Alpha 9 released

no that's not the problem, it's more gameplay related in general.

when you enter a system pirates and intercepting ships (if picked up a important delivery) are (in this case)to far away from you to reach you, so it's getting a bit boring imo.

i suspected late, because i could only see the hyperspace clouds, but ok, to far to read ships reg. (i use to start the game with the smallest ship and have no space for anything else as a drive, a scanner and a gun).

but, yes a control over the entry point would maybe allow to make assasinations like in FE2 and ships that enter hyperspace at close coordinates will arrive at close positions in target system (i suspect gametime is even a factor, but has a rather low influence.

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[attachment=640:2011-03-26_215927.jpg]

if you miss the "ADC-44 Moth"

adc_moth.zip

Yes, this is something I will sort out soon. There needs to be a "spawn near player" option (maybe with some range) for assassinations etc, and for pirates they perhaps need to spawn somewhere between the player and the star, or at least on the same line. I think there should be some give in this though; not all pirates should exist just for the player. I'd like to see pirate ships attacking trade ships and perhaps those trade ships calling for help. I'd like to see pirates roaming the system looking for targets.

sounds great 😀

i guess fighting (flightmodel?) has to be completly overhauled, it was mean in alpha8 to follow a ship and sometimes you couldn't reach them proper. but now it's absolutely impossible for me to reach one ship and it's also impossible for them to reach me, no matter what i do (setspeed 0m/s and wait).

i wish it would be like back in alpha 6.

The AI/autopilot was rewritten for alpha 9. The "Fly to vicinity" code can't get at ships right now - they're either too small or moving too fast (I'd have to check with jaj22). I'm also not sure but think the attack AI is really only designed for close-range stuff. I know John is working on all this though, so things should get better in alpha 10 and beyond.

good to know.

something different,

for those who like to bring some life to Sirius (folder p01p01), set seed to 435 this is the only one i found so far that brings some population to the system even if it's not the proper economy type for it (except you would setup a complete predefinied system).

high population world on alpha centauri?, seed(6)

barnard's star, seed(15)

i guess the values will last only for alpha9, but doesn't matter.

two questions,

first,

is it possible to add only a starport/city to a generated system?

second,

it's more a observation, i noticed from beginning on that the galactical map is mirrored along x compared to FE2.

that means y coordinates of systems in pioneer are inverted to FE2, of course i don't know how reliable FE2 is, some have complete different coordinates (van Maanen's).

but shouldn't i.e. Alioth be positioned 0,-4 ?

Not yet. Its on my list, along with allowing missions to add/remove them. Its a long way off still though, there's a lot of groundwork required before it can happen.

I'll check that systems are being placed correctly next chance I get (probably tomorrow sometime). As for overall positions being correct, you'd need to consult a real star chart for that. The custom systems as a whole need reworking, both to support a coherent storyline/history and also to provide a balanced game. Its a huge job. I'm hoping to write some guidelines soon and then I'm rather hoping someone else will pick it up the task.

Hmm, Alioth is 0,4 on both pioneer and FFE... It should probably be more like -1,5 to align with the other stars.

Basically Pioneer uses the Gliese star catalogue, the latest version of that in-fact which I think is number 3. All custom stars are positioned in their correct locations for today. But Pioneer is set 1200 years ahead of our time, so the stars aren't going to be in the correct positions when you account for 1200 years of drift.

This is why in FFE and frontier, the closest star to Sol is Barnards star, and not the correct Proxima/Alpha Centauri, which is our closest star right now.

It also accounts for the movement of all other stars from their current locations, except of course Alioth, because that was added seperately.

I wanted to add in all of the systems from the gliese.dat file within say 1000LY radius of Earth, but it would be the most mind-numbingly boring task I could possibly think of. It also requires a larger Z area to the galaxy for authentic systems. But despite that I did go ahead and start on adding in those thousands of systems last year... this was the result 😉 :

Found some links to local star charts. Perhaps these could be of use?

http://solstation.com/47ly-ns.htm

http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/

http://www.projectrho.com/starmap.html

And here is a picture (looks to have been drawn on the back of a beer matt) of local stars and their position's in relation to Sol.

Thats the same as we have in Pioneer already however the distance in the Z axis is much lower in Pioneer, just turn it round on Z and X axis... Basically look at it from the other direction 😉

😯 That must have took you ages! s2odan, is there anyway the community (with limited programming knowledge) could help out with such a task?

It did take a fair bit of time, but thats not all of the stars within 1000LY probably only a very small portion of them as I was getting very bored with editing all that text 🙂

It most certainly is the kind of thing the comunity could help out with for sure! And that would be great. With the export of much of this stuff to .lua the task to include them all is now even greater, not harder per-say but simply more time-consuming. But on the other-hand, it also opens this area up to anyone. As you no longer require the ability to code and compile your changes.

