difficult posting from a phone ;(

ok, what i had in mind was an old debate.
now it's not about the conspiracy i like to post which is the intentinal reason for this dementi of nvidia, it's because about the old debate how space will look in space. the dudes of nvidia turned saddled up the horse from behind and liked to show that the moon landing was reality and prove this with a perfect simulation of the situation. but like i said that's not the topic here. i like to show off with this that space is simply black in space as long as there is a central star in range. it was toms and my imagination, even knowledge that any else is kitsch. so here's the clip.

though, as dramatic simple toms drawing of space and our sun was, it is the right imagination. you know i always liked it. space is sober, brutally sober, hostile like nothing else. and imho the right contrast to fantasy based vessels, and occasionally inhabited worlds, they mark live. something very fragile in this hostile surrounding.

until we meet again
live long and prosperous

gernötli

didn't know if i lost my last post i was offline for a while, while i was typing.

i've got some good news to share, i bought a "new" computer, actually it's not mine, i bought it for my mom.
you know "all electrical devices work with smoke" and the macbook has lost its "smoke" 🙂
really, one fan was sticked with dust, i fixed that but it was truely damaged due to overheating.
right today i bought a used dell notebook from a official Windows retailer, overhauled, with new batteries and a win 10 which belongs to us, registered and full support for a lousy 200 bucks. such i neither found on e-bay.

next month i will buy for me from the same store an office machine for even a lousy 150 bucks, that means in fact i can slowly return to what i was up here on ssc, phoenix and ffed3d, finally.

i'm euphoric like a little boy at x-mas right now, the cute dell is like a summerbreeze to me compared to the old macbook we used.

well it takes sometimes a little longer, longer as i expected myself, but in the end it will work out fine.

nah, almost, my best Buddy, the hool, is again in prison, asshole - he beated a railroad engineer
"i just gave him a slap in the face, is that my responsability if he's such a weak guy?"
(the poor engineer fell down like strucked down by a lightning)
i love him for such expressions, do you know that?
they attested him "to much criminal energy" criminal energy - ts - usually criminal energy comes along in a Dress.
also "brutal" yeah because he's such a brutal guy the horses (he works with horses in the open prison) follow him without command.
he's an asshole - but i love him.
nah, he's not, a bit stupid sometimes and can't control his own power.
can you imagine a better best Buddy for me as him?
me not.
and he couldn't imagine a better one as me.
i have no prejudice, of course i had some reservations when i met him first - a hooligan?
i had to learn a lot about that.
of course he looks now different at his own past and certainly he's more as just alright.
a bit to much alright, he can't stand injustice and likewise me it doesn't matters who is handled unfair.
unlike me he didn't thinks to much and... well you know what.
but hey, this is the right stuff.
with someone like him you can conquer the world - hell even.

Congratulation on your "new" computer!

Hi folks (how many "folks" that ever might be).

I started to again tinker somewhat on "Phoenix" since i had the idea to make it more fun to play.
First i removed the quite strong fighters from the starting positions and moved the starting systems to the rim of known space.
After this very basic change i recognized that the travel time for interplanetary runs such as reconning or delivery are not only to short with a fixed value of 4 days, as well for interplanetary distances of some systems if you jump in them to complete a mission, systems aren't all like Sol with a extension of a couple of AU, some are many hundred AU wide.

Have a look at it how that works now:

Whichever position you choose you will have a rotten "Lander" with ZERO! equipment and a lousy 100 bucks.
One who like to play this game, and this will stay for all future releases of mine, will haved to learn first how to fly the ship manually.
It's not as hard.

The "Lander" is a very basic vessel but you can transform it to a quite good multipurpose ship.
It has (together with my little large Shuttle) twice capacity as cargo space, this will allow you to mount up to 11 extra cabins.
The "standard" is mentioned five (as many windows as you see on this erm... yes, spaceship). after mounting the 5 cabins you still have 30 tons for cargo left but the ship will be overloaded due to such, this means you probably can't lift anymore from a planets surface and for sure it boosts fuel consumption because your acceleration will be lowered to a couple of G.

