Two Moons Circle

Two Moons Circle

General Information

It always bothered me that only the one moon was shown, when in canon, Thedas has 2 moons. One can assume this simply means they are not usually in the sky at the same time, but it is odd that in all three games, we only ever see one.

I have wanted to make this mod for a long time, but never knew where the moon texture file was. Thankfully, HoneyWhite added their lovely mod last year, Satina in the Sky, which allowed me to find the file. I like their mod, but I did not think it was lore friendly, as it uses images of our moon in the real world, when, interestingly enough, Thedas’ moon in Origins is actually a monochrome version of Mars, more or less.

At their request, I did not use their file as a base and started completely over. I looked at how they arranged it, but if you compare the files side by side, you will see they do not line up. While the moon has a different texture in Inquisition, the moon in that game is clearly quite large, so I went with the idea that the smaller, much brighter moon we see in Dragon Age 2 is actually Satina. Since BioWare had already used a real astronomical body to represent the primary moon (BioWare please tell us its name), I decided to do the same for Satina. Since the moon in Dragon Age 2 has a really high albedo, I decided to use a high albedo object for Satina as a stand-in: Jupiter’s moon Europa.

I worked on this last year but was not happy with it, and since I am about to play Origins again, I figured it was time to revisit it. I am now pretty damned happy with it, and I hope you guys like it too.

Lastly, the title is a reference, a pretty obscure one, though it is to a video game. You get a fist bump if you recognize it.

Atmosphere Update

Because the moon in Dragon Age 2 has a sort of blue-green aura, I always imagined it was an atmosphere, which is possible if Satina has a nitrogen/hydrogen atmosphere. I don't know if it is strictly lore-friendly, but I think it looks cool as hell. It was not included in the original file because I wasn't sure I could make it look good, but then I kind of got annoyed and went back and messed with it for like two hours and although my sense of perfectionism still says it isn't quite right, it's probably good enough. I hope you like it.

Version History

1. 0: I done made it.

1. 1: I added an atmosphere version of Satina. Reasons explained above.

Bugs and Feedback

None I know of, it seems to work, however, I honestly do not know the proper DDS format export settings for this, I guessed. It worked, but let me know if there is an issue.

Distribution

Please do not redistribute this file in any way, shape, or form. Please do not alter and re-release this file in any way, shape