Done at the last minute because the airport station at Brasilia is partially underground. Work is underway to sort some of that stuff out 🙂

marcel, you can control the type of model used with a seed for the station/city (still possible?)

of course size and appearance of a city change, else it's simply taken from the systems or the next parental objects seed

so it's possible "i like to have four landing pads in my hometown but keep a small city" (needs the right number ;))

that's a good one, settlements should reflect at least some system values (if not specific like a research base).

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looks like there is no getting around of flattened terrrain. 🙁

well personally i still prefere to workaround that and make buildings that fit both sitations.

actually i lifted the groundstations to 100m to avoid "underground" stations that appears when a station is build on a cliff or mountain side, added very long stalks to let all look somehow reasonable even in extreme situations.

of course this means a big disadvantage for a game ran without shaders.

but it has been discussed from the start on to flatten terrain around cities.

i guess the pro's are offens

if once earthlike and hostile have separate architecture, a flattening for cities on earthlike planets would be more then just nice (but please keep the "exotic" places on hostile planets).

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btw, if you feel my buildings stand to far from each, yes they do, i noticed that to and found that i used a collision mesh for the basements, which sometimes are very deep. but it's safe to use them without. i mean in a situation where you could touch such a basement with your ship your'e already crashed with the ground.

else note that the space between buildings simply reflects the collision mesh's bounding radius.

buildings sometimes must not have a collision mesh..... (ok, you can't collide, but also it takes up "no space")

I didn't know that. Interesting. I'll experiment with a custom Eugene later. Right now, I've disabled all ground stations except the type I'm currently working on so I'm certain to have it at the start-up location. I remember that you were working with someone, getting his buildings into Pioneer. They were generally ovoid and looked like they were lowered to the surface by a hovering sky crane. I think they would be a nice addition to hostile environment building sets. I hope you guys are still working on them. 🙂

This version is for alpha17 Christmas Edition. I haven't messed with the starting position on Earth. The other stations in the Sol systems are changed when using this file. Once again, you must start a new game for this to work. Your saved games will not work. To install; extract the enclosed data folder to your pioneer-alpha17 folder. Happy Holidays and button up your overcoat, 'cause baby it's cold outside! 😆

[attachment=1004:Hometowns_05.zip]

I hope you included the North Pole and the Lapland sleigh depot.

I didn't remove anything, just added the home towns. Looking forward to visiting the Lapland sleigh depot. 😉

Here's an alpha 20 version for the four of you that use it. 😆 I haven't updated this since Christmas. My bad because it takes only a few minutes to do. The caveats and instructions remain the same.

[attachment=1093:Hometowns_06.zip]

Hey, thanks for that Marcel! 🙂

You're welcome Geraldine! I thought you were one of the four. 😀

Btw, I know there are some new people here. If anyone wants their home town added, let me know.

i'm curious, it never made it to my mac (pioneer didn't runs before, but i just had to mute the sound)

I don't understand. Do you mean that it doesn't work on your Mac? The syntax is the same as the other ground stations, there are just more of them.

It never made it because it is not part of the master release. It is an add on by Marcel. so you will need to manually add it yourself.

slight misunderstanding 😎

of course it's not part of the master release 😀

and of course it works fine, no problems, except a extreme low framerate when you got a lot of cities in the viewfield.

that's why i optimized the buildings a bit, to see what i can get out of that (not much 😉 **)

it didn't made to my MAC, because i couldn't run pioneer until i found out that to simply disable the sound in "config.ini" will do the trick for me*.

i can run the windows build via "Wine", but it's rather slow (of course) and only enough to use the modelviewer or for comparison.

it has made no sense then, before i got the MAC build running.

*what exactly stoods behind is still a riddle to me, but i don't mind to much actually, i'm happy i can play at all.

** i have plans to remove the collision mesh from the buildings when you got a certain distance to them (even when i'm not sure now how to, needs doubled models perhaps).

perhaps we can gain some of that. it will be just a experiment nothing more.

because i noticed by my own groundstation mod, that even animations won't "eat" much FPS if they have no collision mesh. i.e. the big circular monorail thing. the one that encloses the city and not the one on the platforms (but even them).

to have absolutely no collision mesh won't work, at least because the buildings would be placed one on top of the other.

for the monorail it works because it's very wide, but occasionally it still crosses some buildings.