The fuel consumption i chose for all ships is quite high and it anything else as easy to manage time and fuel for long distances (refere to the clip, when i contracted to the second mission i loaded 12 tons of additional fuel but still i nearly ran out of fuel and was very luck to have enough spare time to complete the mission with the few drops of water left in the fueltank (the autopilot can manage it if you use up 10 tons manually and use another 10 tons to break with the autopilot - but unfortunately you won't have an autopilot).

Additionally i did a mean treat and bound the consumption to the standard drive fittet to a ship, thus look out for ships wihich have a small drive because they will keep their lower fuel consumption compared to one with a larger drive and same capacity.

Overall and since i still didn't worked on vital stuff like trading the game is still bareboned and not really well to play.
But it's already good if you start it, to advance to something useful and leave the sytem for the first time is already a goal.
It can be interesting to find a way back to Sol, of courseb you know where it is - sector 0,0,0 but well how to get there (without to lose the track).

Recently only the interplanetary cargo runs use the new expression for travel time but i will add this to all timed missions.
The idea behind is that one can get a life only by performing action in the starting system also this is needed because you start with the lame Lander and no equipment.

The recent expression i use is as follows (someone might be interested in it, especially if this still stays in Pioneer):

predefined variables:
-- typical distance in one day (approx. 2AU/day, this is a "while playing" evaluated value)
local meters_per_day = 300000000000
-- make seconds
local day_in_seconds = 84600 (simply 24*60*60 as one number)

addition to the interplanetry cargo missions (at very bottom of the "make_advert" function "local delivery" section):

local traveltime = (dist / meters_per_day) / math.log(dist / meters_per_day)

-- distance to target divided with approx. 2AU/day (results in days for distance to target, 1 AU = 149'597'828'680m) divided with logarithm of traveltime*86400 (24*60*60, results in seconds) provides a shorter traveltime for longer interplanetary distances, this is needed because in 4 days you never will reach a possible distance of i.e. 100 AU or greater.
the expression looks maybe a bit strange, but that was the best way i found how to use the logarithm for it, it will divide the time for long distances more as for short and that was my goal because if you travel a long distance your mediacre speed will be far above 2AU per day and for short runs under 2AU per day.

due = Game.time + (traveltime * day_in_seconds) * (Engine.rand:Number(1.0,2.0) - urgency)
-- reduced bandwith of rand, we have time enough but missions with a high urgency will be very short in time due to that

the whole thing needs still some finetuning, up to 3 Months for 700 AU (likewise in the clip) is still to much, if i wouldn't have run out of fuel i would have made it in 2 months.
This can be reached by setting the "meters_per_day" value higher for the logarithm or lowering the "meters_per_day" for the typical traveltime.
Recently it looks good to me, in other test runs i had only about 2 months time to complete the mission which was my intentional goal and what i evaluated in this quite special system.
Any of the 4 starting positions is equal or almost equal to this situation, multiple star systems with short and long distances between the stations/cities.

The fuel consumption i will keep this high because this means fighters aren't suitable to make deliveries and shuttles aren't useful to fight.
Each ship for its special purpose which probably means you will have to change the ship to fulfill a certain mission.

I assume one with more depth in understanding maths will know a better way how to use math.log to lower the traveltime for very long distances.

Sidenote, i discovered a system where the accompainig stars orbit goes through the central star, i liked to make a clip of it but unfortunately the mass reading of the central star is that high you never get in orbit around it's partner thus i would have to wait to long if i can't use the "stardreamer". But i realy would have liked to see how this looks if a star inclusive his planets dives into another.
(how in all the galaxy can they have a orbit? and how do they survive this?)

erm yes - i fixed "new york" by moving it a tidbit, the "dry" position is:
latitude = 40.43
longitude = 74.1
it must have been placed before unluckyly in the hudson river 😉

that's a very nice font you use now fo SSC.

