This is some nice work GlobalExplorer, something like this would look great in Pioneer or any game really. The textures and the way you can deform the asteroids is great work.

Farcodev could use something like this to show asteroid belts when you are using your zoom feature in Far Colony?

The textures in the asteroid screens are made from a Callisto map, and I believe they could be used in an opensource project. I made lots of such textures from freely available maps, and each has it's own copyright story, but I only chose those that would allow reusage. I can upload them if you want. Also others like for example this one which I made (in endless steps) from a NASA Viking map:

But since Pioneers planet landings are head and shoulders about my textured planets approach they are probably not much use. I would however suggest looking at the coloring of the planets in Pioneer and on my screens, for I invested a lot of time in this area and I think they are better colored.

this is exactly what this project needs. better looking planets/moonlets/asteroids. more diverce terrain generation with reallistically looking canyons, craters and rivers.

best part, it's open source 😉

I'd help but doubt this will compile in W7 64b...

Those asteroids look fantastic! I've been thinking that Pioneer needs planet textures and hard coded height maps for the Sol system too.

Those asteroids look cool. I'm open to new noise libraries, particularly if they can generate perlin simplex noise using SSE intrinsics, since that would be almost 4x faster on modern chips.

Pioneer does have asteroids, although perhaps not many get generated by the starsystem generator. Here is a really old screenshot of one:

I should change the system generation, so that systems can have asteroid belts and stuff. Actually, younger systems should have closer orbits and more asteroids since accretion might not have ended.

I wasn't aware that Pioneer already has asteroids and smaller objects. So far I was under the impression that this had not been adressed at all. If you already the functionality to generate asteroids there is no need to replace it with another one. The one in the screenshot looks absolutely ok to me. Perhpas it could benefit from a texture like the one I use.

And I admit that speed is an issue that I also didn't consider. My approach is completely different: I pre generate maps in an external application, not at run time. I do realize that the way Pioneer is designed (with those grandiose planetary landings and seemless universe), speed is very important.

Perhaps you will be able to generate asteroid fields and also work on the colors of the planets, that is perhaps what struck me when I played it the first time.

Once I found the files, I will send you the source code of my libnoise application. I will also upload you some of my best asteroid textures. Perhaps you have some use for it.

you used a different height map on earlier versions(?)

actually they look like spiked monsters, on some rather "big" ones, you can see the "spikes" from far (planets surface).

which looks somewhat funny, but i don't mind, as a gamer (who played and still plays fe2) i would like first to have a possibility to do something useful with them before i look at the shape (i can blast off ore from them, but i can't ghet that aboard), btw, flying close between those many km's sized spikes is a task of it's own (try and you will see). after all mining won't make you rich quick, but why not?

i guess to make it more interesting a mining laser shouldn't be to expensive like it is now or like it's in frontier, else only the "i have to try everything" people like me will make use of it. i know from frontier forums that some feel the mining lasers and equipment (mb4) is something useless (a reason why i created the prepared savegames for frontier where you have to unload the mb4 to make your first money).

might be a idea to create some missions where you have to use a mining laser to get a certain ore as part of the mission to complete it, but first there must be a way to get that aboard, even when using just the common fuel scoop. it don't have to be to realistic, i can imagine to have a simple "open cargo bay" switch, which would allow to get that aboard, or even more fun, put on your space suit or jump into a manipulator vessel to maneuvre them aboard. small fighters, like a eagle, would have to tie the ore at the ship, could be a solution to.

many things have to be solved and could be made more attractive, but i understand also that it's not possible to do all in a short timespan. though i feel very comfortable about how it is by now and i can't say terrain generating could be made better, i like it much the way it is by now and i can't see anything that compares to that. i guess other have this texture mapped planets and asteroids but if i'm right not very useful for a game in which you can land on a planetside, systems and bodies spread over a galaxy which are procedural generated, it will never have a photorealistic look, but therefore the possibility of having a galaxy to explore and you won't know what you will find next.

