Hi and thanks for reading.

I'm slowly writing a space game and am ready for introducing some actual graphics.

I need to wrap a planet texture around a sphere, and have this sphere tilted, rotating and have a variable colour light source + shadow applied to it. Ideally I'd also love to have an atmosphere sphere over it.

My knowlege of DX, API, etc, etc is next to nothing, I'm picture box and PSET level.
I've looked at various examples on PlanetSourceCode but none are really what I'm after.

The best I've found uses a rmcontrol.ocx control but I've been unable to find any documentation about it. I've been able to make a new project that uses this control and display a rotating sphere and even change the lighting colour but I've been unable to work out if it can do transparencies for the atmosphere layer or how to specify a tilt.
I'd also like to be able to take a static version of the generated image to put into a picturebox for display in other areas. It's possible I could use the RMControl instead of the picturebox but without knowing what I can do with it I can't yet make an education decision.

Other examples use just the VB Picturebox but one doesn't turn the image into a true sphere, another crashes after a few seconds display and another produces a static sphere. My knowledge isn't sufficent to adjust the code in any of those demos to get the correct result.

Does anyone know of this rmcontrol.ocx or can point me to any online tutorials that will allow me to write up the code without the tutorial going too indepth? Or could someone write me a module that I could then easily insert my own variables?


Seems to me a simple thing if you know how. I was originally planning on having a big library of static images which were assigned to each planet I've created, but I'm now experimenting with generating a heightmap for each planet which is textured based on it's stats, so as the game progresses, any changes to the planet are visually shown.

I may go back to the static image approach as that's within my knowledge, but it would be a shame.

Thanks for any help