Still the FFE ships look nice in Pioneer - don't they?

recent progress

the idea with the start location "far off" turned out well, i like it and it's fine to start as a nobody with a nobody ship. but well to start always at the same locations isn't what i thought of.
thus i created a table of useful systems to start with a shuttle without anything useful.
the drawback is that if i compile the source the systems will be most probably different and this fixed
table won't work anymore. the next step is to create the table from the generated factions (because i can request them already at start) and select the most populated body as start location, this will work then however it's build. but i could use some help here i'm not experienced in this and it will take me a long time to understand it. the drawback of this would be that many locations won't be useful to start with a shuttle without a hyperdrive because there probably aren't enough stations which are far enough from each to make good money with delivering interplanetary packages. however i think this is cool to start, you have to make at least one manual controlled flight before you have the money for an autopilot. to make it a little more fun i created a couple of shuttles which are the same in price and capbilities though you can't make money in a sleek way and exchange an expensive ship with a cheaper one (ätsch!). the start locations are selected random at start of the game (but you have the possibility to make it fixed in "MainMenu.lua"). there is only one location to see, one of recently 45 possible locations. if you click on "start at..." a random shuttle will be selected, thus if you dislike the ship just exit and restart from the main menu and you will have most probably a different ship of recently 5, "Dinghy", "Lander", "Light Shuttle", "Mining Vessel" and "Sightseeing Boat". a sixth vessel is planned it will be a lifter based on the same parts as the shuttles are (the Dinghy will probably have to vanish for this, it doesn't suits to the new ships anymore i feel).

NO ONE SHOULD NEVER BE ABLE TO SAY THAT THERE IS NO USE FOR AN INTERPLANETARY SHUTTLE!

Picload like to lead ppl to their site, they live from advertisement (i understand, it's free), but well SSC and even i don't like this. i have to call the picture and use the pictures link, that works!

whenever i it was possible i selected the the most beautiful view a start system offers.
sometimes they are real beauties and sometimes ugly as hell.

ugly as hell?

this one is an an asteroid and even a second one is on an even smaller spikey asteroid, one? i guess on this small dustball are at least two stations, you can call it easy overpopulated.

this happens mostly if you select the system from multiple star systems, some are really well populated
other are lonely as deep space.

the shuttles are my first conceptual ships which contain a random setup, sometimes the cockpit is below, sometimes on top.
planned is like i said a "lifter" (Container Lifter) and as final workout of this idea a "Posbi", a "positronic biologic" ship as it was mentioned in the "perry rhodan" novelle. OK it won't be exactly like this but a random setup ship which will alter it's look, looking somewhat irregular, no one said that spaceships have to look like we imagine them. imagine a a race of robots how would they create ships?
only by respecting the purpose of them and not any design, it needs no aerodynamic or any other criteria except purpose. imagine a set of cubes arranged chaotically, at least it will look chaotic to us.
yes i do felt that star trek has adapted this idea for the "Borg" civilization, while the Borg cubes doesn't look like i imagined the "Posbi" ships, Borg are cubes, Posbi are whatever they found in space and found as useful to link to the ship, no cubes each of irregular and unique look.

if you sit in a ants hill you don't have to wonder that they will fight back 😉

The most uncommon looking already might be the "Hair Dryer" (Mining Vessel) orb the "Sightseeing Boat".
"Mining Vessel" is a manned cargo scoop device, the only shuttle with a weapon mounting (recently the mining laser is far to expensive to be useful, it wasn't a good idea to make it such steep in price mining isn't of interest if you are rich, if it would be cheaper it woul probably even make sense to start in a low populated system and do the hard life of a miner. with it's low shot frequency it's not to use as weapon, thus the price isn't reasonable from the view of gameplay, as soon as i fixed such in the source, if i ever start again to do that, then i will make it this low in price that it will be useful). "Sightseeing Boat" is... hmmm well it is.

no real beauties but veryb good to start as Jameson with a lousy 100 credits and a shitty shuttle.
it isn't that shitty and exactly right to make interplanetary runs, take care the fueluse of my ships is somewhat high, especially if you have to travel distances between 300 and 1500 (!) AU (while the position of this extreme case of 1500 AU distance between sister stars i forgot - unfortunately. i discovered it on my first travel home to Sol from a far off location.

youe see you have already a gameplay, Pioneer needs just some good ideas to turn from an eye candy to something which is fun to play, restrictions make the game and not i start with the best fighter available or can sell ship or equipment to make money.

being bound to the starting system is already a gameplay, you like to leave it but first make some money, before you can be a "star" and buy a ship like this

(pic follows)

like this one:

CYRAPI MKI

(cy ra pi = pi ra cy)

Some "new" buildings, mostly adaptions of buildings i created for FFED3D, of course only scripted geometry.

this example is textured using my new texturemapper function, bam bam bam - finished!

