Pioneer Universe- Post your favorite places

[pagroove]

Hi Tomm, No problem. Of course you can use them! Impressed by your program. The Ultra Detail option for planets is so good!I was waiting for Infinity to do such things but now the need is less.I hope you implement a better fighting system than in Frontier. Because for fighting I like Oolite better. But the planet exploring is very good

[pagroove]

Marcel wrote:
His name is not important. Here's how my viewscreen displays Alpha Centauri B h. What a beautiful bon bon of a planet. Looks almost good enough to eat! It also shows something I wanted to mention. Sometimes the text is hard to read due to lack of contrast.
Been Also to BH-Now that is spectacular. Will post some pics soon.

[Potsmoke66]

why this? having lasers for front back top l/r side or what? i never played oolite, so excuse my statement, and i like the system of frontier, i can't see exactly what's not good with it, free fall? that you can't steer the ship like a airplane? i have read that frontier.devs board sometimes, but most hang on to frontier there. i guess some like me wouldn't like it then.to heavy or to weak? also both has stated often (even if i don't believe all of them).i guess some like that the enemy will fall from the sky like a apples from a tree. a ship has a given power your's is the same when the enemy has the same vessel, no advance for the player.and i guess most found the newtonian system annoing, but again spaceships, not airplanes.i really read often that some don't like that, but the ship is in a 0 grav. surrounding no force that drags you except your thrusters, and sorry you could setup thrusters pioneer that are strong or stronger as the main engine, but thats somewhat unrealistic and the i would fly sidewards using the stronger thruster for acceleration. inertia damping has been discussed to, but again such a system (antigrav) you could use even for a main drive so i would prefere than this as "main".i allways liked frontier flight model much, it gives the feel of a spaceship and not a earthbound airplane that moves in a medium like air, which gives you the drag that some miss.allready pioneer differs a bit from frontiers flight model i guess and it's less "accurate", lateral movements "grip" much earlier rather in frontier, imho.but a once accelerated body needs a certain amount of energy to be moved to any side, under conditions of space,that's the difference. and i really wouldn't like to fly around like they do in SW or BSG, absolutely unrealistic!do you feel that's ok a 10'000t ship that is accelerated to 100km/s and makes a full stop like a car on a street? or breaks to the left side like a airplane? i repeat myself such would need "inertia dampers" that are stronger than the main engine, then i would take them to accelerate and leave others all behind me. a bit fantasy is ok, and truely like one has commented to fly in a tiny ship like a eagle through open space is allready unrealistic, but please stay on the ground with one leg at least.further what would be the challange then of a manual flight, when you can do maneuvers like a car, turn left, right when ever you like and break like nothing?SPACESHIP contains the word SHIP not PLANE, one reason i guess is because they act more like a ship rather then a airplane (and not because navy uniforms look neater rather then airfoce ), ships also are hard to stop, maneuvers you can't do in notime, the physics of the element water has allways to be respected and that a ship has a certain mass and if this is in movement you will first have to bringup a certain amount of energy to change the course or stop it. further exactly this is why they do trainings for astronauts underwater, not to make sense for a spacesuit rather to give them a idea how it feels and how you have to coordinate movements under 0 gravity.but feel free to counter that with your suggestions "ich bin ganz ohr" i'm allready curious.

[Potsmoke66]

don't search to far for gliese825 it's right in front of your door!sector -1,0 close to ross154, for those who like to visit it, but maybe everxbody found that allready, there will be more planet's like this i guess, unfortunately i allways pick the odd ones

[Potsmoke66]

i found atlantis [attachment=140:2010-08-22_072232.jpg]i hope i didn't get my boots filled with water therei will never argue about unarmed ships no more, i promise [attachment=141:2010-08-22_081650.jpg]

[Geraldine]

I am having a devil of a time trying to take off using the MORETOM game save. As soon as I break the surface the ship just flips over and crashes. Did manage to do the old trick I used in Frontier and hyperspace at ground level, but I couldn't control the ship after arrival in another star system, which was a shame as an IC turned up to play! So I am back using the default ship and managed to pull off a really sweet docking at a space station then the game crashed So no pictures from me as yet.Oh well, save, save, save :DAs for Marcel's concern over being able to see the text, perhaps this could be fixed by raising the control panel a little and placing the text in little black boxes? That would make it easy enough to read

