if you are tired of the "empty space", use the systems_plus, it includes all above shown systems/worlds, it should work with any alpha10.

Really impressed with canyons of Io...

3 new populated systems

van Maanen's Star (custom system, based on data of the original seed)

61 Cygni

Gliese 725

[attachment=763:3_systems_2011-06-04.zip]

van Maanen's Star

the ship is here

http://www.spacesimcentral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=1101&start=510#p20024

superb :p

is ????

ya Io...

you can paste the above data to the following file data/sytems/n01p02/05_beta_hydri.lua

the result is this (after hyperspaceing from van Maanen's Star)

[/hr]

short explanation and how i work such out

let's take a closer look at it,

CustomSystem:new("Beta Hydri",{'STAR_G'}):add_to_sector(-1,2,v(0.343,0.154,-0.678))

possible star types (which shouldn't be changed for a wide range since they are taken from the gliese star catalogue, even if some have fantasy names but repetive gliese_nnn won't make a nice galaxy)

STARPORT_SURFACE

STARPORT_ORBITAL

PLANET_TERRESTRIAL (all types of "common" planets)

PLANET_ASTEROID

PLANET_GAS_GIANT

WHITE_DWARF

STAR_SM_BH

STAR_IM_BH

STAR_S_BH

STAR_O_WF

STAR_B_WF

STAR_M_WF

STAR_O_HYPER_GIANT

STAR_B_HYPER_GIANT

STAR_A_HYPER_GIANT

STAR_F_HYPER_GIANT

STAR_G_HYPER_GIANT

STAR_K_HYPER_GIANT

STAR_M_HYPER_GIANT

STAR_O_SUPER_GIANT

STAR_B_SUPER_GIANT

STAR_A_SUPER_GIANT

STAR_F_SUPER_GIANT

STAR_G_SUPER_GIANT

STAR_K_SUPER_GIANT

STAR_M_SUPER_GIANT

STAR_O_GIANT

STAR_B_GIANT

STAR_A_GIANT

STAR_F_GIANT

STAR_G_GIANT

STAR_K_GIANT

STAR_M_GIANT

STAR_O

STAR_B

STAR_A

STAR_F

STAR_G

STAR_K

STAR_M

BROWN_DWARF

(GRAVPOINT, dunno if that works in custom systems? it' should be used for true multiple systems, the rest seems to be o.k)

the abbreviations are based the common used classes in astronomy

btw, someone should perhaps think about that brown dwarfs not only will appear as "planet" to a central star, they can be part of a multiple system.

i don't know if some are classified like this in reality, but to tell that with today's technology is very hard, and locating twins or planets in other systems based on rotational fluctuations or brightness fluctuations is more a guesswork rather a exact science.

interesting side info:

before we knew much about mercury's ecliptic newton already calculated one, which was impressive close to reality.

the very unconsistant ecliptic of mercury has let scientists of the early past century believe that there must exist another unseen planet closer to the sun as mercury.

guess the name they gave it...

Vulcan 😉

you see calculations of a ecliptic can lead to complete wrong results if you don't have some evidence for it or take more facts to your calculation rather then a few.

same goes to ALL speculations of newly discovered worlds, more a popular propaganda of some astronomers who like to make them self a name.

real astronomers are very skeptical about that, to less information we have to give a exact description, like it's done sometimes when you see such on tv or in the press.

that's what you see when you open "data/sytems/n01p02/05_beta_hydri.lua" with i.e. wordpad

it gives the advice to generate a random system in the given location sector -1,2 and "intersector" coordinates x 0.342, y 0.154, z -0.678

i will generate a system based on a seed generated from star type, sector and intersector coordinates as well as the system number you find in the systems lua "prefix", in this case it's "05".

to influence the result of any such generated systems you add simply a :seed(n), where "n" can be any integer number.

that's a lot to try out?!

