I really don't think it matters mate, Alioth was just a random addition I added in, I guessed its location. If you want to spend time adding in stars, I suggest you follow Robs advice and use real star data.

He has been kind enough to convert my 1500 real stars into the .lua format, all we need is those stars to have the correct names.

Basically the files should contain every star within about 100 LY of Earth, but it is using some kind of scientific naming scheme.

Check them out, the game will load them up, then you can see what needs to be done 😉

Good Luck Commander!

so you have 1500 real stars in game going into lua and with missions and or colony or other aspects that is good. Allows some content-storyline-back story elements

ok, i will give that a try (github).

at least today i have a day off.

"Barnard's Star will make its closest approach to the Sun around AD 11,700, when it approaches to within about 3.8 light-years.[19] However, at that time, Barnard's Star will not be the nearest star, since Proxima Centauri will have moved even closer to the Sun."

source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_star

If we say that Pioneer is set 1000 years in the future and that Barnard's Star moves 2 light years (from 6 LY to ~ 4 LY) closer in about ten thousand years from now we might assume that in the time of Pioneer it should be 0.2 light years closer than it is now. Which is not a big difference in the scope of the game anyway. But, if you go for hard-core realism you might want to adjust a bit the distance of the star systems.

exactly what i guess, it's not very important.

Not quite.

I have 1500 stars here waiting for some kind soul to spend some time with them. They are already in the .lua format, they need name editing and Z positions should be trimmed.

If you want to help out this is the kind of thing everyone can help with.

Edit// Its actually 1,256 stars that are formatted. But those stars still have crazy scientific names.

There is also a further approx. 1,100 stars that have not been formatted... So once finished, the file would include roughly 2,350 real stars from within 100 LY of Earth.

So people... now is the time for you to give something back to Pioneer... We need one kind person to take the reigns and sort out the pioneer galaxy...;)

Stars need re-naming We cant have 1000s of stars called gliese whatever and LTT random number....

Please contact me in anyway if you wish to lend a hand, this is a pretty major addition. Anyone helping out will get the chance to shape the Pioneer galaxy however they choose.... to a point 😉

Btw, if you do plan on helping us out with this, it is very important that you do contact me, as I have already changed approximately 100 starnames and positions, and it would be utterly pointless to repeat that work 😉

Ah a much smaller distance than I would have assumed then. Probably not worth changing their locations then. It does at least make things easier.

Give me a shout if you have any troubles with that, if your a windows boy I'll have you set up in minutes 🙂

can you show me how the positions get evaluated?

the positions in the galactical map seem to be inconsistent, from far it looks like not allways the same conventions have been used (apart from that, i guess DB shrunk 10ly box sidelength to 8ly sidelength, if you check far off fix stars, the're allways around 80% of real distance, that's not so important for pioneer, except you would like to cover some specific Frontier systems). pioneer uses a different thickness i guess, Frontier was limited to 2*8ly (two boxes)and 65536 sectors over all.

i can smell a mixing of relative and absolute movent, because if i would give galactical coordinates by radiants i would choose a absolute coordinate system (galactical view), that would lead to a absolute movement of the stars in the "disc". but since we are moving with that "disc" to, relative movement is far, far less. i'm not shure but worth to think about and even a reason why actual coordinates are more useful.

anyways, something is wrong and i guess if you compare some coordinates... van maanen's Star on 2,0, while ross154 is -1,0 (which is proper i guess)?

it looks sometimes like the systems would rotate around us in 1000years, they didn't do that.

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close observations bring things to the light 😉

have found a slight failure in neptunes mass it should be 17.147 EM and not 171.47 (17147/1000).

thats why he's shown as medium gas giant instead of a small one.

that one has smelled fishy to.

Ross 154

basically a mix between Frontiers Ross 154 and a Hack called "Arisata".

like it?

BTW, it's good to back D1 😀

Well I had thought that we simply read a Cartesian format from a catalogue, to make things easier, for Example many catalogues such as Hipparcos contain Cartesian coordinates already worked out. But from looking at the python script that we use to read the gliese star data, it looks like we create our own Cartesian co-ordinates from Right Ascension and Declination data.

So it could well be that things are round the wrong way since we work it out on our own..... I have some other, far more extensive star catalogues which contain ready-made cartesian co-ordinates which would simplify the whole process a bit, and ideally should help preserve accurate figures for stars.

