Very tempting. Also, I think the future is more exciting if we've destroyed earth somehow. I was considering raising the sea level by 80 meters to indicate the almost inevitable results of climate change :J

The earth height map is fairly low resolution, which produces silly looking curvy coastlines that other (fractal) planets don't have. This could be hidden slightly by adding a fractal on top (which I have done, and results in the ugly blobs all over earth's terrain). Hm.

How about, shortly after hyperspace is invented the earth is destroyed by a black hole created by a hyperdrive experiment too close to the planet surface? Then you can visit earth and you'll see a big black thing with lots of gravity that kills you.

Maybe Tomm, you could also just re-texture the Earth to make it a polluted mess. More thoughts, perhaps have a mission to restore it to it's former glory by way of some G.E.C.K torpedo?

Poor old Earth, what did she ever do to you?

Tomm you should use a better heightmap. I have heightmaps from Orbiter for Earth, moon and mars all about 7 times detail what you currently have for earth. While it still won't have the detail of the fractally generated planets it would look a heck of a lot better than it is now.

What about textures? There are lots of extremely high quality textures for earth (obviously 🙂 ).

If you really feel you have to destroy our home, then I'd go with the flooding.

low me, i can't say that this will hinder me to play pioneer

of course it could have more cities or more exactly textured surface, whatever!

i still like to play pioneer (and frontier of course) because of many other aspects then exactly a extreme realism of mother earth (btw, the brown blob is from ffe, in frontier it was the topaz it is still fortunately).

in my actual career of pioneer, i visited earth only once, but i'ts no good place to run to for a trader 😆

a bit low i must say, can't understand what is so special about sol?

"a rather avarage type G star with some indigenous lifeforms on the third planet, which still struggle for control, not recognizing that they will loose everything this way" i would say as a alien.

most time you gamble around in open space, guess i won't see many surfaces in a active played game, it's of course a part of the whole thing, but not more important as other aspects.

cities in a game like pioneer could never reach a full realism it would over exceed everything still.

but we will do our best, to make it as reasonable as possible.

something i would wish for planets and/or cities is still a possibility to have various city scapes, i still believe two simple factors can rule that, surface temperature and atmosphere type (most important aspect and will give the chance to have at least two general types of architecture).

talking about a catastrophe, i would choose a war, between humans of course, no aliens, still we are the ones that work most intensive on the goal to turn the topaz into a brown blob. 😉

flooding, hm, i'm not shure if this will ever happen...

...i guess we are faster.

something i always liked about frontier and it might sound strange for guests, frontier sharpens the feelings for our home and how precious it is, of course a wanted aspect of mr.braben, i'm shure.

on the other hand, if i look at who plays the game at all, everybody seems to tend belong to a class of people that allready care about that.

because if i look at the dislikers, i can see a very different kind of our society, like my son, more practical thinking and stating that everybody will fight for himself and his fortune. what does he liked to play?

FPS

i guess that tells a lot, i won't judge here, but it's interesting, no?

so there are dreamers like we are and stoic ones like he is...

sorry, i slipped off topic again (shut your mouth and make some new models, that's the best you can do! 😈 )

s20dan,

how do you get to the vid of my favorite waste of time? 😆

Sorry I don't understand, maybe im a little slow today 🙂

What vid we talking about?

Edit// This?

How about a procedural algorithm for Earth that would turn the whole planet into one gigantic city? Make the whole thing out of cubes, etc. like Trantor in the Foundation trilogy or the capital planet in Star Wars whose name I forget at the moment?

The case FOR Earth!!!

I agree with s20dan and Marcel completely on this one.

Definitely keep Gaia alive and preferably also looking her best.

Coming 'home' from the far reaches of the universe has a special attraction to me and always feels good but put's the fragility of our world into context at the same time. Why should we as game players be sad when coming 'home' in Pioneer? I don't play games to become sad or depressed! That is so easily done in real life and to be honest a daily philosophical struggle to overcome.

Have a little faith brothers and sisters, if not in your fellow man then at least in Gaia! There are many out there just like you and you love Gaia right? Not all of mankind is stinking and rotten to the core and since we all posses the duality of good and evil most can be turned to the bright side of the force.