personally i found facts like temperature, gravitation or pressure more important rather then a realistic look.

remember i'm the one that disabled the textures for planets in FFED3D to make the look more compliant to FFE rather to a satellite's view map. i found it's more important to have a compliant look between what i see from orbit and what i will find when landed on a planet rather a stunning graphic from far and a low reference to to what is generated.

and i'm very disappointed with how they removed the proper atmosphere layer from FFE (mainly they misused it for the mapping of the texture). it was getting to a point i stopped playing it because of such and of course pioneer came up then...

offering all the goodies i was missing on FFED3D (further, it seems my models get a better reputation here 😉 ).

yes, uncle bob, it's true FFED3D seems to be "frozen", i guess dreamzzz lost interest in a further development of it, could be mainly of such problems that are simply not to solve with the basic structure of FFE. if i'm right this was also the motivation for pioneer. start at point 0 and do the best we can for the same goal.

further if it comes to modeling for each, pioneer offers the most imo, there are not many limits in the way models can be setup for the game and best of all i don't have to get my brain boiled with messing with FFE's original code to make them fit (text position, position lights, thruster positions, yes that can be solved to but is a long and complicated process finding and altering FFE's code for that, further i'm not shure how collision detection works in FFED3D, does it use the original model for it? so you are bound more or less to the shape of the original ship.

it's true pioneer kept me away from things i promised myself for FFED3D, sorry for that at this point. i knew i promised to have a solution for the 3 eagles and other models that use sub-models. i would still. but what costs me a week in FFED3D to workout is a sneeze in pioneer.

still i have a folder with at least 10 different hacked versions of FFED3D, all just to fit it for several model tasks.

support for certain things was low from start on, i guess and i'm shure if better documented i and of course others would have made use of i.e hsl shading like it's used for FFED3D, if setup right you can have multiple skins, and even bump mapping or environmental mapping or a glow (alpha) map, but i must say neither me nor coolhand get's behind that fully, and it's disappointing if you have to clutter it all together yourself.

btw, a big thanks again to you tomm, also for how you solved the shading on models and how black textured parts stay matte on any surface, that replaces a bump mapping by near and i can say i'm satisfied with that.

for certain converted low-poly models like the XWA conversions that means some extra layer for windows or such but in the end it's very useful in the way it is.

An interesting read there, Potsmoke. I'm familiar with your posts on the Elite forum. It's a sad thing to agree with you about this but I too have lost interest in FFE3D. At a certain point, the game got a more unrealistic look as compared to the old Elite.

Pioneer is, i.m.o., much better than both Elite and FFE3D and I really like the spacey feeling it gives. Planets look so good, both from space and on the surface. I've never played a space game with so much freedom and such a realistic feeling to it than Pioneer. I can spend hours looking for habitable planets and exploring them.

I agree gameplay could be improved a bit. There should be more things to do. The mininglaser could really prove itself useful here. Right now, the only thing I do is explore planets but it would be very nice to combine exploration with a bit of gameplay. I know in the future there will be scripted missions you can choose from the bulletinboards but a little extra randomized gameplay never gets boring. That's why I would love to see the ability to create a small, simple miningbase on a planet, or inside an asteroid, even if it's very simply done, so you can come back after a while to check on your mining progress. And maybe more computerfunctions in your spaceship so you have to scan planets first from orbit whether or not they are worth visiting. Maybe a surveyor drone (like in the game "M.A.X. Mechanized Assault and Exploration") which scans the surface of a planet for valuable minerals.