[Potsmoke66]

sorry yes, the thing is you will launch in pioneer exactly the way you've docked before, that's a bit you will see the ship in proper position in the dock but when launching it tilts to the position it was exactly when docking was engaged, i hope that can be fixed someway, because it's annoying me to especially that you haven't sometimes control about how you dock. i mean you can land properly aligned to horizon but the prog. will tilt your ship due to whatever reason.(maybe because of the halfways into the dock reaching mountainside, because mostly this happens on such places).to launch the MORETOM, just have your finger ready on the manual main thrust, and press as soon as the ship gets free, that worked out for me most times, you may catch a little damage of course.alternatively i can "park" that ship somewhere else on the planet that would help i guess. i didn't thought it would be a big problem for others, maybe a little

[Potsmoke66]

fixed the savegames,starting position on alpha centauri is now at rhodes starport and the ship should start safely.therefore i removed the naval ecm because it gives the player to much extra money when removed, imo.prepped savegames alpha3 01tip; there is a high risk mission on the board to epsilon indi, time limit feb. 4. actual game time is jan. 17. so that should be to manage (this counts for the alpha centauri savegames of course).or sell the sidewinder to an odd eagle and get ~6000 credits back

[pagroove]

I found another spectacular mountain rage at Aplha Centauri B-H. It's much like our Karakorum although much higer.The Highest peak of this range I call simply the Aplha Centauri Tower. It's about 30 km high. Sadly I can reload it because all my savegames on Aplha Centauri B-H don't work. Other planets work. I don't know why. But enjoy:Aplha centauri Tower is situated in a large valley I call the Tower Sanctuary.Here you see the Tower from Sanctuary passAplha Centauri Tower from Tiger passSomewhat higher above Tiger passHere you can see this is really a spectacular mountain

[pagroove]

I can share the savegames if you want so someone can look into why I can't re load the savegames at AC B-H.In my savegames is also the Giese 825 locationEdit Is it an idea that you can buy locator buoys that you can left at the planet to easier find back your locations. A bit like a location marker in Google Earth?

[Potsmoke66]

gliese 825? sector -1,0use the sector code for locationyou can estimate this a bit more precisely, if we use a similar system like it is used for "wormhole" calculations for old FE2.assuming that the center of each sector represents the integer number (which isn't true i guess, in FE2 internally each sector starts at lower left corner, but it doesn't matter for a "user" location system) so gliese 825 would then be at sector -1.1,-0.1 roundabout (somwhat left from center, somwhat down), but it helps much to find a certain location in the systemmap.another example alpha centauri would be then -0.4,0.4 or altair -1.4,-1.5 or arario 5.9,0.75, got it? (0.5 in each direction is the grid you see)to locate a position on a planets surface, hm.....sadly we havn't no MB4 mining machines to place in pioneer, but there is a possibility if you would compare the data of your actual position in the savegame or in the process memory, that should work, at least it has for me in FE2.to get the actual pos on a planetside you would need to compare a lot of data in the process memory but once you will get it.you can use a game geenie or something like that to find the right changing value when you change a position slightly, but it assumes that you have to start the game allways in the same environment, else the adress will change and such programs like game geenie's can't findback the right address in memory then. another possibility is to use a advanced hex editor with which you can explore the process memory, address in the actual process won't change i guess and you can find locations then "easy" but it also affords a lot of comparings to find the right address.or draw a simple map.but i don't know if that is at all very useful, might be names and location will still be changed, there was at least one change to that, i recocgnized it while i was looking at the pics in the gallery and wanted to find that system.i guess it is SC 3034 +5 +0 fortunatly SC systems carry their system sector in the name but unfortunately at +5, 0 i can't find such a system (i looked around close sectors, or changed the not to clearly readable 0 to 8, 6 or 9 and searched negations of it to) there is only one system in this sector Quce, but it's a complete different one, only a single star system while SC3034 must have had at least 3 you can see that at the uppercase Cso i guess before the game is at least allmost complete i wouldn't do such locating for planetsides. the planets in a system you will find or the planets look could change for all systems with a change to the system- or terrain generating code.