I say let Gaia shine in Pioneer! I don't care if she is not absolutely perfect in Pioneer, just show her correctly enough to overcome the suspension of disbelief and the imagination will do the rest. I mean come'on you have all played the original Elite with vector graphics and all.

A giant city covering the globe is also fine with me, and If you must have man kill himself by whatever means with most of the surface in the process then so be it, but then I would go with the flooded world. You could even go against the fancy currents of gloom and doom and put a positive spin on the whole flooding thing making it an attempt to leave the Earth alone to recuperate from her man inflicted scars.

Frans

Yes I suppose the flooding would have to be deliberate in some way. As surely if man can terraform worlds and colonise interstellar space, he knows a few tricks to combat a natural flood.

Anything that makes its way into the game from the Foundation Trilogy is a bloody good thing in my book.

I loved those extra bits of info in FFE about Hari Seldon and the Trantor like world that was a few hundred LYs west of Earth. Of course the Real Trantor was 1000s of LYs away right on the Galactic rim I think.

EDIT// its not Trantor I'm thinking of, what was the name of the High tech world set up by Hari Seldon on the edge of the galaxy?

The name to the StarWars city is Coruscant. All copied from Trantor 🙂

perhaps coruscant would be a logical choice but mabe were looking at this from a biased perspective being actualy from earth means that its the place we make special

its like when i draw a map of europe

i make england the best because i know it the best cos its my home

whereas the rest of europe i make rough guesses and poland ends up roughly round in shape italy ends up nothing more than a boot and germany ends up looking nothing like it should

im not a cartographer so you get my point

maybe the same is true with stellar cartography

earth needs to not be any better than any other dustball in the universe its only special to humans im sure imps think topaz is tha bomb in the same way

and come on if it was so great why did we ever leave it in the first place

map it as accuratly as possible but i dont care about how great it is just get it in their

hawkerT, thumbs up!

good idea!

it sounds like i heard that somewhere before... 😎

should i put engine parts to the archology and make a ship out of it? a huge carrier with a giant dome. a station using the domes is allready planned, could be also a giant ring type station.

also the small buildings are to imagine as capsules or something like that, they have allready a small biosphere built in.

who knows, maybe mankind slips underground and only a few surface buildings are left to see on the surface.

This sounds like the simplest solution, combined with a mass exodus of earth's population.

Put me in the camp of the "Save the Earth Foundation".

I'd rather not see my home planet trashed or covered in metal.

Can trees be procedurally generated?

Whatever you do, please don't destroy her by A BLACK HOLE! It's the most silly means of destroying a planet I know about.

That would be great. I'm pretty sure that in Infinity the trees are all placed procedurally but perhaps they are created procedurally too like in Ad-Astra 🙂 In which literally everything is procedurally created, even the ships.

Even xenophobic aliens would be a better answer than a black-hole 🙂

Cern is coming to get you!!!

"No landing in Australia"? - Steady on there - I want to be able to land in my back yard.

Then again, perhaps early in the third millenium Australia finally dug out all her minerals and the local economy dived. Everyone got sick of the heat and lack of water and all the deadly snakes and spiders. 😉

Here's another creative solution - low Earth orbit is so polluted with space junk that no-one can get a look in for fear of being holed by random rubbish (oh wait, that's what shields are for...)

Further on landing in my back yard, to pop into my house and pick up my computer...mmm...recursion...

http://xkcd.com/244/

Destroying the Earth by something easy like they did in FFE is going to look cheap, which imo is worse than a low-res Earth, which people will appreciate for the effort, I think. I know I will.

If you're going to turn Earth into Trantor the marketplace and amount of traffic should reflect that, since otherwise it wouldn't be realistic. In the stories, Trantor had ~40 billion inhabitants. I think that is an extremely low figure for a global city, considering the 6 billion the real Earth has. Also most will be very poor. But even then, the amount of traffic and goods to be traded in Sol would be so staggeringly high, that trading there will be by far the easiest way of getting rich, which I think would negatively affect gameplay.

