wow a lots gone on since i was last here ........great job .......on another note i realy wanted to help with this project but my wrestling game (of witch i am a developer now) has realy taken hold lol

Toying around with sunspots:

My, what a sunny disposition! 😀

For your next challenge, remember that stars rotate more rapidly at the equator, and that sunspots are the reason that we know that. Oh yes, and your 11 years cycle could be extrapolated to other stars... (-:

u could aim high for gas flows around the sun to move in real time

Challenge accepted 😉 I have an idea how that might work, if we just stretch the X axis wrt noise inversely with the Y axis, there's something similar for streaky patterns on some of the gas-giants.

Ae_ from IRC is actually working on this 😉 But its a long way off...

Once we have working shader-based animated fractals it opens up the possibility of other things too.. Clouds, auroras ect

The future looks bright! 😀

indeeed it does lol 😀

ok ..just had a play with alpha 15 (sterling work chaps) and i was wondering somthing

mars has been terraformed right, so obviously it has water now

but whenever i look at mars it just looks ......well.....wrong,

(apologies i dont know how to make images smaller)

from what i see the water on mars is concentrated round the south pole .....if we were to terraform mars this wouldnt be the case in my opinion, see this map .....the northern hemisphere is primarily lowland ......and the southern hemisphere is primerily heavily cratered highland, so wouldnt it be more realistic to have the ocean to the north with an ice sea north pole and a cold south pole

of course ...this means that cydonia would be underwater but hell ...its not like the face is anything significant enough to be modeled on the planet .....and if it was and mars was terraformed in real life they would just move whatever it was like they did to the temple at abu simbel when they built the aswan dam in egypt

just a suggestion ......im not astickler for accuracy and i apologise if this has been covered elsewhere ......but i at least think that if the game can accuratly map earth than at least all the planets in our own solar system should be too, .......hell we could even have the dwarf planets represented ....(no ceres ..wtf)

i wish a plugin for celestia existed that allowed pioneer to use celestia to accuratly map everything we know but that is an advancement for pioneer alpha 200 or somthing lol

all im wandering is could we at least map our neck of the woods correctly (again apologies if this has been covered ..i dont know how terrain mapping works in the game its just as i say ..if earth looks semi accurate , why not mars ect)

Because there are far more important things to be done first.

The actual reason is that nobody has yet obtained free heightmaps for Mars and the Moon, and integrated them into the game. Until then, these bodies will remain "wrong".

Would these be of any use Brianetta?

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/spacear ... lmaps.html

Actually I have several free heightmaps for Mars, as does Ae from IRC. And they have been implemented in the past but as Durandal mentioned, there are more important things to be getting on with and likely one day Mars will use a proper heightmap.

There are issues with using a heightmap with quality, but I suppose we have faked a lot with Earth so it can be done.

There are also space considerations, and in the past Tomm had told me he did not want to use more heightmaps precisely because of that, but this was before we had music and silly amounts of large textures, so now the size of a heightmap would have less of an impact...

Edit// What I mean is they have been tested to work, its just really no-one can decide what we should do 🙂

No idea. "And integrated" were the operative words. Despite the business of the devs, I doubt that they're too busy to test somebody else's work.

any lurkers have any thoghts on mars hightmaps - i would think at some point it might be a idea to include-incorparate in some fashion

i apologise for my comment but im not actualy a lurker ....i have been pitching ideas to this thread since it was created i just dont come on often as i have been busy being a developer on a wrestling game (long story but i wont bore you with my scars for more info just go to mpire mall look for tony spike)

i have also offered to help by trying to create some ship blueprints ..but thats got sidetracked because im actualy learning how to modle them whilst simoultaniously trying to model arenas,

long story short im on a learning curve here with every intention of using my skills to try and help .....now i understand thast accurate hightmaps on mars is not an important issue ...i was just asking why they hadnt been implimented ......now i have my anser i understand and im now going to try and think of a solution if i may be allowed ....their must be some way of doing it if earth got done was my logical assuption .....sorry bout that

i am going to offer my services as a skin artist though (no i dont mean as a tatooist lol)..........here is my card

apolagies for it being wrestling but its the only CV i have lol

im not looking for a position on dev team or trying to step on anyones toes ....im just saying i specialise in 2d stuff ...be it planet maps for the stelllar cartography part of the game or just menus ..menu backgrounds ..or ship skins ....im happy to whip somthing up since i will be round more often now ......

back to the planet map problen cos i have just thought of somthing ......what about using maps from celestia or somthing like that ...their are plenty of mods out their for that that are free ...im sure i found terraformed mars.......just a suggestion i woild like to throw out their

