from previous page...

the mini compass sounds good, i guess it needs only two reference points sol and a free to set one, to many will be confusing or cost overview at least.

the "compass" itself i guess should have a fixed orientation (same as the map view), so two arrows from center pointing to the reference points would give a good idea about where you are, the galacical center is not so important to know for mankind 😉 i mean if you go somewhere in the world how you orient yourself? i'm so and so far from HOME, or HOME is in this direction, or have you ever heard of one using greenwich as reference when he's born in china?. anyway the grid is oriented by it's dimensions.

a hint for all the slartibartfasts out there,

if you setup a distant system like i did for Antares, then you might find it hard to spot the system or to travel there to check the appearance of your planets.

just name the script 00_a_mysystem.lua* and position it in sector 0,0 you will find yourself then in this system instead of sol when you start the game.

note that randomly seeded stuff will change with the sector, all "hard coded" will stay of course.

the system seed together with the systems location will effect the economy type and population of the system, in some locations some economy types are hard to reach or unreachable.

i experienced a pattern in seeding and you can expect that when you have a certain economy type at a given single number, i.e. 4 the chances are high that somewhere between 35 and 45 something similar will be generated this can be exceeded (hit at 43, 420 - 440 and so on).

if you like to find a fitting economy type for your system it has to be placed in it's final location, disable a given "short desc", so you can see on the map it's economy type when you select the system (save a test game with the system selected).

anyway i would use this only in very special cases and leave it else to the economy type, i.e. Barnard's Star - "Federal Prison Camp" as short description, but most systems i would leave it to the economy type that has been generated.

further i would disable all ships except for the eagle and the lanner, as long as you like to check only such a system, this shortens loading time drastically (or use a special slimmed install of pioneer).

* the "00_a_" is important to make shure the script gets handled before 00_sol, of course later you will have to rename it to it's proper name including it's system sector number.

i would appreciate the real coordinates of Antares much (or is it in the parse gliese script allready, no it's to far), maybe some well known other giants that everybody's looking for first. actually i transposed only frontiers coordinates which is not proper (-39.45,+34.95).

and finally i like definately jumping once to Beta Lyrae without crashing the game 😆

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oh yes, Binary systems, ther'e some troubles with it, unlike when you specify a binary system a generated binary system can have a star orbiting in a star (hulls bigger then orbit),

of course only in such exotic cases like Antares.

further it seems to be only possible to setup binary systems where one star orbit's the other, binary systems where stars orbiting each other can only be generated from seed.

A note about the naming of system scripts.

In the Pioneer engine, stars are referenced by a three-digit path containing the X,Y sector location and the system index. The system index is assigned sequentially based on the order the stars are defined (generated and custom). When you save your game, your location is saved in the same way. As such, its imperative that the systems are generated and loaded in the same order in every run of the game.

To ensure this is always the case with custom systems on every platform, the sector number is encoded into the filename. The files are sorted numerically before they're loaded so they always load in the same order. If you do something to change this ordering, then you break save files - its that simple.

The p00/n00 directory structure is there just to break things up, as having hundreds or even thousands of system scripts in the same directory would rapidly become confusing. Those directory names are not used by the game.

You can of course do whatever you like for your own testing, but just be aware of what the names are all about.

You use a reference point that does not move, like the sun. Or at night, the north star...

Same idea in space.

i'm aware (and i hope any other to) of that,

but as long as i can "beam" myself to a distant system, it's a good way to view your work, i tried to reach Antares, well i stopped after two hours of playing...

close systems this isn't important if you can reach them in a few jumps and if it's generated it doesn't matter anyway, you can visit the system once to see what's became of it.

keep also in mind that when you add a new object to a "hard coded" system, you will have to re-enter it to take effect ("old" savegames will halt the game). if you change the position of a starport you will also have to reenter the system to take effect.

so best is save a game before you jumped to your system and one when you arrived, you can check (i guess anybody knows) selected objects with CTRL-F10 and also play around with the seeding for the planets. unfortunately gas giants will loose their proper appearance when you change the seed, but it acts anyway more like a color scheme and you can write down quickly some you've experienced once and re-use the seed for the gas giants anywhere.

you can control the appearance of a starport with the seed (even bigger - smaller, that's nice).

if you change the seed for a planet the cities buildings will be on surface, the starport will have it's old location (above or under), unless you re-enter the system.