Of course, this may be a lot of work to implement but random gameplay means a lot. There's a silly little game on the market now called Minecraft. They guy who made it earns 250.000 dollars everyday because it's so popular. The game is extremely simple to look at but the fact there's so much random gameplay makes it very attractive. You spend your day just walking around on the surface trying to survive by digging holes and mining. It's hard to believe but it's quite addictive. What I'm trying to say is that Pioneer can become a very popular and addicting game if it will move "beyond Elite". Elite was good but it can be made better.

following to tomms statement, at least we will have soon more fights and AI ships that launch from starports, assasination and other will be then in reach.

to me that's very good news i love the fighting part much.

of course after some long and hard fights to the core of a system i allways liked to do something different like mining or simple explorations, i.e i discovered once a (near to) contact binary in FFE(D3D), since the only classified as contact binary is unreachable (game crashes), it's the only evidence i found so far in frontier, there might be more of them but the galaxy is quite big. i hope i find one once in pioneer to 😀

coordinates are -77.75, 29.2

it's somewhat far from usual trading routes 😉

i discovered it i guess when i was looking for a trading route through the galaxy, because i noticed that there are clusters of inhabited worlds everywhere, but i guess it was more a bug in FE2 and in FFE you won't find any of them 😥

the system will be there with mainly the same specifications but no starports or colonized worlds.

if i compare how the data is handled in both, FFE is somewhat cleaned up, a lot of things that was before more chaotical in FE2 is moved to tables in FFE.

ok, without something like a wormhole bug or a cheated drive you can't reach most of them or it will cost you a lifetime to find a route.

but on the other hand a galaxy full of systems and you can't get there is not very useful, it could then be far smaller you wouldn't notice in common gameplay.

personally i guess, allready with frontier a lot of things was abandonned, maybe simply because lack of time to develop or lack of space on a single DD floppy.

it took me a while before i started to play FFE at all, then i got somewhat addicted, later on i stepped back to FE2, it's nice to complete the missions in FFE but apart from that i miss the many "bugs" or unfinished things of FE2.

i'm even not shure if the wormhole bug is really a bug or another abandonned task, if i think about that and the size of the galaxy, you will need such to reach it's full depht.

further it's the only way to make something useful out of a Lynx or LRC (1ly is far to less, but using wormholes, ok it's hard to find a good route then but possible, it was really part of the game for me to search them, you feel then like a navigator, had to pick up your calculator and search for the fitting route*), i know without hacking the program you can't buy one, but on the other hand if they was ment just as a embroidering, why do they have specs and a price?

it's like the fighter launch device, what's good for if not ment to be used? exactly a Lynx or LRC could need such strongly.

and i can only repeat i really would like to see a possibility of docking and launching from such large transporters with your ship in pioneer, i guess it should be in range of possibilities.

* i know this would go to far for most gamers, but i would like if you had to calculate each jump you do, like it would be when using a "real" hyperdrive. calculate "course" or maybe the timespan you stay in hyperspace to reach a certain point in the galaxy, a task of it's own and you would never know if you "materialise" at the suggested point or somewhere far from, or you will directly jumping into a star 😆

btw, i misjumped at least once in pioneer, i hope that wasn't just a single occurance.

just like in FE2 i found myself inbetween two systems

further i wonder if you could leave the sector in pioneer, i know in frontier it's not possible, but this would be a nice "feature", not very useful but fun to find out

i tried at least once in pioneer but also didn't get nowhere.

did you know that max. speed is far beyond Lightspeed in pioneer? crazy!

you might noticed the little noise on ships position,

when accelerated to extreme high speeds that little noise turns to a rattle, it looks like your ship will break to pieces soon then.

I always thought those far away worlds in FE2 were all caused by the 'Worm Hole' bug somehow.

Wormhole Bug:

But we don't have that bug in Pioneer as far as I know. So those distant worlds are deliberate.

Personally its something I also would have added if I was making the game, as we need some reason to leave the core worlds.

I guess I'm not a die hard Elite fan after all because I've never even heard of that bug but it sounds interesting. Would be a nice thing to have this "bug" as an official thing. Maybe an expensive or hard to obtain device, only sold in a certain sector, that let's you use this wormhole creator so you can travel way further than before.

