Alpha 9 released

[s2odan]

Well we certainly can't add all of the stars. There are far too many, and the average computer would not have enough diskspace.But what we can, and are going to do, is add all of the bright stars, around 150,000 of them.Thats totally acceptable. Only use a few extra MB of space.
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but, what i can imagine is some nearby, let's say a circle of 1 or 2 sectors (maybe more).
I have already said that me and one other person have in fact been working on this....I will post an example for you later... ;)We won't have just 1 or 2 sectors of stars, but rather over 2000 custom star-systems. 2000! not 10, or 20, but 2000! That gives you roughly 100-200 sectors full to the brim with custom stars, perhaps a lot more. :DThis is in fact the whole reason why we think that we have to upgrade to a 3d galaxy. Too many tricks are invloved in faking a 3d galaxy on a 2d plane.With a proper 3d galaxy, we can literally just use 10s of 1000s of star systems as they are without everything becoming too over-crowded.We could have Celestia-like accuracy...
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dan i guess you misunderstood him, he didn't ment to shrink the real thickness to 16ly, he suggested only to shrink the distance for the view in the map.
Ninja'd, yeah I got the wrong end of the stick. I'll give that some thought.

[Potsmoke66]

he suggested to make them visible in the game view (while having the chance to see polaris from london), which a lot have suggested before even, but i guess this goes to far, maybe some ok, and maybe some well known very bright ones to give you a rough orientation (but what about deep space sectors?).

[s2odan]

If a 3d galaxy doesn't work out, then we might try something like this. But I do think it would be very aggravating from a players perspective, being able to see stars that look like they are in range, but in fact they are over 10times outside your range :)Edit: Also, the screen would be *very* crowded if you compacted 100 sectors into 1.
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i know the idea of using a "find...." isn't far away,but wouldn't that kill some of the fun in pioneer, if everything runs automated like some suggested it will 1000 years in future, it get's boring if i have only to press buttons, that's why i hate most of the RPG's you have nothing to do. it's like watching a movie a pressing the right button from time to time
Ya I have in fact been thinking about adding in a feature like that. With a true 3d galaxy you would need it. Remember though you don't have to use it.. and I would never make it a requirement to use such a feature...You mentioned modern RPGs, which is a very good example.... They have all these nice features which are ok, but you cannot play without them... which is very bad. EG.. Oblivion, if you remove the compass that shows you where to go, there is no real way of playing the game as the game has no other means of informing you where something is.The best idea we have had so far for a true 3d galaxy was Rob's idea, which was to use an isometric style display with all sectors greyed out except the one you have selected. So you would click left, right, up, down, forwards or backwards to move to the next sector. It would help stop overlap.
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he suggested to make them visible in the game view (while having the chance to see polaris from london), which a lot have suggested before even, but i guess this goes to far, maybe some ok, and maybe some well known very bright ones to give you a rough orientation (but what about deep space sectors?).
Oh I see that your talking about something else now. :)So you mean how costly it is to track the stars in a few sectors to update the sky box?... Not costly at all. For a start to make things easy, we could automatically always track very bright custom stars, (Custom star is a real star) like Polaris or Sirius or any other massive stars.But we're getting ahead of ourselves :)Edit again: And deepspace sectors... Well did you ever play Noctis? You could fly to the edge of the galaxy there too and you would eventually hit the void

[Potsmoke66]

a few sectors yes, and some well known i guess that's in range, but in the end the background won't change, but well i wonder how such will look.---like i thought it would have to be a isometric view,375 - 2000 sectors, goodness that's quite a lot of thickness...and you like to move in such a map without loosing orientation? good luck commander i guess most will loose orientation at least 2 sectors from sol (i remember how heavyly i used frontiers printed map in beginning). :lol:i have a idea, how about if the grids color would reflect the z depth in the map, this would mean only a very slight change from sector to sector even if you use the full scale from red to violet, but it could be useful. additionally to a z value, but numbers have no meaning and it's hard to imagine where you are in 3d. give the brain a reference for 3rd dimension and it gets easier, you will feel after some experience, if you are on solar reference plane, or how much above or below.

