Lords of Light! Ever go about trying to change something in Oblivion thinking it should be pretty straightforward, and it turns out to be a real pain?

Okay, so I replaced the moon textures, and like some other moon replacers out there that I've seen, there are stars shining through the moon, which as you probably know, does not happen in real life. Might this have something to do with the normal map? I will go about checking on this next.

I am wondering what dds format to save the moon textures in so that the stars don't bleed through - I wanted to use one with an alpha channel because I didn't want the hard black lines around the edges of the moon. I guess if it's between that and having stars bleed through, I'll take the former.

Also, what is Moonshadow.dds supposed to contain? I haven't used a bsa unpacker to see what the original file is, but on my machine, it seems to be a completely black, multi-layer, mipmapped... er transparent image. Would this have something to do with the moon transparency? Is it supposed to be the "New Moon" or blacked out texture? I am guessing that if this file is blank, then a new moon would appear, well, as nothing, not even a void.

So any experts on moon replacers or anyone with the vanilla moon textures who can tell me what format these textures are supposed to be and should they even have an alpha channel at all?

Moonshadow.dds comes standard as a DXT3 formated file, which if I'm looking at this right would be just what you suspect - a transparent disc.

The rest of the vanilla moon textures are in DXT5 format, with varying degrees covered over by the alpha channel to handle moon phases.

The two moons can show up in the sky as nothing more than large black discs, I watched it happen over and over while doing weather testing for All Natural. Masser generally fades to invisible around 3am or so, but I forget when Secunda does that, it was usually during daylight hours though.

Thanks, Arthmoor, always a knowlegable fellow.

Do you know if that "fading out" bit is scripted or hard-coded?

So weird, that fading bit - I know, it is more fantasy for Tamriel and all, so I guess it makes sense in a fantasy setting, but if you were trying to make the moons or a Moon (as in Luna) operate more realistically, you'd only want it to ever fade out during the day, or just drop down below the horizon. I wonder if there is a texture I can replace that will prevent it from doing that (fading), or if I have to change a script.

Interestingly, I notice Fallout 3 uses the same format for the Moon(s). It uses the "Sky/Masser_.dds" files with a smaller image of the Moon in the center of the image and with the rest transparent.

It's hard-coded into the engine. You can fiddle with the sun timing in the climate controls but it seems as though the 3am fade out for the moon is set in stone. Either that or it's set to fade a certain amount of time prior to sunrise in the climate settings.

The funny thing is the moons do have what looks like a proper arc over the sky and they'd work just fine if they'd left out the fade effect. Rising and setting in a more or less normal looking pattern. So there's probably some kind of semi-lore related reason for it.

Ah. It's as I feared, then. Why oh why, since the beginning of time, even after the advent of "modular" programming concepts, do people insist on hard-coding weird stuff into an engine?

I guess they figured it was "TES Oblivion" engine so they could put as much Tamriel-specific "spaghetti code" in it they wanted to, but since they used the same basic engine for Fallout 3, I wonder if FO3's Moon fades out 3AM... ^_^

Well, thanks for the info, Arthmoor. I couldn't load up the CS momentarily, but I'll see what else I can figure out on it once my computer is finished updating stuff. I can at least play around with the normal maps and see if changing any of those helps. I accidently misstyped earlier, the Moonshadow.dds file I have is a completely transparent image, not "Black" as I had typed (I think I meant to type "Blank") I wonder if it should be a black disc, though...

I think I saved the Moon image files as DXT5.

Well, I do know that the Fallout 3 moon orbits in the wrong direction. (North to south, just like in Oblivion) :rolleyes:

Haha.
I don't think I ever noticed that. I wonder if that means there will be "Levitation Act"-style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retcon to Beth's Fallout Lore, telling how a stray nuclear warhead (or more like many) hit the Moon, knocking it out of its orbital path, causing it to orbit Earth along the polar axis.

Or even better: "In the year 1994, from out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction!" And in the process, changing the orbit of the moon.

Points for anyone who knows where that quote comes from without googling it!

Well for Fallout they'll probably say the Zeta aliens did it

I almost wanted to say Space: 1999, but then remembered that the moon got kicked out of orbit completely. So... I'd have to Google that.