I also like the idea of calculating every jump, as long as it's more or less dumbed down as I'm not a rocket scientist. But it's nice if you could plot a course on a starmap or something and make a few doable calculations before every jump. That way, exploring will become much more rewarding as you'll really have to work for it. Not a bad idea at all.

Potsmoke, really nice phenomenon there. Never seen that before, but yesterday I did find a starsystem with 6 Earthlike planets all in very close proximity. I thought that was quite unique too. It's not even far away from Sol, a class 4 military drive could make it in only 1 jump. Maybe it's not unique at all, it's not that I used to play Elite for months exploring every system. I was a very casual player. Only now that Pioneer has these beautiful unique high detailed planets I'm becoming more and more of an explorer.

Are 6 Earth like planets in 1 system, all very close to each other a common thing in Pioneer or did I really find something special here?

No that sounds pretty special to me. Especially if you can see them from the skies of one another 🙂 But special all the same even if they are a bit more distant.

But the galaxy is so large that all of these rare things are probably repeated thousands of times.

from my point of view, something i would like to see changed in pioneer

earthlike planets occure to often, for my choice...

i guess the chance is very very low in reality, there are many factors that have play together for a earthlike planet with a oxygene atmosphere, size (gravity), declination, temperature (orbit), only for the most significant.

even if all these has set right, it's no warranty to have a stable weather system, but ok we can leave that aside and maybe concentrate only on the three important factors above.

the occurence of water alone won't mean a earthlike planet in all cases (i guess in least cases).

but we like to play a game and not everything has to be like in real universe, else we would get quickly bored of to many icecold rocks out there.

to gain a oxygene atmosphere, wow, first some very basic lifeforms would have to turn other more common, less radical elements to oxygene. oxygene is a radical, in fact a killer, it's the strong ability to build new compounds that makes it so agressive (oxydation) simply said.

we can of course assume that the same process will happen more or less often in our own galaxy, because physics are the same all over. but still i would say chances are very low.

and like i said even if all is set right, let's say those basic "compounds" for life are given allready it's no warranty for a stable weather.

something that has been fascinating me...

genesis:

"...and god divided the waters from the sky and the waters from the earth..."

how did they now then?

this is extremely important, no casualness and describes the low chance of a stable weather system.

ok, you can look at this sentence only as a spiritual expression,

but it's true in both cases, spiritually and physical.

Yeah, in these days where everything is technologically possible I think a lot of people are getting a bit too excited about certain things and many think there are Earthlike planets swarming the galaxy.

I'm not so sure about this. I'm not a scientist, not by far! But I think a planet like Earth, or Earth itself as a matter of fact, is very, very unique. And I think it may be even more unique than a lot of people think. And I'm not at all sure there are that many planets like our own, not in our galaxy at least, but maybe there are. Who's ever been there to tell? But of course, our galaxy is one thing, the entire universe is another. Right now, scientists are very enthousiastic about Gliese 581g. Anyway, I agree Earth like planets are a bit too common in Pioneer. But that's OK with me, as I think they're the most interesting planets to visit in the game. And some of those rocky vulcanic worlds are nice too. Not all of them, though. Some have almost no variety in landscape. I like it when there are large plains between the mountain ranges and mountains of variable height, not just mountains of the same size everywhere. Some planets are extremely goodlooking in Pioneer!

By the way, for those of you who are interested: the name of the "6 Earth planet system" is Ceol and it can be found in sector 4,2.

It depends on how you define earthlike anyways. There's most certainly a whole lot of planets with similiar temperature range, some of them should have liquid water. If they do, the chances for plant live to evolve (the basic condition for oxygen in the atmosphere) are unknown. even if that is the case, the chances of it having a compatible (i.e. digestible) dna seem rather slim, if live did not originate by panspermia, which is a hypothesis we won't be able to prove or disprove for a veeeery long time.

