You're doing it wrong! you need to be staring in a mirror at midnight while saying his name 762 times to evoke the bean.

Metalic surfaces sound like a good way to cover the structures. Then even extremely low res textures would look good, especially if they had illuminated windows using glowmaps. They could look really cool at night when making your final approach 🙂 I might be able to give a hand with that if needed. I'm no expert but I've played around with glowmaps a bit before for a fallout 3 mod.

edit: i meant for the starports, but the same might also apply for planet textures if you can get that working.

I have a vague, general idea. There's an example in pimodles.lua of an object moving around in a circle. There's also the example of a spacecraft docking in a station. I've been thinking about animated objects inside a station, but I'm sure that traffic around ground stations will be possible as well. 😀

Something I want to do at some point is a Lua-based animation system. Its not so different from the station docking animation in concept, just more generalised. The idea is that you'd define a set of waypoints and then instruct a ship or other object to follow them. The script would receive callbacks at the waypoints to take actions. I have two particular use cases in mind: police patrols, and an intro movie. There's no reason such a system couldn't be made generic enough to support vehicles in cities and so forth. Of course no work has been done on this so far; in fact I've barely even thought much further than what I described there.

Multi point missions now thats a good idea for the lua system sounds like its coming along nicley ( same could be done for mining missions on xyz planets) perhaps for pirate bases u could go out and hunt targets in certain sectors of heavy shipping and bring loot back to a pirate base ( later on this in turn could raise a criminality index in a system esp if youre an outlaw ) well down the track of course

I like modular cities as an idea. At the moment, buildings are literally strewn all over the landscape, somewhat like Lego bricks on a child's bedroom floor. Houses half-way up mountainsides.

If anyone is familiar with Microsoft Flight Simulator X, the way the buildings are positioned relative to each other seems to be quite realistic:

Buildings only appear on terrain that is realistically flat enough for building on (i.e. not more than about 10 degrees from horizontal), so you'll see houses on hilltops, in valleys, on plains and steppes, but you won't see them on mountainsides or cliffs.

But further away from the cities, buildings disappear entirely, giving way to region-specific vegetation (cactuses in desert areas, trees in forested areas, fields in arable land areas):

This would suggest that on a particular planet, you can procedurally place a marker that says "this is a city, it's about 20km across, and is densely populated". From there, the building placement engine would attempt to place "city blocks" in neat rows, forming a roughly circular shape around the position of the city centre. Blocks would be omitted on areas where the terrain is determined to be too steep. Blocks closer to the city centre could be defined as bigger buildings. Farther from the city centre could be defined as much smaller structures (individual houses).

Flight Simulator also has the ability to put cars on roads - the issue is that roads are placed based on real-world roads of today - granted, you could do this for Earth, but it would be far too complex, and besides - Pioneer takes place more than 1000 years from now. What you could do is make roads run between the centres of cities, assuming there is no ocean or steep mountains between these two points. Then use lua to make very basic car models move between cities.

This is what FSX has for cars:

Pioneer doesn't need to have anything like as detailed as that. Note also that FSX has shipping, but that is probably not needed in Pioneer's world, as all the shipping companies would presumably use much larger cargo spacecraft to move cargo around planets.

Note, I have absolutely no idea how to do any of the above - just trying to give some ideas to someone who does know. Hope it helps someone in some way 🙂

A city that covered an entire planet's surface would cook itself.

But I saw it in a movie!

A city that covered an entire planet would have incredibily expensive outer districts.

There's always a way. If you can build a deathstar, or turn a planet into a city, you can figure out a way to manage heat... You can lump it under 'Engineering challenges" You have to use some imagination, and no one is being specific enough to validate the statement: "It cannot be done". Seems perfectly reasonable that a society with hyperdrives a thousand years ahead would probably know more than we do now. Hyperdrives cannot be made either, right? Humans cannot withstand sustained 30g etc... No need to be a party pooper.

Think of it another way, a little over 200 years ago (when steam trains were being developed), the accepted wisdom at the time said that if you were to go over 30 mph, you would suffocate due to lack of air at high speed, hence trains would be useless. As for flight, that was pure sci-fi. 😉

On the other hand, if city planets are impossible then we don't have to bother trying to code them 😆

😆

Honesty Aces High, it was no myth to the people at the time. An average horse could do around 30 mph, a race horse a little more. This was perceived as the maximum speed you could go. Also those who used horses for transporting goods and people had an invested interest in keeping this "speed barrier" going, otherwise they would be out of a job. History is full of little stories like this. 😉

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon

quite false hot air baloons came first in 1782 now that would be lets see 220 years ago. So nope flight first and then trains .....