if you like to setup a custom system and "build" it yourself, experiment first with the seed for the system until you find one that comes close to the one you've imagined.

you can read it's data and use it in the script, that helps much.

unfortunately economy is only selected by seed, it needs many tries until you got a populated system and even more to get a specific economy or a specific amount of population.

further i can't tell if the seed will be constant in upcoming releases...? so it could be a populated gets "empty".

are you shure about that?

i know what you mean, but these reference points are abstract, humans as subjects use their own location as reference or where they came from (that is what you feel and not what you compute). a reason why we are lost on open sea without a compass and some bright stars to navigate after.

or to compare if i would have a compass on the system map showing me the center of the galaxy that wouldn't help me much to orient me as a human coming from sol, else try to number sectors with the galactical center as 0,0 and i guess it get's allready hard to tell where you are in a planar galaxy.

further the used coordinate system is set by the extensions of the galaxy it's allways easy to tell in which direction the center is (estimated).

what i suggest is something like that

if you like you can use the green arrows as reference for centre, so that if you possibly rotate the map and compass, it will still show the proper reference to centre.

if you like to keep the cube static while you rotate the map, you would have to use a arrow or leave that center, center for god'sake, it's really not important to know i guess (i don't have to tell you how many hours i spent once to evaluate frontiers galaxy centre, but that's another story).

something's wrong...

i had the idea to use this...

...as a orientation help on generated planets to easier locate a new starport ('cause they look stupid in the sea 😉 ).

but the starports are not all in the expected location (???)

"lo_3" and "la_5" arn't where they should be.

i hope this will show what i mean

on top you see la_3 on bottom la_6, la_2 is on the right, while all "latitudal" stations should appear like pearls on a string in this view.

the alps, as they appear in pioneer

i forgot a slight bug, in some systems when you select a target and engage the autopilot the game crashes.

sometimes it crashes while lifting the undercarriage when you leave a starport, next load of a saved game it's ok.

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to the above wrong positioned ports

in this picture la_2 is la: 43° and la_3 la: 56°

in this picture la_2 is la: 42° and la_3 la: 57°

i hope that's somehow helpful

the funny thing is that they are out of position longitudal, while i didn't changed the longitude for "la_" ports

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you see the speed i allready got? and i'm gettin' nowhere.

this star (antares) is so huge when you enter the system you materialise almost inside the star.

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shots do have a mass, this couldn't be the view angle...?

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artist's view to a binary system,

PIONEER can do that better!

ok dan, i'm sidned up to github

gimme a short advice before i mess up all...

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this is how we look at the local sectors when you start a game no?

then tell me how did get van maanen's star to the "right" (2,0)?

🙂 Maybe it likes it there...

Looks like either a problem with the star data or a problem with the script. Gliese 3 star data is pretty new though. And the script isn't likely to be consistent all that time, and fail on one star. Perhaps that is the location of VanMaanan2 in Gliese3.dat, so they just updated its location. Although I have also read that gliese catalogues are not so accurate on their positions of some stars due to the method they use....

The star catalogue used in FFE and Frontier gets a lot of stuff wrong as you will see when we finally get this more modern and more accurate system into the game.

Your windows, so the easiest way for you is to download TortoiseGIT. Adds simple right click context sensitive menus to the windows interface so you can use GITs features.

Right click on a folder, choose Git Clone, then add in your details for the fork that you wish to clone, this is either Robs main branch or the fork you already made of that on the website.

Let it do its thing, make your changes... Right click -> Commit to save changes into your fork, then Push to send them to the GitHub website.

Note, if you add in new files, you will have to include them manually by ticking a box next to the name when you Commit the changes.

yes, it can be helpful to compare different sources.

i know, checking all data would be impossible, but well the ones we know well and stay close should be accurate, more exotic systems won't matter because no one will suspect.

but i swear Steve would be one of the first who argues "but this isn't the proper location...", some frontierheads have very huge astronomical knowledge.

no one will know, except by browsing throgh databases, where Gliese nnnn is, but Spica you will look for even when it's very to far to reach.

To be honest I never actually checked that these attributes did the right thing. The were named "latitude" and "longitude" in the old custom systems setup, so I just brought them across. I've made a note to check the maths sometime soon.

Currently when you hyperspace into a system Pioneer places you somewhere between 5 and 6 AU of the target body (usually the star). It should be smarter about this - it should take size and position of the system bodies into account to make sure that you're in clear space not too close to anything.