As it is, for a game (or a novel), you can pretty much modify the unknown factors in favour of the scenario you want to create. important in the end is that the planets are believable (i.e. no earthlike planets orbiting Antares or stuff like that, a common fault in SF) based on the facts we more or less know (or at least think we know. The universe has a way of screwing with our theories in cruel ways. First Gas Giants in close proximity to Stars, now planets in retrograde orbits... it will take a while until our theories have caught up with the last one, I think). The future might render it obsolete, but that's the curse of science fiction in general.

How did they know what exactly? that water is different from sky and earth?

no, it's not different, it's the same compound, but a stable weather system is not casual i want to say.

it means, chances ar higher that everything ends up into a chaos (not quite true, more a regularity) as in a stable (chaotical) system.

oceans, like we know, are hard to get, it could be easely this way;

rain falls onto a somewhat warmer surface and evaporates at the same time or shortly after, maybe some lakes or rivers, but they are not stable, shortly could be 1000 years or more, but life needs a very long timespan of a more or less stable situation, after it will evoporate (the water of course).

by raising the temperature just a few degrees this will happen i'm shure, the thing is once leaned to the "wrong side" it can't be stopped or reverted, a higher density of vapor in the air will raise the temperature more and so on.

our weather system is very unique i guess, even more as the possibility for water or the right mass to hold a atmosphere of a useful density

so this is what i mean by water from sky is divided from water on earth, it's simply our weather.

and how could they know then

maybe a coincidence

but there are to many to speak of coincidence

more examples needed?

expressions and thoughts in that old book, especially genesis, are far far older as the what we know about, i believe.

one thing for shure, if we look at human society in the past (antique), i guess one thing we forget often,

mankind is not more intelligent rather in the past

only we are technically evolved that's all

but intelligence hasn't grown

further to invent the wheel or a scripted language(s) was far more a sign of intelligence rather to land on the moon, which is only a consequence to that.

further on who could exactly say that we was the first who did that?

it's like when they talk about the sudden "vanishing" of dinosaurs, we talk about a timespan of 10mio years at least ("lizards" ruled the world for about 200mio years, correct me if i'm wrong, but don't bargain about a few mio. please)

and we tend look at this as one day or suddenly, that's anything else then suddenly.

the whole catastrophe scenario that should have killed them, is rubbish to me or like one said; "i would rather think the dinosaurs was killed by their own farts instead of a cosmic catastrophe". it comes very close to reality if you think about their organism 😆

it's mostly just because we found no evidence of something, but that didn't mean that it wouldn't be in range of possibilities.

so mankind could have invented a scripted language long before persians did (i allways get fights with them about that 😆 )

but it's the only evidence we know, popular at least, i have other examples for, calendars are no scripted language? (india), musical scores neither? (north america)

we shouldn't be so mindedness (kleingeistlich, small in mind, fits better) to think that there was nothing before mediteranean civilisations, because we have only found evidence (mostly) of them.

evil enough, most archeologists from past century looked only for evidences to emphasize our or the importance of mediteranean culture.

we, the white, arian, overlords.

what a bullshit!

sadly organic things tend to mold, usually 😉

but they wasn't all "stoneheads"

Ah, now I understand. I guess the passage could be interpreted that way. However, since it talks about water beneath the sky and water BEYOND the sky (not in the sky), it seems more probable that it's symbolic language driven by archaic cosmology, where earth is a place of order in a chaotic cosmos (more or less right), with water being a widely spread symbol for chaos. But we're not here to talk theology.

if by a few degrees you mean in the range from 40 to 80 degrees of rise in mediocre temperature, then you're right. However, the atmosphere is quite difficult to get out of equilibrium (indeed our seasons are more dependant on our axial tilt than on wheather we're a few hundred kilometers closer or further from the sun. Hence aphelion and perihelion don't have a very significant role in our calendars). So the "goldylocks-zone" (so called habitable zone) around a star is not as narrow as it might seem. For a wheather system of any body within that region, atmosphere composition and axial tilt will play a vastly more important role than proximity to the sun. But we're not sure how important the wheather is to provide "habitable" (i.e. for humans) conditions.