compared with the backup and preserved.

Earth and Jupiter were visually checked in the running game. Both runs captured screenshots and completed without a crash, renderer errors or new engine warnings. The runtime log confirms 4096x4096 faces -> cube 4096 (13 mips). Reports: texture_build/validation.json and texture_build/runtime/runtime-validation.json. The Earth before/after comparison is texture_build/previews/earth_before_after.jpg. The first full-install backup is tools/backups/sol-textures-20261111-202729/.

Credits

Planet and Earth cloud textures by Solar System Scope / INOVE, Solar Textures, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Changes: spherical reprojection, Earth surface/cloud compositing, mip generation, BC1 compression and Freelancer material packaging.

Moon: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, LRO/LROC, visualization by Ernie Wright, CGI Moon Kit, 2019 color map. Changes: spherical reprojection, mip generation and BC1 packaging.

Sky: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, Ernie Wright, Deep Star Maps 2020, using Hipparcos-2, Tycho-2 and Gaia DR2 catalog data. Changes: J2000-to-game coordinate conversion, cube reprojection, display transfer, dithering and mip generation. No endorsement by NASA, ESA or the texture authors is implied.