What about ditching the "city" idea and just have spaceports? A planet might have lots of people but no real clusters due to advanced communication and transportation technology. Couldn't you just scatter buildings at random across the surface? On any settled world you could just divide surface area by the number of spaceports to get a rough idea of population density and you use that to scale the size of each building. Then you just have a maximum number of buildings visible at any one time, determined by the detail settings... and you've got structures all over the place!

You could apply an arbitrary gradient depending on the climate and tech level of the Planet to determine if Spaceports do form Cities... tightly clustered on an airless rock, nice and spread out on a tropical ocean world!! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Wow... it's almost like you've played Frontier!

So...

• lots of ships causes framerate to drop for unknown reason, possibly collision?
• lots of cities causes framerate to drop for unknown reason, possibly collision?

Looks like there's a need for some investigating there <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

Its well known that the collision code is, shall we say, "suboptimal". In fact I don't think its been touched for at least two years (since I've been around anyway). Its on at least one list, but who knows where <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Been thinking about this and chatting with the guys on IRC, probably going to make a proper mod for this with two aims.

1) More trade ships, with ships spending less time docked (currently they can stay docked for ages!)

2) Bulk carriers actually doing something, first release probably only trading in-system if there is more than one orbital starport available. But perhaps can make them jump in and out of system as well, will have to see if they actually have hyperdrives fitted.

No ETA, i'll give it a go when i'm in the mood.

Can't remember if they do by default, but they can be given one easily enough. We might need to do some tuning to give them some jump range though - they're pretty massive. Or make a new kind of hyperdrive just for bulk ships. Its all pretty easy to do though!

That's how it works. Welcome <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Any way to make the Bulk Carriers into Cycler Stations? Instead of just staying parked outside a station or asteroid base they could just drift between Stations on ballistic courses, stopping at each station for a day then boosting back up to a slow interplanetary trajectory to the next station.

I'm planning on just making them fly normally like traders. After talking with Robn it looks like i can get them to move to vicinity, put not park outside until they make some further changes to what is possible with Lua. Maybe can fudge it though somehow.

The bulk traders fly really well. This screenshot's an old one (the thrusters look different now). Alas, the bulk traders are spawned directly in parked ship slots, and right now those slots are not freed up if you order a bulk ship to move away. Also, bulk ships cannot be asked to move into a parked ship slot, they can only be spawned there. Until this bug is cleared up, this isn't an easy feature to code, and certainly isn't possible in Lua alone.

Spawn one in space and order it into orbit, though - it's fun to rendezvous with one.

You're looking at some hard maths there. In many cases in Pioneer, since we only have single body Newtonian physics, there just might not be any ballistic interplanetary trajectory that you can calculate. If the target body is inside the same frame, then it's certainly possible, but you'd need to speak to JohnJ (our autopilot coder) about the feasibility of that.

In the short term, using the regular autopilot is probably the most productive approach.

Hello, I'm new here.

Is it possible to make a mod that would limit the scope of the game to Sol with multiple factions in one system?

Sure. Just disable the hyperdrive capability of all the ships, and re-fashion everything else around it. You might need to script your own factions up in Lua, but that's no big deal.

I see, I'll try to learn the scripting.

I increased fuel use 200 times, increased deadlines and rewards for long-distance deliveries and now I'm making few/several months long trips on autopilot between earth and other planets. Does it make me a weird person?

No.

Is it possible to edit what proportion of fuel the autopilot uses for accelerating?

Is it possible to edit loadouts of ships, especially police ships?

Is it possible to edit what hardware is available in stores?

If I remove all hyperdrives from ship files the game crashes, does it mean that I have to remove all references to jumps from scripts?

1. Not presently.
2. Yes, except for police ships. They're not done yet.
3. Not yet. The equipment and cargo system is being rewritten.
4. Yes, it does.

Oh. Thanks for the info.