[s2odan]

Well theres a few ideas going around for how we will solve that, one way would be to have a kind of minimap or 3dcompass which always point towards some set landmarks, such as galactic center, Earth and Polaris perhaps, and maybe one or two other giant stars.Plus you always have your X,Y,Z co-ordinates, so you can always back-track.Now is the time to voice any ideas though as this is still just theoretical stuff until someone actually codes it

[Potsmoke66]

from previous page...
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i have a idea, how about if the grids color would reflect the z depth in the map, this would mean only a very slight change from sector to sector even if you use the full scale from red to violet, but it could be useful. additionally to a z value, but numbers have no meaning and it's hard to imagine where you are in 3d. give the brain a reference for 3rd dimension and it gets easier, you will feel after some experience, if you are on solar reference plane, or how much above or below.
the mini compass sounds good, i guess it needs only two reference points sol and a free to set one, to many will be confusing or cost overview at least.the "compass" itself i guess should have a fixed orientation (same as the map view), so two arrows from center pointing to the reference points would give a good idea about where you are, the galacical center is not so important to know for mankind i mean if you go somewhere in the world how you orient yourself? i'm so and so far from HOME, or HOME is in this direction, or have you ever heard of one using greenwich as reference when he's born in china?. anyway the grid is oriented by it's dimensions.

[Potsmoke66]

a hint for all the slartibartfasts out there,if you setup a distant system like i did for Antares, then you might find it hard to spot the system or to travel there to check the appearance of your planets.just name the script 00_a_mysystem.lua* and position it in sector 0,0 you will find yourself then in this system instead of sol when you start the game.note that randomly seeded stuff will change with the sector, all "hard coded" will stay of course.the system seed together with the systems location will effect the economy type and population of the system, in some locations some economy types are hard to reach or unreachable.i experienced a pattern in seeding and you can expect that when you have a certain economy type at a given single number, i.e. 4 the chances are high that somewhere between 35 and 45 something similar will be generated this can be exceeded (hit at 43, 420 - 440 and so on).if you like to find a fitting economy type for your system it has to be placed in it's final location, disable a given "short desc", so you can see on the map it's economy type when you select the system (save a test game with the system selected).anyway i would use this only in very special cases and leave it else to the economy type, i.e. Barnard's Star - "Federal Prison Camp" as short description, but most systems i would leave it to the economy type that has been generated. further i would disable all ships except for the eagle and the lanner, as long as you like to check only such a system, this shortens loading time drastically (or use a special slimmed install of pioneer).* the "00_a_" is important to make shure the script gets handled before 00_sol, of course later you will have to rename it to it's proper name including it's system sector number.i would appreciate the real coordinates of Antares much (or is it in the parse gliese script allready, no it's to far), maybe some well known other giants that everybody's looking for first. actually i transposed only frontiers coordinates which is not proper (-39.45,+34.95).and finally i like definately jumping once to Beta Lyrae without crashing the game ---oh yes, Binary systems, ther'e some troubles with it, unlike when you specify a binary system a generated binary system can have a star orbiting in a star (hulls bigger then orbit),of course only in such exotic cases like Antares.further it seems to be only possible to setup binary systems where one star orbit's the other, binary systems where stars orbiting each other can only be generated from seed.

[robn]

potsmoke66 wrote:
* the "00_a_" is important to make shure the script gets handled before 00_sol, of course later you will have to rename it to it's proper name including it's system sector number.
A note about the naming of system scripts.In the Pioneer engine, stars are referenced by a three-digit path containing the X,Y sector location and the system index. The system index is assigned sequentially based on the order the stars are defined (generated and custom). When you save your game, your location is saved in the same way. As such, its imperative that the systems are generated and loaded in the same order in every run of the game.To ensure this is always the case with custom systems on every platform, the sector number is encoded into the filename. The files are sorted numerically before they're loaded so they always load in the same order. If you do something to change this ordering, then you break save files - its that simple.The p00/n00 directory structure is there just to break things up, as having hundreds or even thousands of system scripts in the same directory would rapidly become confusing. Those directory names are not used by the game.You can of course do whatever you like for your own testing, but just be aware of what the names are all about.

[s2odan]

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i mean if you go somewhere in the world how you orient yourself?

You use a reference point that does not move, like the sun. Or at night, the north star...Same idea in space.