But even those co-ordinates are totally different to FFE and frontier, at least some stars seem to be.

EG Using data from teh bright star catalogue:

Alpha Centauri: Distance: 1.3 (Must be Parsecs) X: 0.9 Y: -0.9 Z:0

Barnard's Star: Distance: 1.8 X: 1.5 Y: 0.9 Z:0.4

Sirius : Distance: 2.6 X: -1.8 Y: -1.9 Z:-0.4

So from looking at that it does indeed seem as though Pioneer's X and Y co-ordinates have been mirrored.. But I'm unsure where galactic center is in relation to the co-ordinates given on a star chart. If center is +X then Pioneer is actually correct, but if Center is -X then Pioneer is mirrored.

Shouldn't have anything to do with sector size, The stars position and distance are calculated then divided by the sector size to place it in the correct sector, if the sectors are smaller then stars are in further out sectors, if the sectors are larger then they are in closer sectors, but their distance would remain cosntant.

The reason that far out stars have inconsistent values is to do with the reduction in Z values. Pioneer's galaxy is just 1% the thickness of the real galaxy, and the script will reduce a stars Z value to compensate for this.

AFIK they are the same thickness. I thought they were all 1 sector in thickness...

Is it really necessary to keep the Pioneer galaxy this thin? It would seem that now would be a good time to expand it to a more realistic value. Also, if/when we help in the naming of systems, shouldn't we use the real star names if possible? As potsmoke said above, there are many nearby stars with 3 or more names given to them by different cultures. A third thought, how about assigning people who volunteer for this a specific sector to name. That way there's no overlap and different sectors would have different "flavors" to their names, based on who did them. The thought of naming 1000+ stars is rather daunting, but doing it in sector sized chunks seems doable.

Btw potsmoke, I'm liking your Ross 154. I still think of Merlin as my home planet. 😆

Edit: looking at the stuff in the branch, but I don't really have an idea how to get started. 😕

s20dan and I were discussing on IRC yesterday what it would take to make the galaxy extend into three dimensions rather than the "flat" setup we have now. We think its mostly doable without too much effort and probably a good thing to do. The hardest bit would be developing a new sector view that will let you browse the galaxy in a way that makes sense.

I think your idea of doling out the work by sector is a good one. The best thing would be if someone stepped up and offered to coordinate it the distribution and checking/merging of the ideas/work. One of the devs (probably me) can then merge updates from a single point and know that everything is consistent. You don't need permission to do this, just setup a Github account, fork the code and get started. If you fork from https://github.com/robn/pioneer/tree/alpha9/ you won't even have to recompile to work - just edit/add files under data/systems and restart the game.

If anyone would like to step up but isn't sure how to get started, feel free to post or PM/email me (or grab me in #pioneer!) and I'll help you out.

Geraldine has been helping with the resorting of stars on the list I have. Even if we update to a 3d galaxy we should be able to use most of that data, we simply update the Z co-ordinates for every star to reflect that.

I've also been scouring the net for more comprehensive star catalogues which should mean that we will have every named star in the sky within our galaxy. There aren't actually that many named stars so this is easily do-able using a script to extract any stars with names.

You kind of misunderstood what I meant. Stars come from a catalogue with names like Alf Cma or Alf Cen, which is no good to be placed into the game.

So someone has to substitute the names from Alf Cma - Alpha Cannis Majoris which just happens to be Sirius. And Alf Cen- Alpha Centauri aka Toliman.

Once those stars are all 'done' there does exist the possibilty of naming some stars that have no name, IE Gliese stars, or LTT stars or CD stars ect.

I mean, why would you have an inhabited colony at LTT 170182 or Gliese 581 🙂 Surely it would have a nicer sounding name thats not given by a computer 🙂

That's what I was trying to say. There are Latin names and Arabic names (Alioth) and names from other cultures. I meant that we should use the most common name, and perhaps list all the variants we can in the system description for named stars. I like the Arabic names because they sound exotic to my ears. Much better than Akawaka or whatever.

Well I'm not the one to co-ordinate this. I'm doing some stuff for the game, but I'm much too intermittently involved to take on that responsibility. I'm willing to take on a sector, however. I think what should be done, perhaps in its own thread, is a set of step by step instructions that even a total non-programmer can follow. That way, anyone here can make a contribution to the game. I can personally say that it feels wonderful to add a little something to Pioneer for others to enjoy. 😀

The system API is documented, but I haven't got around to writing a tutorial. I'll try to do something over the weekend; I don't want to be the blocker on this.

