modelling planet scenes

[Valarin]

It's been quite a few years since I thought about it, but I *think* the landing cutscenes, animated traffic in the background etc. are managed by .THN scripts, much like the main menu background scenes.
If I'm not wrong there, they're completely customisable, and it's been done before. I started playing around with them once but didn't have the motivation to delve very far. The starport (if it's still around) or equivalent might still have a few tutorials somewhere.
If, like me, you're not familiar with similar scripts it might seem confusing at first, but if I remember right you can do some pretty neat things with them. I think lots of minor animations - i.e, idle animations, movement of dust clouds in the window of a bar, things like that - can be played with. Not a huge concept of the game, but fun and interesting to fiddle with:DI'm probably getting mixed up with something else, but they *might* have something to do with scripted effects ingame too, such as the way capital ships explode over time and into parts etc. Don't quote me on that; As I said, it's been many years since I last even thought about FL modding, and even then I was never very knowledgeable.

Ninja-edit:
Here is a brief starting tutorial for THN scripting, which does seem to cover the landing scenes. A quick search also turned up a discussion relating to rotation within the scripts and a link to a thn decompressor. If you're interested in these, I hope they help.

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