How is this star defined?

This is a reply to the discussion earlier about having 1500+ stars displayed, perhaps enough to simulate the Milky Way without using the current "ribbon". I doubt that we could plot enough stars to simulate the galaxy without slowing my old computer to a crawl. You guys have probably already had these thoughts but a static background image seems essential. First of all I'm thinking that the ribbon should be replaced with an actual whole sky image. This view would remain essentially the same at whatever system we're likely to visit in Pioneer. The 1500+ local stars would be calculated at start up and drawn on top of the sky image and saved to a temporary sky image that would be used in the game. When jumping to another system we have a countdown to calculate to jump. This time could be used to actually calculate the jump. Take the starting point of each local star, "A" calculate the place it where will be at the end of the jump, "B" and draw a line from A to B to get the star streaky effect. Draw the stars at B on top of the sky image and save it as the current temporary background image. It may not be as dramatic as the current effect, 8LY isn't very far really, but it would be realistic. Maybe a blue/red color shift would make it look cool. If the stars are actually plotted you could do cool things like show how the constellations are distorted when you are away from Earth, etc.

Just my ideas for what it's worth because I can't actually do any of this. 🙂

I personally think that "realistic" background stars is a bit of a fools errand, but thats just me, and I'm not likely to argue if consensus goes the other way (particularly if working code is produced).

The last post does bring up the interesting question of what hyperspace actually is. Pioneer star "streak" effect currently makes it look like some kind of super-fast real-space mechanism (a bit like Star Trek I guess). FFE looked a bit more like a tunnel between two points in space (it looked rather like the Stargate travel effect). I honestly can't remember if Frontier proper was any different.

We can look to other TV sci-fi for inspiration. Hyperspace has often been depicted as a kind of "alternate"-space which has normal physics internally (eg Babylon 5). There's others of course - the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica was a kind of instantaneous "blip", where you disappeared from one place and reappear in another. The cost came from the complex calculations required.

I've always assumed that Frontier (and perhaps even Elite) was always meant to be a bit like the Babylon 5 mechanism. Witch-space amounts to something like battles in hyperspace. Mis-jumps can be accounted for by screwing up and leaving in the wrong place. The idea that it takes some significant amount of time to travel works there too.

I don't know if we need to think about what kind of interactions can occur in hyperspace. If its a real-space mechanism, is it possible to be pulled out or attacked? If its an alternate space, can interactions happen there? If you're entirely isolated, then where are you?

Oh, and I can't help feeling that "jumpgate" type mechanisms might be interesting for making deep-space trade/exploration feasible. That might be another discussion though.

That point is a good one. What the game - as did Frontier - is lacking is a feeling for distances. It just doesn't feel like a trip into deep space at all when you just hit the hyperspace button, choose the next target and hit the button again. jump gates could help, i actually like the way freelancer did it. Sometimes it was incredibly exiting to get to the gate with the whole cargo filled with illegal goods and the fear of getting disrupted by pirates in mind.

This was something I really missed in Frontier. In the original Elite there was always the chance you could get "mugged" by the Thargoids and I think you are spot on with the Babylon 5 comparison. You did tunnel through space. In Frontier the tunnel was even blue and red shifted depending on your point of view. Example, facing forward you see a blue hyperspace cloud, facing backwards you see a red one (or rather an orange one in Frontier) during the jump.

I think they might be useful for small ships that have limited range, but should charge the player for using them. To put them everywhere (like in Freelancer), in my opinion, would detract from the the fact that hyperdrives are available for sale. So why would you use jumpgates? Think of it this way. Why would you use a bus to get around while you have a car sitting in your garage?

I do agree though that some sense of distance needs to be incorporated into the game. Perhaps there could be a different hyperspace effect for differing lengths of jumps, for example really long jumps, the effect lasts a bit longer as your engines gather the energy required for such a far distance. Just my thoughts 😉

Yes! Thank you for the reminder - its been years and I had completely forgotten.

I commute via bus five days a week. I take it because its cheaper than my car and ends up being faster in peak-hour because it gets priority lanes. The downside is that I can't change my departure time or destination on a whim, and I can only carry what I can fit in my bag. Its interesting to consider how those things might factor into gameplay.