We have a small script which can analyse the starchart file and export all stars within a set radius around earth to a file.

What is needed is this file to be converted into the relevant .lua information. So each line (star) would require its own .lua file in the correct /systems folder. That is what takes the time, its boring but it does need to be done....

I will have a look for my old customsystems file with all of the extra stars, it would save a fair bit of time for anyone willing to have a go...

yes and no, to compare FE2 to Pioneer you need to compare more then one system

maybe use FFE starsys to quickly browse through the systems

you will notice soon that the galaxy is mirrored in FE2, or check even simply sol's position on the galactical map

in FE2 it's above galactical x meridian

in pioneer below

you see what i mean?

some systems have complete different coordinates, but in general it fit's when you mirror or rotate the galactical map

one reason could be that depth is calculated negative in FE2 ("closer" objects have negative values, i'm pretty shure about that because i used hex coordinates for a sort of transwarp),

while i can see on the outsourced system specs of pioneer z depth is positive.

it depends on how you look at the model.

a grid of real systems like you showed, geraldine, would be a big help.

i must say i have no idea how to get coordinates from rotation, declination and distance, would cost me a long time...

btw, the outsourcing of the custom systems is what you've asked for, it's no big thing to place a system to any sector once the coordinates are known.

there is one thing to know before you start,

any by a custom system occupied sector will lose all it's generated systems!

that means if you like to add a system to a existing randomly generated cluster and keep that cluster, you will have to evaluate the positions of the generated systems that are present.

you can add a :seed(n) to a custom system in one call that will look like this

(data/systems/p00p00/04_alpha_centauri.lua)

this will result in a nicely populated system.

actually i'm working on alioth and i'm quite shure it's located sector 0,-4 in pioneer

it depends if you look at the galaxy as a "static" model, would only simplyfie a lot i guess.

further it would make it easier to import special FE2 systems to pioneer and keep their coordinates relative to existant "real" systems.

I found the file with the 2000+ extra stars, about 1500 are already working with the old system. They just need to be moved over to .lua, have their Z values trimmed and given the correct name, as some have some rather confusing names.

let's beautyfie the neighbourhood a bit

n01p00/03_ross_154.lua

n01p00/05_barnard's_star.lua

p01p01/00_sirius.lua

p01p01/04_tau_ceti.lua

hm, correct name...

english, latin, greek original language? perhaps arabic (which?) persian? chinese or sanskrit? get's complicated, imho 😉

starcatalogue? which as reference?

if you use english names, some will find names irritating to because perhaps in german or french the same star has a complete different name.

then, i would stay to a plain latin/greek naming convention

besides,

astronomy is more then data, it reflects human culture(s).

astronomical data has been collected and gathered before any else writings.

sorry barnards star is not closer then alpha centauri, neithe rin FE2 nor FFE 😕

Ah so it isnt 🙂 There I was thinking Braben had been all smart and computed the effect of 1000 years of galactic movement.

P66, here are those star additions, I hope you or anyone else can make something useful with these:

http://pastebin.com/zByJM2Vg

Converted and uploaded to a branch: https://github.com/robn/pioneer/tree/gl ... a/systems/

(Using this script: http://pastebin.com/YeyM2LwB )

Unchecked apart from seeing that the game does run.

Its way too cluttered for my tastes but I'll worry about that when someone is crazy enough to ask for it to be merged 🙂

Fyi, I documented the custom systems API some time ago: http://pioneerspacesim.net/wiki/index.p ... ystems_API

The tutorial it links to doesn't exist yet. I'll get around to writing it sometime unless someone wants to pick it up. I hate writing docs 🙂

Anyone else have a problem with the roll keys? When holding down right mouse to control attitude you cannot roll. You can do this in Alpha 8 though.

here's what i guessed for Alioth (0,-4) (if you use 0,4, you can use a completely generated system, seed(11), but i didn't found a good seed for 0,-4 that reflects the description more or less)

for sector 0,-4

for sector 0,4

the TYPE for Alioth is not proper but i guess A fit's, some medium giant star.

i might will have to add some planetoids (moons).

this is roughly what results from it

[attachment=647:2011-03-28_033805.jpg]

[attachment=648:2011-03-28_033734.jpg]

[attachment=649:2011-03-28_034113.jpg]

New stars can be defined if none of the existing ones fit. Just describe what you want (references to the real star would be appreciated).

P66, can I suggest you get yourself a Github account and fork the project and start committing your changes - not just starsystems but ships and anything else you might want included in the future. It'll make it vastly easier to track and merge your work later. I really don't want to be trawling forums and copy/pasting things - there's far too much scope for error.