Some nice ideas there 🙂

Yep there are fuel scoops, and a planned addition is the inclusion of crew which would have a rudimentary ability to service the drive on the go.

Well there could be many variations of survey missions, some might have a specific target, but another company may simply be interested in systems with lots of resources and might say we'll pay you X(varies with conditions) amount for any information on these worlds... wherever they are. I would think a mission like that would probably not have a time-limit.

Perhaps we could even have missions where you are paid to captain a real exploration ship (large ship 😉 ).

Perhaps it could depend on the type of survey mission, some might require a detailed mineralogical analysis which might require a landing wheras an orbital scan might suffice for others?

Well you have some good ones already, I think the motherlode of finds should probably be an alien ruin, perhaps it could be a ring-world 😉

Ah I have a rudimentary mining branch which lets the player land and gather minerals if they have the correct ship upgrade, its pretty crappy but could work quite well here 🙂

Minerals are assigned to planets based on their metallicity value which is all done by seed, they also have a mineral abundancy value generated from seed.

I think the Devs will slap me if I request code for a procedural ringworld. like really, really hard... 😕

Expect to have to travel thousands of light years to find one.

I'm already working on it 😀

https://github.com/fluffyfreak/pioneer/tree/Vavatch

Needs a lot of work though, currently can only handle something up to about 6 times the diameter of Earth, needs massive refactoring, optimisation, reduce memory overheads etc.

Expect it sometime in the next 3 to 4 months as I only get to work on it occassionally. You can currently land on the inner surface though and watch the day/night roll across the surface 🙂

For testing that branch creates an Orbital within the Sol system. If it ever gets into the game proper then that won't be the case!

Andy

EDIT - Oh yes, and it WILL eat all of your RAM and probably exceed the 32-bits address space 😆 if it does, edit the solar systems Lua file to reduce the diameter of the Vavatch entry. Obivously that's also something that won't make it into the final build!

Impressive. But that's way too valuable to find on a chance mission. This would need a scripted storyline resulting in its discovery. By the way, how does the autopilot handle this little miracle? 😆

I'm thinking about storylines for different professions anyways, EV Nova style (that game has a ridicoulously high replay value simply for all its story content). Actually, I'm thinking a bit further, in the direction of procedural storylines (because, you know, programming is something I'm better at than writing...). As far as I can see, it might be a bit tedious to realise with LUA, but not a technical problem. But the game is in a too early state to start stuff like that. There has to be an official background story and established factions in first, or someone will do most of the work twice.

Well you can't land on it using autopilot, and there's no cities or anything, and orbiting still works which it shouldn't due to it's low (relative to a planet) mass. That's all part of what needs refactoring. However it does mean that at the moment you can autopilot to the various distances and then manually land on it 🙂

I expected that there will be a few, far enough out and within some specific volumes. The remnant of some civilisation, or perhaps part of some active civilisation akin to the purpose the Thargoids served, that sort of thing. When it's ready for inclusion all of that can come up for discussion though.

It might be better to start that discussion now, unless you're keen on the idea of doing a hell of a lot of work only to find that it won't be included. And just so we're clear, that's not me stating an opinion on its suitability at all. That's for another thread 🙂

Oh don't worry I'm going to finish it anyway even if everyone hates it 😀

I realise that it might not be suitable for Pionner but I started it as a bit of a personal challenge and figured that I'd offer it up once it's ready so that people can have Orbitals if they like/want Orbitals in Pioneer.

It's tricky because I view them as a sort of inevitable conclusion for any sufficiently advanced species that wants to live on world-like objects but has an ever increasing population, going through the intermediary stages of space stations / habitats and hollowed asteroids etc. They're not even amongst the most extreme ideas going.

So I view them as probably out there if there are, or have been, aliens that were advanced enough. On a technical level, by the year 3200, I don't see why they'd be beyond humans to build in the real world, but for game play reasons I don't think they should be part of the human factions in the game unless one has been found and inhabited. Perhaps as the base of the non-Earth Empire faction?

At the moment the strongest argument against them is technical, a full Orbital with ~1g surface effect gravity and ~24hour day is ~6,000,000km across. That means a lot of data to be generated and rendered. I have a bunch of ideas for reducing this to manageable levels but it's always going to be a bloody big object hanging like a bracelet in space.

Andy

#760 implements these and will be in tonight's build (and of course alpha 16). See the SystemBody codedoc for details.