ah yeah - i've read by someone, i forgot where that was, that a spaceship will need "idon't know how many" thrusters to maneuver. Cyrapi MKI has only 11 thrusters and this will be enough to rotate along all three axes in both directions clockwise and counter clockwise. the hovering to left and right will be somewhat difficult, but i can imagine this can be stabilzed by a board computer using the reverse thrusters to counter the single side thrusters.
ideal would be at least 14 and maximal 16 but not more as this dude stated.

like this

top  +
   +   +

bottom
     +
   +   +

front 
   +   +

rear
     +

side (2x)
     +   

equal as the Cyrapi is set up.
do you notice something?
three axes and four thrusters per axis in general.
"und 3 X 4 sind nach Adam Riese immer noch 12 und nicht 16"

if you hover to the side the the side thruster the opposite reverse thruster will control the hovering and rear (main) will correct the backwards trend due to this behave.

to hover isn't really needed if you can rotate (Elite control).

Ha, and if i guess of my recently disabled "Atomic X1" Rocket it can't hover and has no retro thrust (close to "0" isn't valid but a thrust of 1 (not 1e"something", simply 1) is almost equal to 0, it's only a small fraction of 1G, very low maneuvering thrust of 1G (shut off main to maneuver manually and get in position - fire main thrust - shut off main correct course and so on... and nonetheless you can control this Rocket. Hard but you can maneuver by rotating and decelerate by flipping the vessel.
It has in fact only 9 thrusters but the Rocket would be to maneuver.
thus in fact even if it's hard and hard to believe a space ship, especially a rocket of some sort can be maneuvered with only 9 thrusters.

a few words to the font i used for the labels, the font is called "Sailer" and it's based on the font of Intellivisions "TRON - Solar Sailer" game. i used different ones before mostly with rounded edges but since every curve needs a lot of tringles to be displayed auch a simple font based on rectangular tiles is much lower in polygon use, each rectangle needs only two triangles to be displayed, and it didn't looks bad - no in fact it looks pretty good and has a fixed with, much better as what we used before when the glyphs stood such close together that it was sometimes very hard to read also stuff like clocks will look better with a monospaced font. further i can tell more exactly how the width will be if i use my auto fontscaler to bound a fontsize to a given space of glyphs in a determined scale.

because Cyrapi means piracy (the ship is loosely based on the design of the "Krait") i drove this further and pirated the FE2 materials (as good as i could) and they turned out pretty good, 16 materials by the way, as if we wouldn't have guessed already that they will be 16.

mostly grey, red, green, yellow or blue scented grey, but i like them, they look so FE2-ish.

then displayed name "Lunar Pod" in the model viewer and on the ship displayed in the main menu is a complete coincidence, totally random, i changed a little the way i randomized them and it turned out that now the random name generation leads to "Lunar Pod", just if one guesses it was forced it isn't.

i really had to laugh when i displayed my shuttle and readed "Lunar Pod" yes that what it is a lunar pod, not much more.

btw you can imagine the sixteen fe2 colors are all based on...
multiples of 16, what i captured wasn't exactly but very soon i noticed that the values are all close to multiples of 16. except the two non-colors white & black. the colors harmonize very well and i already think of something similar, more aren't needed for spaceship and all look very good as hull, most are grey which gives the hull a metallic look in a scent of a color, the only exclusion is the bloodred which is simply 50% red (128), it's surprising how good this simple color looks, mostly it was only used as accent color but i guess the eagle mkiii is sometimes bloodred. for the specular colors i just added "0.5" to each so that it keeps the note likewise for fe2.

the "Native Father" (of the "Cyrapi MKI")

the most saturated blue in the fe2 colorset

more saturation isn't good for shiphulls, the colorset is really very good looking.

due to the very bright texture my old adder has always a very metallic look.

if i'm not wrong this is what i named "blue steel" there is also a green and a yellow scented one but they are very close.

recently i only used it for the FE2 ships and the Cyrapi, but i really like the colorset.
i prefere it to the often to much saturated and to dark random materials of the generic pioneer.

a listing by the nicknames i gave them, though you get an idea what 16 colors they are
brightgrey
darkgrey
copper
sepia (i didn't found a better name for the dark version of copper)
brightgreen
darkgreen
brightblue
darkblue
cyan
blue
greengrey
green
bluesteel
greensteel
tan (turned out to be gold, i gave the names when i wrote down the numbers and i didn't knew exactly how they will look)
darkred

as you see i sorted them (in the table i use) always the bright followed by the darker version, with exception of tan (gold) and bloodred which stand somwhat alone but of course gold harmonizes well with bloodred. i guessed of selecting them in pairs (of even & odd numbers) but as it turned out i haven't to because how i randomized the selection it turned out to be mostly following this rule. mostly is better as always. it uses to select a darker and a brighter one, not always of the same color but at least a bright and a dark one, that's very well.

