That sounds interesting. //understatement 😉

It sounds as if that would also effect the planetary descriptions? If so thats awesome.

Would this also allow a city to change depending on its environment? Like a domed city on unbreathable atmospheres and open cities for breathable atmosphere.

Im very curious how you will do it and look forward to the result 🙂

Another quick question... I know its still early days, but are you planning on the system generator using the average between the assigned terrains, or will the terrains be placed around the planet seperately from one another? Meaning that some areas of a planet would use one terrain type and colour and other areas of the planet would use another terrain type and colour.

Great to see you're still so actively working on Pioneer! It's a darned shame I can't help out with anything. I'm good with computerhardware but suck at programming. In fact, I can't program at all. In the good old days, I used to make levels for Doom and Half Life. Maybe one day I'll start learning 3D modeling so I can make a few nice models. A friend of mine is quite a talented 3DS Max modeler. He can teach me a thing or two. Also, he likes Pioneer just as much as I do and has agreed to start taking a look at modeling for Pioneer next year.

Sometimes we fly around a planet, each at home with a skype headset connection, telling where we are now. Hehe, would be awesome if multiplayer were possible but then you'd have to have lots of patience without the time acceleration 😀 .

But I'm way off topic. Again, this is good news. Thanks and good luck with your work!

Nah, we change what data is available for the terrain engine to make terrain and colors. Currently the planet prototype that is input to the terrain engine gives only planet type (TYPE_PLANET_WATER, TYPE_PLANET_CO2, TYPE_PLANET_DWARF, etc), average surface temperature, and 32-bit integer seed to do what you like with.

Instead the terrain engine will not be told that the planet is TYPE_PLANET_WATER, or TYPE_PLANET_CO2, or whatever. It will be told how much water, volcanicity, atmospheric composition, temperature, possibly crust composition, etc. It can use this to do anything it likes. It can invent internal terrain types from this info, and have different color and height fractals for these. Probably it makes sense to keep the concept of a highly volcanic terrain type and coloring in the terrain engine. That could be triggered by high volcanicity, but the additional advantage is that you also know how much water the planet has, atmospheric density and so on.

So you could have a highly volcanic planet with 50% landmass covered in water and a thick nitrogen atmosphere. This wasn't possible before, and it will be (when I do this work). Additionally, the planet description can be generated from this data so it matches the terrain type.

Awesome man... just think Minecraft world generation... in galaxy scale... wow.... (Puts head in refrigerator)

I see, it sounds grand.

It could really take the game to another level 🙂

How about adding planetary core or mineral composition to the planet stats and descriptions too?

I could see something like that being very nice when mining becomes more prevalent.

I only mention that because it sounds like it would be best if something like that was done on generation of the system, as apposed to afterwards, so that it can relate to mass.

I'll put a stop to adding any new terrains and colours for now, unless you think its ok to continue to add them in.

Also, if its ok with you Tom, I'm going to go ahead and release what I have done so far as the Alpha 6.2

You might as well call it alpha 7. Shall I give you the ftp details of the pioneerspacesim.net thing?

I think continuing to work on terrain types is ok, since the link between SBody info and terrain types is currently weak, and the coming changes will mostly just give terrain theming more information to work with.

Ok, I'll rename it to Alpha7, that works out fine as there was another thing I meant to include but had forgotten. 🙄

That would be great if you sent me the details for pioneerspacesim.net, make it seem more official like 😉

Thats great, I really enjoy playing around with the planetary code and witnessing the results 🙂

The universe is a cool place. Did you know that the largest moon of Saturn, Titan, has a denser atmosphere than earth? Ultra-violet light from the sun creates organic compounds from methane in the upper atmosphere, and this orange smog drifts down to lower altitudes. The gravity is much lower than earth's, so the atmosphere extends much further into space.

Definitely need to put these things into pioneer... 🙂

*Raises hand* ... Yes sir, I knew that one.... But I love astronomy and reading about the solar system.

The atmosphere is so thick that we cannot see what is beneath it without visual aid, just like Venus.

I added this to alpha 7, titan and venus now have super thick atmospheres. Although obviously it needs some work, as while they are the correct thickness, they will never be the correct colour without some overhauling of the amospheres that would allow multiple tones in an atmosphere.

I didn't know this one. Though that obviously explains why that planet has such a striking atmosphere.

If you look at some nice high quality pictures, you can see this orange smog and it almost appears like a liquid.

Heres a cool pic:

Another cool thing about Titan, is that we know that it has liquid on the surface, perhaps even oceans. It is believed to be liquid methane.

I added that possibility to methane worlds a while ago, they now have a small chance to contain red pools of methane.

Gannymede is another seriously cool world, with an Oxygen atmosphere and a magnetosphere, which is the thingy that protects the earth from radiation.

Its a little larger than Titan too.

It is also said to hold oceans below the surface.

😉

And then theres Europa, which could quite possibly hold more life within itself than the Earth. As it is a whole self-contained ocean planet.

Ganymede resembles Merlin from FE2. Frozen surface with vast bio luminescent oceans beneath the surface. Transparent cruise submarines for tourists, and a fish cannery where I was working when Uncle Jameson died and left me an Eagle. Can we do this in the game eventually? 😉

That Gannymede pic is an enhanced/false colour one, as it looks rather dull in regular colours.

Titan looks even better in false colour:

And one of Venus, where you would swear you were looking at a water planet:

This is probably closer to what we would see if we were to go to Titan, which incidently is close to how it looks in the game:

King haggis said,

Don't belittle yourself. That video was awesome! And suggestions, complements and criticisms are helpful too! 😎

Ok I'm playing with this stuff. I'm trying a new way of making atmospheres, where you decide the mass and composition of 'volatiles' like O2, N2, H2, and do a sortof toy reaction to get CO2, CH4, H2O and stuff.

My thing calculates that if earth's oceans were all boiled off and became part of the atmosphere we'd have 280x the current atmospheric pressure. Nice.

Awesome. 😯

holy crap 🙂 It probably doesn't take into account atmospheric loss to space, but other than that it sounds pretty accurate.

I suppose as an atmosphere heats up it would expand itself, pushing further from the planet leading to more loss.