I'm not sure if the Pioneer verse has matter conversion. Niven might have had a few quirks in his book, but I think he's totally right that such a project could only be realized if you can produce the needed materials out of thin air if needs be.

w00t! 😀

A fellow Banks nut (-:

Yup but actually Banks is just a maths nut 🙂 To generate an outward force at the surface equivalent to 1g, whilst also having a 24 hour day/night cycle requires an object to spin at 0.0006944 rpm and be ~6,000,000km in diameter 😀

There's a formula embedded in the code that also needs hooking up so the interface will change from being like a planets to something more like a definition for an Orbital, i.e. day/night cycle in hours, desired inner-surface gravity will give you an object X large and spinning Y rpm. Add in a desired width (edge to edge) of a section and it'll get as close as possible to that and then divide the surface into plate sections appropriately. For an Orbital the size of Earth the rpm is clearly visible even at normal speed! Scary.

They actually require less mass than a planet. The typical one I've been assuming wouldn't require more than 50% of Earths mass. Of course you might have to mine and process about half the planets in the solar system to acquire all of it in the correct forms you needed... details, details...

EDIT - Of course by Niven you mean a Ringworld don't you, hmm, yes. Still not impossible but would probably require the dismantling of every body in the solar system!

I thought that was what everyone was talking about... ?

anyways, you jacked my thread! 👿 😆

I'm aware; I've read him. It's extremely anthropocentric, though: the chances of aliens either using a 24 hour day or requiring 1G is somewhere between negligible and vanishing.

(You also called it an Orbital, which gave it away) (-:

smaller ones yes... oops, I should have said YOINK! ... there, now it's mine 😛 😆

On topic:

I do like the idea of survey missions.

You could even have some that are purely exploratory, lets say, a bonus for being the first to visit and land on particular types of worlds that might be suitable for colonisation?

I suppose at the moment most of humanity is within a small volume but even a long way out there are always "small scale mining and prospecting" which seems a bit like a bug. If there's that much mining going on the Earth's would rapidly be buried beneath hundreds of kilometres of material imported from all of these outlying mining systems!

You could pick up a job from the agency board asking you to visit and land on several worlds across several star systems a reasonable distance outside most of human space. The pay would be good to cover fuel etc, the job would be dangerous because many systems means many possible pirates and potential for crash landings etc, and finally the chance of finding side quests or artifacts would be higher than just plodding around known systems.

You're basically talking about freelance exploration. That will certainly become a topic once the planetary generation is fully fledged out (you know, planet composition and stuff). Doing it before that would only mean doing it twie.

I think that's temporarily. I suppose the "settling algorithm" will undergo some severe rewriting when factions and stuff come into play.

I'm sure they're not mining for Earth. Perhaps they're prospecting for relatively rare materials (such as gold, gallium, tungsten, carbon) for use in the construction of future space stations in that system.

That's counter-intuitive to me. While any artefacts would remain undiscovered only in unexplored systems, the number of artefacts would be, for all practical purposes, zero. Unless you mean alien artefacts, in which case you'd better be a long, long way from Sol. In that case, the odds of stumbling upon the one system with such an artefact is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to it, and that's assuming you stop and search every system in a straight line on the way.

Basically, if you ever find something at random, it's going to seem like the game handed it to you deliberately. The only way that would have believable odds would be the FFE way: Clues, and a mission chain. In a single word, plot.

Actually that was more what I meant, being sent to a system to "survey" it with a knowing nudge wink wink bob's your uncle and do-please-investigate-the-3rd-moon-cheers! 😀

This is where a "hint oracle" could be useful, like the newspapers in FFE. Wouldnt it be cool (when the game itself is finally completed) if you could download a regularly issued txt file that would detail exploits of other players, flying tips, good trade routes ect. It could bring the game to life.

We've been way ahead of you for months, Geraldine (:

https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pion ... k-features

Now there's an idea! Let's hope we don't get too much spam into our bulletin boards (you know, more than the occasional "we need your money!"-ad).

This is going a little much off-topic now, but I might as well ask: Are there any plans for an ingame-logbook, in which the player can write down his own notes? I know there's always alt-tab and notepad, but directly ingame would be more immersive. I couldn't really enjoy the original frontier very much without writing my own log to give the game some more flavour...

No, there are not. You can try to change that, though, by making a feature request on the issues tracker.

That will teach me to keep up to date Brianetta on whats happening in Github! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' /> Actually, that idea goes far further, I was only thinking for something far simpler. Still, it's nice to think we are all thinking along similar lines <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

As to the log, I suggested a muti featured log a while back, https://github.com/p...neer/issues/204

I think adding the ability to enter own own thoughts into it would personalise the game for the player, make them care more about what happens in game.

Anyways, yes off topic, but not my fault.................. <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_confused.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':?' /> um,......this time! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_mrgreen.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':mrgreen:' />