FE2 or not, i started first with a own colorset, is better as completly random.

in future i will create a special set for fighters with mostly green & brown colors and one with more agresive colors for anything else as fighters. but as you know rules are only valid due to exceptions.

a few words to the buildings.
when i started to adapt my FFED3D buildings i thought of using the same positioning as it's in FE2/FFE. the buildings are centered on the most far left side corner if you view them from front this leads to that they will never be on the exact opposite side when they get rotated and this looks very good in FE2

          +--+
          |  |
  +----+  0--+    
  |    |    
  +----0     0----+
             |    |
       +--0  +----+
       |  |         
       +--+         

but unfortunately i forgot that due to this some will vanish almost complete in a hill if the are rotated "wrong", means the pivot is on the flank and depending on how it's rotated the building will be either inside or outside of the hill.

unfortunately i had to trash this idea.

overall i would still prefere something made of larger city quarters, two things are in the way, mostly the terrain.

to much code hm? ah it's just code because of the schemas which i made using glyphs, but to display it right it must be a monospaced font like for the code.

in general i like this type of "needleprinter" or typewriter graphics, and yes it had it's revival already.

  *              *
 /             / 
/             /   
   /  4-TRIS     /
 +-+            +-+
 |o|            |o|
 | |++++++++++++| |
 |o|            |o|
 | |     __     | |
 |o|    /      |o|
 | |    |JZ|    | |
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
 by Joseph Zbiciak

this one is designed for the "LTO Flash!" a Intellivision Flash ROM which will display manuals (apart from the main task to store all the roms as binary images) in a resolution of 20 rows and 12 lines, which fits to a NTSC tube TV's resolution of 352×240.

a quite differnt type of "CGI" 😉

to some old is just old - to me it's vintage and precious.

one who understands why Tetris is such a long time runner will create better games, i'm convinced about that.

today i was looking for industrial building textures (if i wouldn't be such a lazy ass we have a lot of modern industrial buildings in Wattwil). However, i stumbled over Flightsimulator and how they generate buildings, generate one must say and it's something very obvious. Buildings are background art and doesn't need to be detailed, in general a cube with a texture on each side. The cool thing is that they even dont need to build the buildings, the system is also obvious, you have uniform tiled texturemaps and just say no.xxx is the front face, the front face itself is a quad - nothing else. I guess right now with the mapper function, if i extend that a little, something similar is easy possible, one would just have to tell which sections of the map you like to use for which viewplane and enter the size of the building you like to have, the output will be the finished building.

sidetrip, one was asking for slanted roofs (they turned out very funny), yeah it's possible but well this makes such a mapper very complex if i can even rotate the viewplane and the face, the face is less a problem as to respect that in the mapper, fixed not as much if i tell all slanted roofs have this or a short table of angles, but if i like to rotate free it's a brainfucker to respect that (i'm up to, it just didn't works yet as i expect, the goal is a real use of the projection vector so you can enter i.e v(deg_to_rad(30),1,0) and the mapping will be in this angle, recently my mapper only supports integer vectors, in other terms the three basic viewplanes (6, negative numbers are respected to flip the texture, left is the a little complicated thing to rotate a texture that "up" in the texture becomes left or right, i would need an additional vector for this but this again makes the function call more complex, but if you make a map you can respect this that you can't rotate the projection in this way and rotate the respective texture on the map you create).

if all would be set up perfect one could make a "for" (for 1, #bldtexmaps do) routine which outputs generated buildings in masses based on uniform tiled texturemaps. the only work left would be to assemble the texture maps by a given scheme. it won't have to be a map for variuos bld's like in FS, one bld per map would be fine as well.

generated buildings
next
generated space ships? 😉

OK no this goes to far, i'm happy if i can put together one random assembled ship.