[mathee]

Hey guys,my first post here. i've been following this project for quite a while now and it is so awesome! i did some explorations in a huge number of systems and everytime i am overwhelmed by those planets, they look so beautiful from space.and that leads directly to my question, if there's anybody here who can answer it: Do you know if tomm is working on those atmospheres? i remember someone mentioned already here that it would be perfect if you had a real blue (or green or red or whatever ) sky on a planet. You all know that even on pioneer's earth you can see stars during the day and when you look above then you see the black space. it would be so cool if that was different so that you would have the real feeling of being "on a planet" and not just "close to the surface" I know it is just a graphical thing and not really important for the gameplay, however it would improve the game depth drastically on my opinion.

[tomm]

mathee wrote:
Hey guys,my first post here. i've been following this project for quite a while now and it is so awesome! i did some explorations in a huge number of systems and everytime i am overwhelmed by those planets, they look so beautiful from space.and that leads directly to my question, if there's anybody here who can answer it: Do you know if tomm is working on those atmospheres? i remember someone mentioned already here that it would be perfect if you had a real blue (or green or red or whatever ) sky on a planet. You all know that even on pioneer's earth you can see stars during the day and when you look above then you see the black space. it would be so cool if that was different so that you would have the real feeling of being "on a planet" and not just "close to the surface" I know it is just a graphical thing and not really important for the gameplay, however it would improve the game depth drastically on my opinion.
Yeah I've thought a bit about the problem.Starlight should also attenuate (get dimmer the further away you are). You don't see stars during the day on earth, but out by the orbit of neptune perhaps a planet with a similar atmosphere would have starry daytimes.Something about the brightness of the scene needs to be known when the background stars are drawn, which is first in the scene. Doing it this way, stars would still be incorrectly visible through planet atmospheres when viewed near the planet but still 'in space'. When the atmosphere is drawn the alpha blend doesn't know anything about the absolute brightness of the object already drawn to the framebuffer, so can't do it right.I wonder how the smart people do it (infinity)?

[tomm]

In fact, I think the solution is what is called HDR, which recent cards can do. So for pioneer v1.0 the answer will be a hack of some kind, since HDR will probably be a bit intrusive while trying to keep opengl 1.4 backward compatibility. Maybe v2.0

[mathee]

yeah... i guess some sort of fading the star-background texture to the planet's dominant atmosphere color would create some nasty effects if you have a moon or gas giant rising at the horizon (with its black side pointing away from the sun ), am i right?Unfortunately i am not a coder, so i can't help. (however i am a musician, maybe i can contribute something by trying to get the players attention on something else than stars during daytime )

[pagroove]

Does anyone want my save games?

[pagroove]

Found my new favorite place. Waedla h1 is a rare outdoor moon around a gas giant. splendid views here

[Potsmoke66]

the broken ones?i don't know, i gave mine up, sometimes that seems to happen, especially savegames right after hyperspacing i have lost some to (alpha2), since then this hasn't happend (mostly because i evade to save my games after hyperspacing or "update" them soon as i'm docked also i use more steps since then to be shure, no. like this, jameson_0_0, jameson_0_1, jameson_0_2 etc., if one get's broken i still have a working one in a close location, it's very wise to save as often as possible and before any new action) but i guess it could still happen.i can't say if there is a way to fix them, i guess not.it's strange they have worked i know, but in a different session you can't load them again.lot's of such "small" bugs are still in the game."undockable" starports, you simply have to put them on a black list (such that terminate the game).starports that make launching impossible by some mishandling of the direction i guess, i.e. altair (-1.4,-1.5) i2 mooney starport. first i thought it was my fault but i checked the dock with different ships and it allways happens the same when docking the ship gets tuned completely to the right side and stands by near on it's "wings", then you will launch exactly in this position, also the camara does a weird roll when outside view is selected.launching....(re) docking...sometimes you cant launch then without getting wrecked!and this is not the only one that acts this kind.have seen the cool new pics, while i was writing....

[Potsmoke66]

waedla, sector?

[Potsmoke66]

i guess i make a special ship which you can launch from the right side :lol:pagroove, you must excuse my couriosity, but what kinda ship is that on your avatar?