Honestly though, if you're just doing stars, its pretty straightforward. Even easier if s20dan can build the files from a real star catalogue. Then its just a matter of editing them in Notepad and renaming 🙂

How about keeping the scale of the X and Y dimensions the same, but then scaling the Z dimension down so that the galactic chart looks like it did in Frontier - while still respecting the true Z distance (meaning that you still can't travel to a system that is too far away in the Z dimension).

I can't really explain this any better, sorry 🙁

X and Y would be as in Frontier, but Z would be 1/3rd scale (so even though a star system might be 50 light years off the galactic plane, it shows on the star chart as being about 17 light years off the galactic plane. Instead of having a range "bubble" showing a perfect sphere around your current position showing your range, it would be flatter in the Z axis, but still perfectly round in X and Y.

Damn I wish I could explain this properly - frustrating!

Does anyone understand what I'm suggesting? 😳

What I have been doing is picking through the star list and doing my best to find their names. If I can't find them then out comes my Frontier map or I use a little imagination. After all, with space travel being a reality and colonies being established, it's likely that many non famous star systems would be re-named by their inhabitants

of course, easy to imagine.

sounds somehow reasonable to me, because it wouldn't change the way you move through sectors in the map, less confusing if you have only a limited depth.

i allways imagined it hard to scroll through a map that has real 3 dimensions, i guess you won't have a good overview and it will be hard to find a specific system.

in some cases that will mean for shure that the" camera" is "under" a system, either the main star (dot) will fill the whole screen or in the other case it's not to see, both is inacceptable.

of course you could use a fixed depth for the map view, but then in depth far away systems will be maybe unreadable or cover each other because of perspective (except a isometric view, but i guess that looks stupid).

i know the idea of using a "find...." isn't far away,

but wouldn't that kill some of the fun in pioneer, if everything runs automated like some suggested it will 1000 years in future, it get's boring if i have only to press buttons, that's why i hate most of the RPG's you have nothing to do. it's like watching a movie a pressing the right button from time to time 😉

and dan,

it's how you look at the model (cartesian system)

that varies and ones Z+ is anotherones Y- 😉

since there are no given fixed directions (e.g. up) in space, anyone can choose a own reference, preferably galactical plane; lefthanded or righthanded model? which is "north"? do i look at the galaxy from under it or above it ("west" becomes "east").

Ace! 😀 I'm actually a native English speaker, and my Dad (retired now) was an English lecturer at our local college - I'm normally quite eloquent but by God when I find it difficult to explain a concept it really frustrates me 😆

The other good thing about this is that you wouldn't need to manually adjust the height (Z axis location) of the stars on the map - just get the proper names and their locations, feed them into Pioneer, and tell the galactic map to scale things on the Z axis.

Even better would be that, because the program knows about the actual Z-axis location of the stars (not just the adjusted Z-axis location for the star chart), there's the potential for putting stars in their real positions when in a solar system - so in Sol, you should be able to point out the constellations as we know them, but other systems would look different. Rather than having a fixed "skybox" or randomly-placed stars. You would also potentially see the milky way while in space purely through realistically-located stars.

#

Edit// Ah I see what you mean. Why do that?

I don't see any point in all this trickery. We should just make a realistic galaxy with realistic positions.

If your going to do something, then you do it properly....

Edit2// Actually this is not a bad idea and would allow a 3d galaxy with hardly any editing of code... hmm I'm gonna think this over and run it by Rob as well when I see him, see what he thinks.

I know, I've been trying to explain that to you for days 🙂 If things look to be the wrong way roung, just imagine that you are looking at it from a differnt direction...

And there are in fact given/fixed directions in space. The center of the galaxy is a fixed position which does not move.

ok, now i request your full capability of imagination 😉

you got a idea what a realtime update of all stars would mean (cost)?

this is a game, not a planetarium reflecting all systems of our galaxy, else we wold really get a place in history 😀

but, what i can imagine is some nearby, let's say a circle of 1 or 2 sectors (maybe more).

but since the stars in constellations as we see them, e.g. big dipper, have no relation to each other (only subjectively), usually located in complete different distances (some of the "dots" in certain constellations are whole galaxies), you won't even see the milky way or constellations as we know them.

