ok so the new system limits the size of the human empire to about 750au tops with the outside chance of outside colony areas. Any um ideas for how to use the rest of the galaxy. Or will ti remain a dead abrren unexplored landscape until colony expansion can be put in in some form

Its on 'the list' 😉 Basically as soon as I stumble on this section in the mammoth amounts of code, then I will change it as its something that I find annoying too... Although I still have to check with Tom if this was in fact intentional or was a bug.

And btw, its an old bug/thing from way before Alpha 7, in fact it might be in all the alphas.

Don't think anyone is working on it, but be patient and it will come.

Believe me, someone will add this.

Once I have worked my way through Tom's list of needed changes, then I will have a try at adding that if someone else hasn't already.

For now theres not going to be much out there except the occasional colony. But there will be other reasons to go off exploring.... The Giant stars will see to that, give people a reason to go off and find them as there aren't going to be many Hyper-Giants in the galaxy at all.

Can someone turn the heating down?

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades 😎

Don't forget the suntan oil.

dude, seriously. i can't wait for the next alpha. this is going to be epic.

🙂

Its pretty unlikely anyone will ever see a system like this again, so I'll post itpioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-09 20-59-41-11.jpg]

It's 2 type O giant stars, these were the one giant star type already present in the game. So theoretically there exists a system like this on the version you are using.

I haven't flown there because its a little too far for my piddly little engines 🙂

Here's a terraformed colony around a Hypergiant or supergiant, they are using the same graphic so I can't recall which one it was.

Its also an unknown system which is colonised, so I must have jumped the gun on anouncing that I had prevented colonies popping up everywhere.

[attachment=395:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-09 20-44-50-24.jpg]

What kind of effect does an unexplored system have on the game so far? Is it basically just a system without a name or does the system info screen show no information before you actually arrive there? just asking what we can look forward to in the next alpha 😉

Its just the same as its always been, theres just more unexplored space now.

It simply means that no-one has officially been there. You can still see what planets moons and stars are there.

I haven't changed anything like that, all I attempted to change was human colonies appearing everywhere

But it seems that it didn't work, as all that was changed was the name of the colony type to unexplored instead of say Farming Colony.

It needs to be changed so population is also limited to range, then the planets shoud not be colonised.

Edit//

I've fixed that now, so you now won't get colonies throughout the galaxy, but there wil be the occasional rare one.

Lots of new giant star types, red, blue, yellow, white, giant, super-giant and hyper-giant, as well as various classes.

Radius on colonised space.

Tweaks to ships and the volume stuff.

A few bugfixes and more tweaks to various things.

Saturn that looks like Saturn and a moon for Earth that looks like the moon.

Probably other stuff too.

Probably some new ships.

Finally a moon thats the right colourpioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-10 01-05-00-28.jpg]

Edit2//

Here's another little change, see if you can tell what it ispioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-10 02-34-34-93.jpg]

the moons are looking ok. From that screenshot its more realistic looking.

As far as the population spread the odd colony out beyond the colonization range seems reasonable ( then again unknown groups settling the fringe to escape whatever works to) and given the average jump drive can do a fair range 750 light years seems about right

Here's a trinary system I found with 2 red hyper-giants and 1 red giant, the 2 hyper giants are literally stuck inside each other (contact binary 😉 ) with the red giant orbiting around them both:

[attachment=400:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-10 03-14-58-32.jpg]

As you can see the system info can't handle things like this, it will need some tweakingpioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-10 03-15-46-47.jpg]

so a smaller graphic or more of a complete layout redesign. Moving away from the original FFE2 graphics could work to. What about a zoomeable star on the info screen for larger stars

Looks like you can identify systems with giant stars on the galaxy map 🙂

giant stars on map now identifable good stuff

🙂 Makes finding the stars much easier. In fact all stars now have different scales on the sector map and not just the big ones.

Another little change I made last night was to give all planets and stars a half-decent random generation of radius, instead of all bodies of one type being the same radius.

EG, before, all planets that were terran were all the same radius as earth, no matter what. And all K type stars were all the same ect ect.

But now a random radius is generated for each body on system generation using min and max values from wiki, and some values out of my arse.

At the moment there is no correlation between mass and radius, however this will change in the future once I link the systems up.

Brown dwarf type substellar objects that orbit a star will now have the correct temperatures.

Awesome! That was something that I had noticed before (that there were only a small number of different radii in the smaller planets), and I figured it was some sort of limitation in the ways the planets were generated. One of my favourite parts of Pioneer is just seeing what kinds of systems crop up. This, combined with the new star types (among other things) should make things far more dynamic.

Things have gotten far more sophisticated than a couple of alphas ago when rocky planets were just solid colours with round and bean-shaped craters. I hope we get to see even more new types of topographies/colour schemes in planets in the future. The "dead world" type of planet is an absolute masterpiece.

Thanks 🙂

I have been planning to overhaul the planets again, its just that other stuff gets in the way, and there will be a lot of boring work involved in doing that. 🙄

The plan that I have is to further seperate the current worlds up even more, so there would be several types of dead worlds and several types of terran worlds with different descriptions and slightly different graphics.

It wouldn't look much different to how it looks now, but if a planet were to have a volcano it should say in the description, or if it has other features like lots of mountains or no mountains or whatever. Thats what I will try to add.

Aha! I wonder if your favourite ship in Frontier was a Moray Starboat?

But yes water would be good, as would lava (active volcanism), snow, rain and dynamic clouds. If Pioneer had those, it would be great, but I guess I have more chance of seeing giant sandworms....... <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

There will only be one of these, who's gonna find it first?

[attachment=407:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-11 22-27-30-17.jpg]

Pioneer accepts heightmaps which when combined with a decent colour for the terrain would be nearly as good as high resolution textures. The only one is for earth, but the heightmap is not a large one and the colours for earth would need a bit of tweaking.

I have some heightmaps that can be used in Pioneer for earth, moon and mars but have no way of converting them to pioneer's format.

I also wanted to make some heightmaps for some other custom worlds other than in sol but have held off on that until I know how to get them in the game.

... is not likely to return

since any movement in this system knows just one direction, i guess immediate departure via hyperspace is the key to survice, right? 😆

black hole survival

Yes flying there would probably mean certain death 🙂

I have flown around the smaller version of the blackholes the Intermediate-mass black holes and its just about possible, but really we would need a pro-grade and retro-grade option on the autopilot so you can point in the correct direction and use time acceleration to increase or decrease your orbit.

Regarding water, i think that's doable. It could be tied in with the atmosphere of the planet. Below a certain level the atmosphere becomes much more viscous. Think about a gas giant. The lower you go, the thicker and mushier the atmosphere becomes. On a water world there would be a sea level boundary beneath which you would enter a buoyant fluid environment. The sea floor would be determined by the planet's topography. A Moray Starboat could take you to underwater bases!

Water would really finish of the views from space of some of the planets, they would look breathtaking.

Here's an example how the interface changes look in-game and of being pulled into a super-massive black hole: