Uncle Bob mentioned that and posted the link so they shoud be in next time.

Hmm that sounds to me like you bought yourself a regular shield and didnt know that they have a graphic 🙂 Always have as far as I know. I find it distracting so I always use time accel when I get one so it charges, the graphic goes when its charged.

If you go and shoot some baddies and you should see their shield change colour as you blast them.

If it's where it's supposed to be, it should be pretty simple to find... but a looooong way from home. 😕

Oh, thanks. Now it makes sense. 😳

Of course... but where is earth in relation to that...? If you look in the code you will see its a doddle to find it, but *they* don't know that ;).. The player will know from the galactic overview map that Earth is right of center, but how much is it to the right of center? And is it north or south of center? ... ect ect....

While I know these answers and you probably do to, the average player won't know the precise location, only that its 'that-a way' :). Anyway thats what I was aiming at and the fact that even if you do know where it is, you wont ever see it without cheating.

Rest assured that I haven't hidden the blackhole away somewhere... it will be in the only place it can realistically exist. 😉

As for Stellar Blackholes, they are a different matter, they should populate the galaxy like stars however they are of course rarer than any star. So would be very difficult to find.

at least according to current stellar evolution theories, "common" black holes should be a lot more frequent than high-mass stars (60 solar masses upwards, the really big boys), because all of them should leave a black hole behind at the end of their lifecycle, which at those masses is barely a few million years long. And since there undoubtedly have been more around of them since the beginning of the milkyway than are around currently, that should result in a pretty "high" black hole density (since there's maybe about 6.7e-5 percent of stars that massive, it still shouldn't be more than a few hundred thousand, though).

Here's what I added into the game, if you know a more correct naming system and/or statistics I would welcome that:

Stellar Black holes 0.2 Solar Masses to 20.0 SM. Radius is around 10 - 40KM

Intermediate mass Blackholes 1,000SM - 20,000SM. Radius around the size of earth.

Supermassive Black Hole 100,000,000SM - 20,000,000,000,000 (although this isn't used as there is only one super massive black hole and it will most porbably be added manually by hand.)

Although the only ones so far that are actually in galaxy generation are the small stellar black holes, as I'm unsure about the Intermediate mass ones.

The only thing I can say without further research is that barely any star will leave behind 20 solar masses to form a black hole. Black holes formed by supernovae are expected to be significantly below 10 solar masses, as far as I know, since most of the star material goes off flying through the galaxy...

Thats what I have read too, and this mainly applies to the 'Stellar Blackoles'

However the Intermediate-mass Blackholes are in fact billions of years old, and probably started out as a regular blackhole, but then they got hungry 😉 They are the class in between a supermassive blackhole and a regular collapsed star blackhole.

So a blackhole like that would have been gorging itself on the galaxy's stars for many billions of years, ever growing.

However I'm unsure if we would even have one of those types in our galaxy.

Isn't there a theory that super massive black holes exist at the heart of most, if not all, galaxies and may in fact be essential to their creation?

That is what is currently believed yes but it is un-proven that every galaxy has one, although we can see evidence of them in many galaxies. We also have no direct proof that there is a supermassive blackhole in our galaxy, however we do know that right at the center there is an extremely massive amount of mass (millions of solar masses) within around .2 LY or something, although those figures might be incorrect they are from memory.

So that would seem to indicate that there is one in our galaxy.

Thought I would check those values just in case, here we go:

Anyway, I find them fascinating 🙂 Mathematically they allow all kinds of crazy things to happen, however the reality is probably that our maths is not up to scratch, and that they are really just big black balls of death and the end of all things. Or perhaps when the universe is finally eaten by the MOTHER of all black holes, then it will just start again in another big bang.

i have try to use the fuel scoop-but i failed

how to use the fuel scoop?

in theory the fuel scoop u go thro a gas giant atmosphere and maybe its not in the game yet but u would activate it at a certain range from the planet and scoop up atmospheric gases ( hydrogen for the most part)

I successfully used a fuel scoop at Jupiter using a Viper in alpha 7.5. Assuming you bought one and atmospheric shielding and have cargo space available, 😉 , skim the upper atmosphere at a pressure near 1.0 at 40kps or less. Watch your hull temperature and be careful about overheating.

will be different based on size of atmosphere , planet/ gas giant etc.

Down the track how about robotic mining ships u can deploy that u can tag in space jump off somewhere else and come back to and collect materials

Could be useful for pirates or those maintaining their own player colony far out and needing mid point fuelling points to ge tmateirals in and out

Thought I's share this comment I found in this link from the mini-chat.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/01 ... cancelled/

That sounds like Pioneer 2.0! 😆

sounds like yes what pioneer can acehieve long term the progress to date just about exceeds elite 3

Here's an early attempt at a better Earth:

[attachment=490:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-30 23-50-59-12.jpg]

Its basically just a new colour scheme for the terran world terrains that is more sensitive to height.

That looks nice. Another problem with earth is it uses a limited resolution earth heightmap (and the next resolution up that I had was 25mb and I couldn't justify that - nor would it provide enough resolution). I couldn't find a fractal to modify the heightmap with that would retain the essential terrain details (ie keep the highlands of scotland rugged and norfolk flat).

Perhaps feeding the heightmap point's normal to the fractal as a roughness value would be some use.

Thanks, I actually have some half-decent height-maps that can be manipulated by photoshop into various sizes, but I had trouble converting them into the required format.

If its of any use I can send them to you.

Edit// Ah, nevermind If I understand your post correctly they would be of no use anyway.

Edit2..

This might work, if you can find a way to apply terrain settings to a planet after it has the heightmap loaded, then we could fake a nice looking earth using the fractal mountains and such tied directly into teh height of the map, I'm sure it could work, using a similar idea that I used to make the new colur scheme.

See the last line of the function double GeoSphereStyle::GetHeightMapVal(const vector3d &pt):

return (v<0 ? 0 : v + 100*octavenoise(10, 0.5, 2.0, 1000.0*pt));

This applies a sortof crap rolling hills perlin thing to the filtered height map value. You can replace this with a height map fractal of your choice. The trick is making it in keeping with the height map itself while adding useful detail (or masking the lack of detail...)

I have just tried to alter the part you suggested, but its harder than I thought to get the effect I was thinking of.

I assumed that double = v is to do with the height value, but using that I was unable to change the noise values based on height... Like Noisy mountains but less noise around the coast and low lands.

It's Earth Jim, but not as we know it.

[attachment=494:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-31 05-52-53-68.jpg]

[attachment=495:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-31 05-52-12-80.jpg]

I was quite pleased with that. Thanks Tom for pointing me in the right direction.

I can't follow your technical discussion, but I can certainly appreciate the results! 😀

🙂

Still needs a bit of tweaking but it turned out better than I thought it would.

Here's some more pics just for fun:

[attachment=496:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-31 06-23-25-90.jpg]

[attachment=497:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-01-31 06-10-04-02.jpg]

Is that first pic the result of global warming? Seriously, you've got the terrain looking plausible. Nice work!