Here's the latest version for alpha 21. I've added 5 spaceports;

Cardiff - Skodyn

Cotswolds - Overlord

Rosario - walterar

Versailles - NevilClavain

Also my daughter's hometown is in there so I can visit her. 😉

Read the instructions above if you haven't used this before. Hope you enjoy it!

[attachment=1162:Hometowns_07.zip]

edit: Thought I'd better mention one more time that you must start a new game if you're going to use this. Previous saved games will cause Pioneer to crash.

Nice one Marcel, thanks 🙂

marcel, that's cool 😎 ,

erm, i live (or should live, i havn't been there since 2 weeks) now in "Wattwil", but it's such close to "Kaltbrunn", that it won't matter.

for people that live in large cities this would be "next door" (at least there is a pass and a railroad tunnel between them, 7km for the tunnel 😀 )

are all these people play resp. participate with us?

i never was aware, wow. i always had my head such deep into the machine...

These are the people on Space Sim Central that I could figure out a location for when I first started this. If I couldn't find their city then I picked the largest and/or capitol city of their country. If I were to do this again I'd just include the people on the Pioneer Forum. Earth seems a little overpopulated, especially in Great Britain! 😆

hmm, i guess that's easy the truth...

what does this north american native stated when he as first of them visited great britain?

"there are as many people on the earth as stars in the sky..."

for what he has earned only ridicule.

Well yes, that statement is wrong. It's more like there are as many galaxies in the universe as there are grains of sand on all of the beaches on the Earth! 😉

I can't remember if I posted this here, but take a look. Don't forget the fairy cake. 😉

http://htwins.net/scale2/

Very true, and I remember when I first found that out, it's just hard to imagine how many that is, it's certainly a big universe and possibly even bigger than we think.

And that's just our universe. 😯

bookmarked it!

i wouldn't say wrong from his point of view and what he could imagine as population (perhaps his words was as grains of sand...).

i guess he only never saw so many peoples at once, or a city like london.

i guess any native from elsewhere would have felt (will still feel) the same.

for western civilisation the world has ended behind india for a long, long, time.

most uneducated people would have guessed that there won't live a lot more humans on earth as they could have count up to.

or in other words, what they have experienced, what they already know.

i guess if you would have asked a swiss resident 2000 years ago he would have guessed 1000 or 10'000, while this would have exceeded already all he ever seen.

what he knew about the world has perhaps ended in rome, england, the big forests in the north, he will have known there is jerusalem (he will have probably heard about, while he wouldn't have had no idea how far away it is) and a sea that surrounds all.

what brings us to the measurement of the unmeasurable or infinite...

it depends on our horizon, our horizon is steady growing.

with every little knowledge we gather from the universe it grows and grows and grows, imho.

universe, "all", or better "all what is surrounding me", also tells already a lot about that.

as a individual my mind always stays in the center of the universe, the "rest" is surrounding me.

slowly we filled the infinite with definit and we won't stop doing so.

a little astronomical history mixed with a little legend, when mystic and science was still sisters.

the great pythagoras seemed to dare to ask his students, if it wouldn't be logical that something perfect (or made by the gods) like our earth must have a perfect shape?

"yes", they would have probably answered

and what has a perfect shape?

"a sphere".

now further he dared to ask them, if they could imagine, that if the above statement is a fact, the moon, the sun, the planets and all the little dots we can see on the nightly sky must be spheres then too?

"-" (means silence)

that was completely ahead, more, it was dangerous in those days only to think of such, that's why he asked only hypothetically.

i have more "in petto" for you

perhaps "next lesson".

"wer wie was

der die das

wieso weshalb warum

wer nicht fragt bleibt dumm!

wer wie was

der die das

wiesoweshalb warum

wer nicht fragt bleibt dumm!

tausend tolle sachen

die gibt es überall zu sehen,

manchmal muss man fragen,

um sie zu verstehen!"

the german lyrics to "childrens television" in germany "sesamstrasse"

that's the same melody as

"Nothin shakin on shakedown street. used to be the heart of town.

Dont tell me this town aint got no heart. you just gotta poke around."

well, well, well, you can never tell...

cmdr cody, when i see the "shakerman", it releases always a broad smile, i can't help it.

aoxotoxoa is a dead cover band from region Zug, switzerland

You need a Deadhead decal on your ship:

That's my Cobra Mk III Rolling Thunder, which is also adorned with several other decals!