Im a sticker for historical accuracy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport

rail transport came in at 1820 with the steam train but did utliise horses back 500 years

Actually ollobrain, if you are talking about the Montgolfier brothers and their hot air balloon, the Chinese beat them by about 1000 years as they were using lanterns which they floated up into the air. It was they who first discovered the principle of lighter than air flight, but just like with their discovery of gunpowder, they didn't take the idea to it's ultimate conclusion. if they had, the Chinese could have had hot air balloons and guns a 1000 years before the west. History could have been alot different.

Strangely I see a lot of Chinese lanterns at Christmas time and new year here in Scotland. Seems quite the fashion these days to send a load of them up at festive times. Anyways, the point is, accepted contemporary wisdom can sometimes hold back development of new technologies.

I liked how you went to the trouble of looking it all up though ollobrain 😉

Yep, programmer art at its finest. 🙂 The city models are functional but could definately be improved.

A little off topic, but have you tried the latest nightly build (not Alpha10), as we have added in Manual thruster control in set-speed mode. I now often when launching from a planet starport quickly set the speed to about 0m/s, and then I can use the manual thruster control to move around, without having to worry about things such as gravity. 🙂

Semi on topic anyway. Gee Aces, WHY DON'T YOU TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL... 😀

On Pioneers scale of doing things, an 8 sided circular skyscraper is MORE than enough really, thats 16 triangles for just the sides alone. better to leave that structure as having non tapering sides, or more futuristic shape would maybe be a truncated cone, a more insteresting shape (still thin and elegant) for no more triangles a structre with 4 tapering sections would have 64 triangles, plus 6 more to cap it at the top (hopefully i don't have to mention that the cap at the bottom can be deleted. IF you apply such a regime to an entire city you can be spending 3 times more than you need you, easily.

That's the "hockey puck" building and its responsible for half my power bill when playing pioneer. if you mean 20 sided cylinders, its probably not far off that. and there's how many in each structure? 20 per tower and 2 towers, i often see pairs of them next to each other also.

So to convert a 20 sided 'puck' to triangles, there's 40 on the sides... cap sections add up also and well, i'll save some time, there's 80 triangles in that.. times that by 40 and you have 3200 triangles over 2 towers structure.

Which i guess is some sort of a frontier in-joke. 😉

IT could be replaced with something that has maybe 40-60 triangles, which with the right tiled textures would look even more scaled and do a much better job of illustrating a future city.

To be fair though, its pretty easy to replace with something better so if it really annoys you, make a different one - find the hockey puck building and overwrite its .obj with something of similar proportions, i'm sure rob would listen to reason about replacing it in the next build.

Ah and now to go offtopic, that wonderful world when men were men and scared of going on very slow moving trains.

you have more control in pioneer than in frontier, but only to the extent of being able to blast and manuvering engine at will.

problem with that is, you can only use them at full power, so sometimes performing a delicate manuver like attempting to shell a chickens egg with a jcb bucket that you're directing with a NES joypad. its a question of scale, the controls are scaled for getting you around a galaxy, or at least a solar system, they are not scaled for sainsbury's carpark.

it's awkward but i can get around ok, its easy to lose it and crash though due to the ship being able to pick up so much speed in a short amount of time. Analogue keyboards would be a great help here.:)

what would be nice would be throttle-able engines, then you can shell that egg with the teeth of the bucket. proportional control. the other thing you're talking about is more like a primative 'flight director' - autopilot basically.. maintains alt, heading etc depending on which bits of the director are enabled.

also on similar lines to cracking eggs with giant mechanical implements, a deadzone for joysticks would be great - pioneers implementation seems to assume that all joysticks are perfect (or perhaps i just suck at setting the things up?), and i'm sure lots of functions could be mapped to something like a xbox 360 joypad, which gives 2x analogue sticks, as well as analogue triggers - you could put a lot of thruster control over those twin sticks.

I lol'd - so much that my three-year-old daughter came and hugged me and asked if I was ok and "did you see that laughing pear again dad?" 😆

But yes, to summarise:

* The current buildings aren't pretty. If you want nicer ones then make some yourself or encourage others to do so.

* Recent builds (and thus alpha 11) allows manual adjustments to set-speed mode, so you can do some very fine movements around cities etc.

* We don't have atmospheric friction/aerobraking. Its an open question as to whether we should or not.

Could you clarify there Rob, i find skimming planetary atmospheres great for a shedding a few km/s off my speed for free.