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dan i guess you misunderstood him, he didn't ment to shrink the real thickness to 16ly, he suggested only to shrink the distance for the view in the map.

somehow i think that makes sense, easy to locate systems while you move through the map, but keeping the Z depth, so if two x,y nearby systems, separated by, let's say 30ly depth, will be separated by 30ly in data.

that means, if you can follow, you can have as many 8ly cubes (sectors) in depth as you like, the map will show only one, i guess should be no problem to transpose real z to percentage, only for the view. further i suggest a logarithmical transpose of the depth, if so (closer to the plane z is less "compressed").

i guess a map is a map, if you would have a map for routing, a map having real depth won't be very helpful, the used "rings" to mark height is much better to read.

Well we certainly can't add all of the stars. There are far too many, and the average computer would not have enough diskspace.

But what we can, and are going to do, is add all of the bright stars, around 150,000 of them.

Thats totally acceptable. Only use a few extra MB of space.

I have already said that me and one other person have in fact been working on this....

I will post an example for you later... 😉

We won't have just 1 or 2 sectors of stars, but rather over 2000 custom star-systems. 2000! not 10, or 20, but 2000! That gives you roughly 100-200 sectors full to the brim with custom stars, perhaps a lot more. 😀

This is in fact the whole reason why we think that we have to upgrade to a 3d galaxy. Too many tricks are invloved in faking a 3d galaxy on a 2d plane.

With a proper 3d galaxy, we can literally just use 10s of 1000s of star systems as they are without everything becoming too over-crowded.

We could have Celestia-like accuracy...

Ninja'd, yeah I got the wrong end of the stick. I'll give that some thought.

he suggested to make them visible in the game view (while having the chance to see polaris from london), which a lot have suggested before even, but i guess this goes to far, maybe some ok, and maybe some well known very bright ones to give you a rough orientation (but what about deep space sectors?).

If a 3d galaxy doesn't work out, then we might try something like this. But I do think it would be very aggravating from a players perspective, being able to see stars that look like they are in range, but in fact they are over 10times outside your range 🙂

Edit: Also, the screen would be *very* crowded if you compacted 100 sectors into 1.

Ya I have in fact been thinking about adding in a feature like that. With a true 3d galaxy you would need it. Remember though you don't have to use it.. and I would never make it a requirement to use such a feature...

You mentioned modern RPGs, which is a very good example.... They have all these nice features which are ok, but you cannot play without them... which is very bad. EG.. Oblivion, if you remove the compass that shows you where to go, there is no real way of playing the game as the game has no other means of informing you where something is.

The best idea we have had so far for a true 3d galaxy was Rob's idea, which was to use an isometric style display with all sectors greyed out except the one you have selected. So you would click left, right, up, down, forwards or backwards to move to the next sector. It would help stop overlap.

Oh I see that your talking about something else now. 🙂

So you mean how costly it is to track the stars in a few sectors to update the sky box?... Not costly at all.

For a start to make things easy, we could automatically always track very bright custom stars, (Custom star is a real star) like Polaris or Sirius or any other massive stars.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves 🙂

Edit again: And deepspace sectors... Well did you ever play Noctis? You could fly to the edge of the galaxy there too and you would eventually hit the void 🙂

a few sectors yes, and some well known i guess that's in range, but in the end the background won't change, but well i wonder how such will look.

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like i thought it would have to be a isometric view,

375 - 2000 sectors, goodness that's quite a lot of thickness...

and you like to move in such a map without loosing orientation? good luck commander 😉

i guess most will loose orientation at least 2 sectors from sol (i remember how heavyly i used frontiers printed map in beginning). 😆

i have a idea, how about if the grids color would reflect the z depth in the map, this would mean only a very slight change from sector to sector even if you use the full scale from red to violet, but it could be useful. additionally to a z value, but numbers have no meaning and it's hard to imagine where you are in 3d. give the brain a reference for 3rd dimension and it gets easier, you will feel after some experience, if you are on solar reference plane, or how much above or below.

Well theres a few ideas going around for how we will solve that, one way would be to have a kind of minimap or 3dcompass which always point towards some set landmarks, such as galactic center, Earth and Polaris perhaps, and maybe one or two other giant stars.

Plus you always have your X,Y,Z co-ordinates, so you can always back-track.

Now is the time to voice any ideas though as this is still just theoretical stuff until someone actually codes it 🙂