That looks really good Spike! If you want my advice fwiw, find something that needs doing that interests you and start working on it. Ask questions if you need to. That's what I do anyway. We're all friends here, so please, put - down - the - gun. 😆

lol .....technicaly thats what im doing ......both space and wrestling intrests me (especialy frontier) .....im just saying im already busy on one of my hobbies but if anyone needs me for the other one im going to be round here a lot more often nowadays .....TWC5 is well underway ....and i can tell you i know games development can be a pain in the arse from experiance (im lead TWC5 coordinator of all things) so i appreciate the effort that is going into this thing and i would love to help this thing in any way i can so ....if that means making things pretty (not saying they arnt im just saying its what i do) .....than give me a shout ..im here all year lol

fantistic effort though so far chaps i have to say .......somtimes its easy to get in way over your head with adding new features to a game but you guys are doing a fine job

Say, I just now realised that you guys were looking for heightmaps for mars and moon. Here are some for Orbiters terrain generator (it's pretty much a .raw format, if I'm not mistaken). I'm sure Artlav will let you use them:

http://orbides.1gb.ru/orulex.php

trying to add 1 ceres and 2 vesta to the solar system to try and get to grips with the lua code and be a bit useful

im gonna doing this for all the systems in frontier ........its mainly for my own satisfaction .....and i know their are guys working on this already so this is just plainly for my own satisfaction .........but i will post them if people want them

so heres the code im using for ceres ......its mercurys code .....what im wandering is ..how would i convert ceres actual data (on wikipedia) to the numbers on here

local mercury = CustomSBody:new('1 Ceres', 'PLANET_TERRESTRIAL')

:seed(1900) : dontknow what this value is for but its for the moon

:radius(f(38,100))

:mass(f(55,1000))

:temp(340)

:semi_major_axis(f(387,1000))

:eccentricity(f(205,1000))

:inclination(math.deg2rad(7.0))

:rotation_period(f(59,1))

:axial_tilt(math.fixed.deg2rad(f(1,100)))

:metallicity(f(9,10))

:volcanicity(f(1,2))

:atmos_density(f(0,1))

:atmos_oxidizing(f(0,1))

:ocean_cover(f(0,1))

:ice_cover(f(2,100))

:life(f(0,1))

once i get the hang of deciding how far out a body should be .....(most of the data is already in frontier for me to copy) i will be adding the systems of interest from the gazetteer and obviously all the well known systems (beetlegeuse, sirius, proxima,rigel kentaurus ect)

hey, sorry I forgot about this question 🙂 Heres what the values mean:

:seed(1900) - A number used in the creation of all random numbers this planet uses(It changes everything)

:radius(f(38,100)) : 0.38 Earth Radii

:mass(f(55,1000)) 0.055 Earth Masses

:temp(340) 340 Kelvin

:semi_major_axis(f(387,1000)) Average orbitral distance.. hmm shit I forget what the units here are.. Ah scratch that Im pretty sure its in AUs

:eccentricity(f(205,1000)) Higher values give a more eliptical orbit

:inclination(math.deg2rad(7.0)) the bodies inclination, how much it is on its side. Or infact that may be Axial tit, one is how much on its side the object is, the other is how far off the eliptical plane the objects orbit is.

:rotation_period(f(59,1)) How long it takes to rotate/spin in days I think

The rest are self-explanatory.

To find the number in Fixed() terms, just divide the first by the second:

:ice_cover(f(2,100)) = 0.02

:metallicity(f(9,10)) = 0.9 ect ect

We have them all. Please note that its likely any randomly created systems will not be included, we use a real starmap so there is no need to make stars up. FYI FFE and Frontier had wildly inaccurate starmaps, we aren't following that route 😉

EDIT/// just to clarify, there's absolutely nothing wrong with giving already existing systems interesting features, But I got the impression you were looking to create starsystems that aren't there. Which is the wrong way to go about it as the majority of stars are all included, its just that they are now in their correct places. (3d vs 2d)

The custom system format is documented here: https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pion ... om-Systems

There is work underway to allow "partial" custom systems. You'll be able to take a real star and its auto-generated planets, and just add a couple of starports, or a planet, or whatever. Right now its an all-or-nothing prospect, which is difficult.

Here's something I've been working on alongside Ae_ :

Very very cool, or should I say hot! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_cool.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='8-)' /> With your usual attention to detail s2odan the future of Pioneer is written in the stars <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' /> Could you do something similar for cloud layers on planets?

That's one of its use cases!