Please don't flood the place. Earth is considerably more intersting with Amsterdam than without. Believe me.

Removing Earth from the equation would be a game-killer for me. There is no real case for it.

After zooming around the exotic worlds, it is always nice to land in London, Paris or New York.

Wanting to destroy earth's homeworld due to silly Mayan balderdash, climate paranoia or that

horrific 2012 movie rings untrue. People who recall the Elite storyline will know that Earth did

have various wars and disasters before the year 3000, hence "New Moscow"...But the planet

recovered and was made into a tourism world...Pioneer should reflect that situation...:)

EARTH - it doesn't blow up or disappear -

it just looks UGLY for a thousand years! (F.Zappa)

...then it gets cleaned up and turned into a planet-sized tourist resort - a pleasure jewel in space - where every off-world Human makes a pilgrimage at least once in their natural lifetime; swim in the sparkling seas, glide the clear skies, climb the tallest peaks (those still 'tall' after the sea rise), or simply just get drunk in the nearby spaceport bar and get no further than the space-hotel.

Future Earth with higher sea and tighter coastline would make a startling globe to fly across and explore. The poles smaller and closer to temperate. The scorching equator, wider and ringed by powerful solar farms. Some of the ancient drowned cities might be built upon the sea like huge islands of lego.

LARGE METROPOLITIAN AREAS...

Some of the largest metro areas on Earth (in descending order); Neo Tokyo (Jap), New New York (USA), Mexcity Nueva (Mexico), Nu Seoul (Korea), Sao-Paulo Novo (Brazil), Nieuw Jakarta (Indonesia), Naya New Dehli (India), New San-Angeles (USA), Neo Cairo (Eygpt), Nue Shanghai (China), Nu Moscow (Russia), etc. India and others have similar sized metro areas that'd make this list but I imagined the major space-port going to the largest city in the region - as so to spread the main ports around the Earth.

TACKY TOURIST POSTERS

Something Curt said to me; spaceports ought to have tacky tourist posters on the walls as you descend the launching bay... 'Welcome to Earth, home of the Hamburger', 'Visit the bars of Mars', ''Get serious on Sirus' , Tau-Ceti is sore pretty' or just 'enjoy the slot-bars of New Vega and get wasted', etc.

-- Jamie

"Welcome to Earth, home of the hamburger!" *Will Smith kicks the alien in the head* 😆

Actually, there's something else about our homeworld that we take for granted. Think about how rare it must be for a habitable planet to have a moon with the exact apparent size as its star. I think that people will come from parsecs away to see a total solar eclipse with their naked eyes!

yeah i agree ..that was a shitty move by braben to destroy the greatest planet in the galaxy ,.......everywhere needs an amsterdam lol

Hm, if there are so many opinions what should be done to Earth, why not put some kind of 'Starting Menu' where player could choose various options about his starting place, Solar System's past (so he can actually choose what history fit's him best - pwnage of Earth or the way it is now, maybe even another options like Mars terraformed or not, colonization of Saturn's or Jupiter's moons etc...) etc.

I think it shouldn't be that hard to implement, right? And everybody would be happy. And yes, for those random-liking purists - there would be an option to set all the things randomly and start playing without choosing anything.

What do you think about that?

that's not true! Ole Fronts did a pretty nifty job... I remember the first time I pulled out of 'abe link' and gazed down upon a blob of green that kind of looked like Australia and low and behold... there was Sydney... which I was living in!!!

it blew my mind...

I vote keep Earth and keep it well.

For maximum flavor/dev work ratio I would vote for the "Earth is a reconstructed historical landmark/tourist location" explanation—with no extra work it explains everything about the Earth just the way it is—the lack of human habitation, the terrain not being quite accurate sometimes. I'm sure that with some more work a more interesting scenario can be created.

Er, the more options there are, the more content devs have to implement (and test!), and a shrinking fraction of players who will see each option. It really is "that hard." Plus, a coherent, compelling game universe comes from a solidly established backstory, not a series of options for a backstory.

And if we wanted to cater to people who wanted random starts, then we would give them actual random starts by starting them at a random station in the galaxy.