If we made it so that hyperspace carried risks and costs, then a jumpgate system could exist to reduce those risks. Borrowing from Babylon 5 again, lets say that small ships aren't big enough to carry a hyperdrive and/or aren't powerful enough to generate the energy required. They have to use jumpgates, which limits them to the well-established and well-protected routes. Profits are lower, but so is the risk. Its like the Sol-Barnard's Star run 🙂

Larger ships can get themselves in and out of hyperspace, so they can go exploring/mining or just reach the far-flung colonies that don't have a jumpgate yet. There's greater risk of attack (in or out of hyperspace), greater chance of mis-jumps (imagine shipping lanes in hyperspace for the jumpgate routes) and so on.

Missions could add/remove jumpgates to systems much in the same way that they'll be able to add/remove space stations and other planetary bodies (something I'm working towards). And I can already envision the difficulty of a recon/bombing mission that requires a small, fast craft against a secret or remote base that doesn't have a jumpgate nearby. Then you either have to do it in a large ship that isn't suitable (higher risk) or we need to be able to jump into the system in a large ship and then deploy a fighter to do the grunt work.

Something like this would be a pretty significant departure from the traditional Frontier setup. That's not a bad thing necessarily, but we must be careful. So far we're mostly just implementing a design that has been long established and understood. We're talking about add mechanics that require everything to be checked and rebalanced. We'd be proper game designers 😎

"mist"

i lost a article, because i logged out meanwhile. 😉

any way short the specs for antares, all the rest i wrote i forgot (no, i remember now some hyperspace, jumpgate stuff).

this will end up in a populated binary system, but the masses and radie of the stars arn't correct of course. furthert it should be a spectral type B, but that's to large for the requested system and offers no (or rarely) populated systems.

the main star should have a mass of 15 solar masses and 820 solar radie, Antares B should have, as i found out now, 7 solar masses and 4 solar radie (prev. i used a generated value and the planets in the scripted system reflect this, so i i'll have to update them).

true binary systems seems not to be possible scripted?

so if you use the above you will feel the giant star when entering the system (3.8 AU!).

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to the hyperspace,

short, i like the limited range, it's important to keep limit's else the game looses fun.

remember in frontier you never found the ideal ship, this keeps you buying new ones even if you not like to.

i love my conny, but i like to dig for ore to, so i have to buy a different ship to deploy mb4's.

if i could folow any ship through hyperspace with a courier i wouldn't buy a different one for assasinations, but the courier is to lame for a python sometimes.

so you need a fighter with a good range for assasinations.

what would be the fun if i obtain a LYNX and i could go any system i wouldn't have to SEARCH for a trading route.

i can imagine some jumpgates, but not to many, only to connect distant sectors in the galaxy, not system to system, this would kill the fun to.

even i can imagine linked drives, but they should be unpredictable.

experienced frontier pilots know that you won't go really far in a common gameplay.

even when i travelled half of the galaxy (wormhole bug, next service in 1000 years), but that was for fun and no real "career".

something like the wormehole bug i can imagine to, it was limited (you can't follow a ship through hyperspace) and additionally it gave you something to do.

it was another reason to make notes, notes for trading routes, notes for wormhole routes, my whole desk was filled with notes from frontier... 😆

some hyperspace theory

let's suggest hyperspace has no or only a single dimension.

you use this fact by leaving the common 4 dimensional space to this quasi 0 dimensional "space".

you will have to set "course" and or time* in normal space, longer travels will have a big fuzziness.

just to explain why i like the "small" range and why it's reasonable.

*very basic idea, time set's course in hyperspace, based on the imagination that when you leave the 4 dimensions, the dimensions will "flow" while you "stay".

Couldn't agree more. Everyone seems to have totally misunderstood what I was talking about.

We have 1500 custom stars, thats it! I am not doing anything magical with them. 🙂 I misunderstood them, they misunderstood me, Oh don't you just love the internet....

Interesting conversations on hyperspace. I have many ideas to this effect myself.

My ideal solution would be thus; A starTrek like system, which enables massive speeds without having to leave normal space.. this is good because it gives you... *drum-roll* seamless flight between systems, and real deep space 🙂

One of my Pioneer-Dreams is seamless flights between systems... Just like what Artlav has accomplished with spaceway. Frontier shocked the world by having seamless flights between planets.... :O We could go one step further, and we should...

