The trouble is that although we are all from different sides of the globe, we all work on different aspects of the game. Some do coding, some make spacecraft models etc, therefore for example, at the moment visually only my culture is going into the facegen stuff. I think we need more contributors working on all the different aspects of the art for a variety of cultures to make it in. Maybe one day though 🙂 I'm sure pioneer's fan base can only grow considering how well it's going.

Hello everyone!

First I want to thank the dev team for Alpha 10, I enjoyed Alpha 9 and I see some great improvements in the new version.

I have some suggestions that may or may not be helpful, you decide.

I searched a while for a blue star, just like I did 15 years ago in Frontier, traveling hundreds of lightyears in my trusty Puma Clipper. Then I would land and park on a barren moon, and enjoy how everything was lit by the beautiful blue light of that star. Spaced out without drugs, ya all know what I mean.

I've found one in Pioneer, called Faolen (1,39). It's a blue hypergiant with something like six brown dwarfs.

First of all, is there a list of stars that truly produce blue light? Ye know, the ones that produce much more in the UV range, 25K - 50K Kelvin or more. Right now all the planetary bodies in Faolen reflect white in HDR, and look pink or some other color in normal mode.

Besides the effect of HDR is a bit much, even at the outskirts of the system everything shines as if you're only 0.1 AU from that star. And it's like HDR is some kind of very sensitive IR sensor.

The brown dwarfs for example, indeed look a bit brownish in normal mode, but shine brilliantly in red with HDR. Since the temperature range of most brown dwarfs stops well below 3000 K, that's a bit much :-). Here's an image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... _sizes.svg

That brings me to the next thing. Most of the brown dwarfs I encountered were huge, I mean, really huge! I was near a medium gas giant looking at it's parent, I thought it would be 0.03 AU away or something. Turned out to be 6 AU, with an apparent diameter of 30 times the Sun at that distance! Actually the opposite is true 🙂

I hope they'll shrink a little in the future 🙂

I just openend WinUAE and loaded Frontier, I even remembered the correct saved game in an instant, after all this time. Here's an idea, that's what I mean, the whole place flooded with blue light 🙂

Thanks for everything!

Hi,

That sounds a bit unusual... HDR doesn't work correctly anyway, there are several problems with it so I won't even go there 🙂 But the surrounding planets should have looked rather blue-ish without HDR, but there could be something going on with these Brown Dwarfs. A Blue HyperGiant has a lot of red light already, if there was a reddish star nearby you would notice this and things would appear pinkish. So its kind of correct but a brown dwaarf should not have so much of an effect.

Well that star is a B class hyper Giant, you won't get a star more blue than that... But Pioneer's colours are based on blackbody radiation diagrams which means that a blue star is not actually blue, it is 80% red, 85%green and 100% blue (approximately).... The numbers probably just need a little more tweaking to make the blue part appear a little more blue.

I'll explain this a little more in-case you don't quite get it. I'll use our own star as an example... Our own star is in fact a green star, it has more green light emitted from the sun than any other colour, however it also emits copious amounts of red and blue light, just a bit less red and blue than green. However our eyes can only pickup so much light before they are literally overloaded and everything becomes white (Kind of like how HDR works now) so we see the star as a yellow/white star. But actually measuring the wavelength of light emitted from the star, it would predominantly be green.

The problem with green in the visual spectrum is that red and blue are evenly spaced either side, so when you add green light, you also have to add in some red and blue, identical amounts in fact. So green cannot be green, it can only appear yellowish or white.

BUT.... for the sake of gameplay and what the average guy expects, I am going to increase the 'blue-ness' of these stars... But only a little 😉

That all sounds more like a bug than anything else. Most likely what is happening is that the Brown Dwarf is using a value from another type of star probably some kind of sub-giant star. A brown dwarf should have no more a radius than 60% of a small class M, which would give it a radius of approx 25% of our star.. These are the values currently in use and a temp of about 2000 K. The radius may be a little too high but thats easily changed.

EDIT// It is indeed a bug, I have now witnessed this in-game and it only effects Brown Dwarfs that are considered to be orbitting another star, like a planet does. But not those who share an orbit in a binary+ type configuration. I'm still looking into it and hopefully I can find out why its doing this now.

EDIT"// FYI there's a fix to that now in case your able to compile yourself: https://github.com/s20dan/pioneer/commi ... ecadf16f42

Basically the game was disregarding the star info if the brown dwarf was considered a planet, so it would work out the radius from the mass and end up with some crazy number. 🙂

🙂 Glad your enjoying it.

Thanks for the reply!

Anyone interested in the original font that was used in Frontier, as a TTF? Look great in the game!

Oh and nice Shodan avatar. I bought myself three copies of SS2 10 years ago, still have one in the original plastic!