well it is, but you have a little help, it's kind of a fractal, so start with numbers from 0 9 (where 0 is the original seed and equals to no specified), if you have a hit in between (a populated system) you can assume that somewhere around the next exponent there will be a similar system to what you have found.

it didn't works 100% all the time but often, as you see in the above example of beta hydri.

in this example i didn't found a populated in between 1-9. so what can i do then, check the next 90? to much work!

needs some experience and a lot of imagination, i had a nice looking unpopulated system at seed(4), there was only a population missing.

i assumed that somewhere between 31 and 49 i must find something similar and it's perhaps populated.

bingo! with seed(45) i had a hit.

next was to search the next exponent for a fitting value and i can start with numbers from 441 to 459.

again i hit at seed(453)

sometimes this can be really expanded far, other times it's extremely hard (or impossible) to get a populated system at all (that's why van Maanen's Star is a custom setup system).

also i listed the hitting numbers as comment (--) below the command. it's only to remember which numbers work and what economy type will be the result.

often this method works very well, hit at a integer between 1-9 and the next hit will be in the next exponent of the number you have.

there are systems that have a very good spread and all possibilities from some "established mining" to "heavy populated" appear in a short frequency around a hitting value (i.e 3, 285, 297, 308, 321, 2856, or 3215).

others you won't find many possibilities or no, since you can't check billions of numbers 😉

so you will have to depend on such a "graining" or "pattern" in the randomizing.

:govtype('string')

is not very important and has no influence on the seed, use it by choice to give the systems a "character", pioneer does not much yet with it by now, but in future i guess it will be a important part of the gameplay.

but feel free to do with your pioneer galaxy what you like it's yours

possible political systems are

DISORDER

PLUTOCRATIC

COMMUNIST

EMPIREMILDICT

MILDICT2

MILDICT1

EARTHMILDICT

SOCDEM

CORPORATE

LIBDEM

CISSOCDEM

CISLIBDEM

EMPIRERULE

EARTHDEMOC

EARTHCOLONIAL

PLANNED

MIXED

CAPITALIST

VERY_CAPITALIST

EMPIRE

CIS

EARTHFED

Fyi, the custom systems API is documented here: http://pioneerspacesim.net/wiki/index.p ... ystems_API

Be aware that it will change in the future.

any good reason for?

the wiki is very comprehensive, but i guess far to complicated for beginners, that's why i posted this to find a grip on how to setup a simple random system and don't care for all the stuff a custom system can be build from.

---

btw, do you thought about that the actual problems we had in alpha10 came perhaps from implementing "modules.lua" to the code?

that little guy in my ear told me so 😉

apart from that i must say, to me it's getting very "obscured" and i really have problems now to understand the new system of modules, might be because i'm a little inflexible in such things and when i once figured out something i always find it hard to change it in my mind (especially if i believe something was good, what doesn't mean it couldn't be made better, more a general behave of of me).

Several reasons:

- the interface is not very Lua-ish, due to the use of OOLua under the hood. OOLua will be removed as soon as I get around to it.

- the custom systems need to be integrated with the rest of the module API allowing things like dynamic system modification based on game events and attaching custom event code to specific system bodies

- some fixed attributes like govtype will be removed once we have a dynamic economy.

Not to my knowledge. There were a specific set of bugs in alpha 10 that have all been fixed. What are you referring to?

The new module system (of which custom systems are not currently part) is more consistent and better documented than the old one, though there's still room for improvement. As usual, point to specific areas where there's a problem and we can take a look at it. Unfortunately I can't do anything about having to relearn things that change. We're in development, change is a given.

nothing exact, only a feeling in my tommy, after stumbling over the many misbehaves like interrupted jumps (pirates.lua could be a reason, but not the source of it, i never have seen one pirate, only attackers when trying a classified delivery), non loading gamesaves, stating it couldn't load when the game is not running, only when started a mission.

deadends after late arrival or similar. never ending jumps (2-3 months) until the game halts.