There does seem to be a fairly nice simulation of general drag and friction, do you just mean an aerodynamic model?

i really think there should be an aerodynamic model, even if its very simple, i'd like to be able to perform orbital plane changes by ducking into the atmosphere and using that to change my course and feel the effects of flying in general.

to keep it simple, make the flight model like that of a disk, so it doesn't matter which way one is pointing, but for example flying backwards and pointing the nose down would generate lift... or flying sideways to port while also banking the ship to port would generate negative lift. assume things like stability are handled by flight computer. It doesn't need to be xplane quality fluid dynamics to add to the experience.

There, you've made a liar out of me. I should check these things more closely. There is a simple implementation of drag based on atmospheric density and object size. It certainly doesn't seem to do much at ground level. Presumably that's at least partly to do with our ship thrusters being so ridiculously powerful.

Whenever this kind of discussion comes up I think of the Panther, which is basically a flying box. It seems that any kind of aerodynamics should not apply in that case. Once we start making exceptions though we end up needing a way to specify/determine that a ship is shaped such that aerodynamics produce useful effects. I'm just not sure thats a level of complexity we want or need to go to.

All that said, I've made it clear that I'm no expert in this at all, and for all I know its trivially easy to implement.

Well so far as massive bulky ships are concerned, even a brick, will - if propelled with enough force, with the right attitude - generate a lifting effect. My description probably makes it sound too trivial...

I expect you could base the effect on the ships direction of motion, its motion vector or whatever you call it, and the attitude of the ship in relation to that. Using this difference to determine how powerful a thruster-like force to apply to the ships up / down axis (based on the angle of whatever sides leading edge is (whether its an actual leading edge is not important, only that its leading into the "airstream"))

You could assume also that all ships are bit more slippery going forwards than they are in any other direction, with the most drag being induced as a side effect of the above lift process... but thats kindof a separate thing i would think. However as a consequence of the lift process, as the leading edge, or all edges i guess, approach 90 degrees perpendicular to the airstream, its generating "lift" now as a braking force, whether the ship is top or bottom facing to the airstream.

so essentially, the lift increases with the angle of incidence, whether thats nose up or down, front side or back facing the airstream, except past a point, that lift is doing nothing but slow you down.

but i'm sure none of that probably makes sense, and its probably a stupid way of doing it;)

*edit* another thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift-to-drag_ratio a basic implementation of a lift / drag ratio as a multiplier could be set for each ship, so certain designs which look more like an aircraft would generate more space shuttle levels of lift and boxy shapes generate very little lift for their larger drag... though none of the ships in pioneer would make particularly great aircraft so all would probably have poorer L/Ds than real aircraft.

as an alternative / refinement of the idea, perhaps just treat the flightmodel as always being oriented to the airstream.

if you are aligned with the airstream - by flying directly into the airstream, whether thats nose, side, back etc, key thing is the ship has a flat attitude to the airstream - then the lift is neutral, you are in plane with airstream.

if you perform any pitch manuver then you take the ship out of alignment with the incoming air. In real life this would generate a lift vector. pitching and rolling will also have the same effect, but rolling along will not affect things.

so to work out how much force to apply, you need to work out the angle that this flat plane (an imaginary plane through the middle of the spacecraft bisecting it horizontally) now has to the airstream (how the ship is actually oriented is at this stage not considered, the nose could be yawed off to the side, half rolled over or the entire thing could be flying ass end first, upside down into the wind)

then apply a thrusting force on the ships up or down axis accordingly. you could also use this difference between the angle of motion and the angle of the ship to approximate drag differences based on aspect/attitude. And being able to multiply this effect by a L/D number(which is really just an arbitrarily chosen number to use as a force multiplier) (and also being able to change a ships drag individually) would allow for a large difference in handling between craft in an atmosphere.

eh, maybe i'm just explaining the same thing?

infact, if it works, you might want to use that same process but on the yaw axis , because 'side slipping' will also generate lift, even in flat and level flight, if you yaw a vehicle, it will generate what is basically lift, which pulls to the ship to the side... in which case the total lift vector will a function of these two values.

so how's work going on the cities? I've got to say, once proper cities and a decent combat engine have been implemented, we'll have a fairly magnificent game on our hands 🙂

Was thinking about this robn and I have come up with a way around the aerodynamics problem. What you say is correct, a Panther like craft would essentially be like flying a brick. But, dont all the ships in Pioneer have shields? With a shield in place you could shape it to any aerodynamic form you liked around the hull of the ship. Then even a brick like Panther could generate lift. Just my thoughts 🙂

The panther would generate lift. Not efficiently, but noticeably.