[Potsmoke66]

i'm aware (and i hope any other to) of that,but as long as i can "beam" myself to a distant system, it's a good way to view your work, i tried to reach Antares, well i stopped after two hours of playing...close systems this isn't important if you can reach them in a few jumps and if it's generated it doesn't matter anyway, you can visit the system once to see what's became of it.keep also in mind that when you add a new object to a "hard coded" system, you will have to re-enter it to take effect ("old" savegames will halt the game). if you change the position of a starport you will also have to reenter the system to take effect. so best is save a game before you jumped to your system and one when you arrived, you can check (i guess anybody knows) selected objects with CTRL-F10 and also play around with the seeding for the planets. unfortunately gas giants will loose their proper appearance when you change the seed, but it acts anyway more like a color scheme and you can write down quickly some you've experienced once and re-use the seed for the gas giants anywhere.you can control the appearance of a starport with the seed (even bigger - smaller, that's nice). if you change the seed for a planet the cities buildings will be on surface, the starport will have it's old location (above or under), unless you re-enter the system.if you like to setup a custom system and "build" it yourself, experiment first with the seed for the system until you find one that comes close to the one you've imagined.you can read it's data and use it in the script, that helps much.unfortunately economy is only selected by seed, it needs many tries until you got a populated system and even more to get a specific economy or a specific amount of population.further i can't tell if the seed will be constant in upcoming releases...? so it could be a populated gets "empty".

[Potsmoke66]

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You use a reference point that does not move, like the sun. Or at night, the north star...Same idea in space.
are you shure about that?i know what you mean, but these reference points are abstract, humans as subjects use their own location as reference or where they came from (that is what you feel and not what you compute). a reason why we are lost on open sea without a compass and some bright stars to navigate after.or to compare if i would have a compass on the system map showing me the center of the galaxy that wouldn't help me much to orient me as a human coming from sol, else try to number sectors with the galactical center as 0,0 and i guess it get's allready hard to tell where you are in a planar galaxy.further the used coordinate system is set by the extensions of the galaxy it's allways easy to tell in which direction the center is (estimated).what i suggest is something like thatif you like you can use the green arrows as reference for centre, so that if you possibly rotate the map and compass, it will still show the proper reference to centre.if you like to keep the cube static while you rotate the map, you would have to use a arrow or leave that center, center for god'sake, it's really not important to know i guess (i don't have to tell you how many hours i spent once to evaluate frontiers galaxy centre, but that's another story).

[Potsmoke66]

something's wrong...i had the idea to use this...
Code:
local port_1 = CustomSBody:new('lo_1', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(0)):longitude(math.deg2rad(0))local port_2 = CustomSBody:new('lo_2', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(0)):longitude(math.deg2rad(45))local port_3 = CustomSBody:new('lo_3', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(0)):longitude(math.deg2rad(90))local port_4 = CustomSBody:new('lo_4', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(0)):longitude(math.deg2rad(135))local port_5 = CustomSBody:new('lo_5', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(0)):longitude(math.deg2rad(180))local port_6 = CustomSBody:new('lo_6', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(0)):longitude(math.deg2rad(225))local port_7 = CustomSBody:new('lo_7', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(0)):longitude(math.deg2rad(270))local port_8 = CustomSBody:new('lo_8', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(0)):longitude(math.deg2rad(315))local port_9 = CustomSBody:new('la_1', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(0)):longitude(math.deg2rad(0))local port_10 = CustomSBody:new('la_2', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(45)):longitude(math.deg2rad(0))local port_11 = CustomSBody:new('la_3', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(90)):longitude(math.deg2rad(0))local port_12 = CustomSBody:new('la_4', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(135)):longitude(math.deg2rad(0))local port_13 = CustomSBody:new('la_5', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(180)):longitude(math.deg2rad(0))local port_14 = CustomSBody:new('la_6', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(225)):longitude(math.deg2rad(0))local port_15 = CustomSBody:new('la_7', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(270)):longitude(math.deg2rad(0))local port_16 = CustomSBody:new('la_8', Body.Type.STARPORT_SURFACE)--:seed(2):latitude(math.deg2rad(315)):longitude(math.deg2rad(0))
...as a orientation help on generated planets to easier locate a new starport ('cause they look stupid in the sea ).but the starports are not all in the expected location (???)"lo_3" and "la_5" arn't where they should be.i hope this will show what i meanon top you see la_3 on bottom la_6, la_2 is on the right, while all "latitudal" stations should appear like pearls on a string in this view.