Stargates... a big yes and a big no... Like you said Rob its something that has to be done right. Infinity quest for earth has done this pretty well in its design documents. Basically the big worlds should be linked, but no more... perhaps there are also some secret military gates linking some very remote sections of the galaxy. I would also think it pretty cool to have a handful of in-system gates for the big worlds.

@P66 There are loads of binary, trinary and quadruple systems in the game, what makes you think you cant add them.....? 😉

The stars revolve around a GRAV POINT, not each other.... thats the trick to adding them.

So your fist 'star' should be a grav point, then your main stars orbit that gravpoint. Everything else is normal. " TYPE_GRAVPOINT " although that syntax is now different but you should be able to work that out from that.

Also note that you are potentially wasting your time 😉 Because once I am back in coding mode, these star catalogues I have been blathering on about are going in.

But don't worry, once they are in there will be lots of work for you to do, they will all need nice seeds added, and some data will need correcting. Basically everything will have to look 'nice' 🙂

I remember pausing the game in the middle of a hyperspace jump. The clock didn't stop, but slowed down to real time. I never had the patience to leave my computer on for a week to see what would happen. 😆 Hyperspace clouds were the ends of the tunnel. It seemed consistent. I didn't much like FFE's effect where you were "going plaid".

Pioneer's effect seems to be inspired by the view from the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. I like it a lot but how does it relate to hyperspace clouds? Showing the stars actually shifting around you could give a feeling of distance traveled, perhaps with a blue/red color shift tunnel, with a duration related to the distance of the jump. Maybe .5ly/sec. would do.

As for jumpgates, it's an idea I rather like, but the Babylon 5 model would make jump drives only available to larger ships. An Eagle for example would be too small to carry one of those. Of course that was back in the 2260s and we're in the 3200s with more advanced tech. 😉 It would mean that you'd start out following established trade routes until you could afford a bigger ship. If the gates were placed 10au or so from the star(s) you'd still have Elite style gameplay when you entered a system. Some could be safe and patrolled, and some could be sketchy and dangerous where pirates are waiting for you. But as Geraldine said why use jumpgates if every ship can jump on its own?

Just had an amusing idea about hyperspace. You could enter it like in Babylon 5 and the alternate physics in there would be like the physics in the original Elite! If you turned off your engine you'd stop, banking for turns, etc. 😆

Right... the reason that the star is way too big is that pioneer isn't really set to use Supergiants or Hypergiants yet... the stars that are the size of an entire solar systyem... I did add those in a while back but it was a seperate branch with too many other changes so was never integrated(The volume branch, you probably remember that). For now, let Pioneer decide the mass/radius and later when code is added to account for this stuff you can change it back to the correct values.

Second... here's some co-ordinates for you to use for Antares. They are the correct co-ordinates, so you will have to flip them round to fit with pioneer.:

X:177.1, Y:-25, Z:48.1 Those values are in parsecs. 🙂 Distance : 185.2 -> 604 LY

i don't live behind the moon, only in switzerland

what do you think i didn't tried to?

i try everything (almost).

GRAVPOINT isn't available yet (i should have noted that, but you can see also on robs lua constants used for custom systems), i guess rob will fix that for shure.

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i can't say i misunderstood anybody, but well might be because i'm not native english speaking so i have to read more attentive.

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do i misunderstood you now? 😆

no the stars aren't to big if generated, i would say to small compared to real Antares A,

the only TO BIG is the spectral type B it occupies together with the red super giant the whole screen in system info.

further it ends up in a star which is possibly to big compared to real Antares B and worst of all i cant get the system populated with this combination (just to settle some cities brings no population, seed, temp. life and atmosphere influence this).

so i chose a type A instead of B which generated size will be in a realistic range for Antares B.

after all it makes it only easier to setup a completely scripted system if you have something generated that comes close to what you suggested.

e.g. i don't have to think about which surface temperature on which distance and all the rest, i just copy that from a seeded system with a star similar to the one i like to get.

but i will see if i find something useful with a type B i will use it, main problem is i can't read data of planets that didn't appear on the system info screen.

thanks for the coordinates i will see, it's really far off hm? i know about 600ly.

some facing north, some south, for some width is length, i guess there is no common system behind cartesian coordinates for the galaxy, everybodys doing it's own.

some look from the outside while others look from the inside of the "model". fortunately all use sol as 0,0, but that's all. 😉

I'm looking at code for gravpoint right here In CustomSystem.cpp line 79.

Calm down, only trying to lend a hand 🙂