time seems to have changed to and after the first month only seconds will be counted, which has lead to several non working animatons at my models which depend on fractals of seconds (i have to use now os.clock() to make them work in all cases, but it won't be then reflecting game time, sometimes wanted; position lights, scanner, look stupid when the rotate fast, sometimes not wanted; pulsing lights on hyperdrive engines, clock(s) and such). after the first month all these animations stop or work only in 1 frame per second stepping. sometimes, i guess even due to that, the bulletin board didn't get updated no more, no matter how long you wait. 🙁

I've taken a vacation from station building. I just had to step outside for a bit. here's some vacation pictures of Hamilton World in the Beta Hydri system. I don't know why my menu bar shows in the first pic, and they all look darker than they did in the game.

[attachment=765:Hamiltonworld01.jpg]

[attachment=766:Hamiltonworld02.jpg]

[attachment=767:Hamiltonworld03.jpg]

[attachment=768:Hamiltonworld04.jpg]

[attachment=769:Hamiltonworld05.jpg]

[attachment=770:Hamiltonworld06.jpg]

[attachment=771:Hamiltonworld07.jpg]

[attachment=772:Hamiltonworld08.jpg]

[attachment=773:Hamiltonworld09.jpg]

[attachment=774:Hamiltonworld10.jpg]

[attachment=775:Hamiltonworld11.jpg]

[attachment=776:Hamiltonworld12.jpg]

I want to build a castle here.

[attachment=777:Hamiltonworld13.jpg]

[attachment=778:Hamiltonworld14.jpg]

[attachment=779:Hamiltonworld15.jpg]

have one of those minecraft mining guys drop em off to build ya castle

that's a cool world, all terrains in one 😉

raised gamma by 1.6

[attachment=780:Zwischenablage-2.jpg]

seems to be different, you used what of seed for it, none?, mine?, a different one?

or after all a different build?

As you know these have long been fixed in development and will be available in alpha 11.

I'm not familiar with either of these. We can't fix bugs we don't know about.

This interested me because I've also noticed that landing lights don't always blink at the same rate. After some experimenting I've come to the conclusion that using os.clock is the culprit. The OS clock is not locked to the frame rate so you get a differing number of frames across a particular time period. In the case of the lights, the solution is simply to replace calls to os.clock() with get_arg(1). It also makes things look much nicer - the lights stop when the game is paused and go faster when timeaccel is active. The next step will be to remove all mentions of os.clock through all the models.

As you say though, things do slow down/stop as the game progresses. I looked into this and found its a simple loss of precision. The game time is a double-precision float, as are all Lua numbers. get_arg() however operates entirely in single-precision floats. After a month (some 3 million seconds) there's only two fractional bits in a float so only get 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 for each second. Not long after that it goes down to one bit and then you lose the fractional component all together. The fix for it is simple - use double-precision floats in get_arg. I've made that fix and it will hit the repository this evening. It will be available in alpha 12 (its missed the merge window for alpha 11).

So, in the future, avoid os.clock for timing functions - use the functions provided to you by the engine. And please, report bugs - this problem has existed since the beginnings of the Lua model system, and we didn't know about it. Workarounds are well and good but surely its better to fix the problem properly? That could have been done easily if you'd taken the time to report it properly. As I've said repeatedly, posting in this forum is not the right way to report problems. I personally try to read everything posted here, but some days I'm tired or don't have time, so I skip over things. The issue tracker however is something where every word is read in detail to try and tease out the issues. Don't expect anything posted here to get any movement if you haven't brought it to the attention of the devs.

Why didn't I think of that? 🙄 That's what it looked like in the game. I'm running fabea7a-win32 unaltered.

Look at all the pretty lights!

[attachment=806:UV Ceti A 01.jpg]

Just for a second there Marcel, I thought your picture showed lensflare. Nice picture though 🙂

I see what you mean. 😆 That's actually the other star in a binary system. I thought it looked a bit like the nebula backgrounds that everyone around here hates. 😉

Hey I don't 😉