[Potsmoke66]

the alps, as they appear in pioneer

[Potsmoke66]

i forgot a slight bug, in some systems when you select a target and engage the autopilot the game crashes.sometimes it crashes while lifting the undercarriage when you leave a starport, next load of a saved game it's ok.---to the above wrong positioned portsin this picture la_2 is la: 43° and la_3 la: 56°in this picture la_2 is la: 42° and la_3 la: 57°i hope that's somehow helpfulthe funny thing is that they are out of position longitudal, while i didn't changed the longitude for "la_" ports---you see the speed i allready got? and i'm gettin' nowhere.this star (antares) is so huge when you enter the system you materialise almost inside the star.---shots do have a mass, this couldn't be the view angle...?---artist's view to a binary system,PIONEER can do that better!

[Potsmoke66]

ok dan, i'm sidned up to githubgimme a short advice before i mess up all...---this is how we look at the local sectors when you start a game no?then tell me how did get van maanen's star to the "right" (2,0)?

[s2odan]

Maybe it likes it there... Looks like either a problem with the star data or a problem with the script. Gliese 3 star data is pretty new though. And the script isn't likely to be consistent all that time, and fail on one star. Perhaps that is the location of VanMaanan2 in Gliese3.dat, so they just updated its location. Although I have also read that gliese catalogues are not so accurate on their positions of some stars due to the method they use....The star catalogue used in FFE and Frontier gets a lot of stuff wrong as you will see when we finally get this more modern and more accurate system into the game.
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ok dan, i'm sidned up to githubgimme a short advice before i mess up all...
Your windows, so the easiest way for you is to download TortoiseGIT. Adds simple right click context sensitive menus to the windows interface so you can use GITs features.Right click on a folder, choose Git Clone, then add in your details for the fork that you wish to clone, this is either Robs main branch or the fork you already made of that on the website.Let it do its thing, make your changes... Right click -> Commit to save changes into your fork, then Push to send them to the GitHub website.Note, if you add in new files, you will have to include them manually by ticking a box next to the name when you Commit the changes.

[Potsmoke66]

yes, it can be helpful to compare different sources.i know, checking all data would be impossible, but well the ones we know well and stay close should be accurate, more exotic systems won't matter because no one will suspect.but i swear Steve would be one of the first who argues "but this isn't the proper location...", some frontierheads have very huge astronomical knowledge.no one will know, except by browsing throgh databases, where Gliese nnnn is, but Spica you will look for even when it's very to far to reach.

[robn]

potsmoke66 wrote:
...as a orientation help on generated planets to easier locate a new starport ('cause they look stupid in the sea ).but the starports are not all in the expected location (???)"lo_3" and "la_5" arn't where they should be.i hope this will show what i meanon top you see la_3 on bottom la_6, la_2 is on the right, while all "latitudal" stations should appear like pearls on a string in this view.
To be honest I never actually checked that these attributes did the right thing. The were named "latitude" and "longitude" in the old custom systems setup, so I just brought them across. I've made a note to check the maths sometime soon.

[robn]

potsmoke66 wrote:
this star (antares) is so huge when you enter the system you materialise almost inside the star.
Currently when you hyperspace into a system Pioneer places you somewhere between 5 and 6 AU of the target body (usually the star). It should be smarter about this - it should take size and position of the system bodies into account to make sure that you're in clear space not too close to anything.How is this star defined?

[Marcel]

This is a reply to the discussion earlier about having 1500+ stars displayed, perhaps enough to simulate the Milky Way without using the current "ribbon". I doubt that we could plot enough stars to simulate the galaxy without slowing my old computer to a crawl. You guys have probably already had these thoughts but a static background image seems essential. First of all I'm thinking that the ribbon should be replaced with an actual whole sky image. This view would remain essentially the same at whatever system we're likely to visit in Pioneer. The 1500+ local stars would be calculated at start up and drawn on top of the sky image and saved to a temporary sky image that would be used in the game. When jumping to another system we have a countdown to calculate to jump. This time could be used to actually calculate the jump. Take the starting point of each local star, "A" calculate the place it where will be at the end of the jump, "B" and draw a line from A to B to get the star streaky effect. Draw the stars at B on top of the sky image and save it as the current temporary background image. It may not be as dramatic as the current effect, 8LY isn't very far really, but it would be realistic. Maybe a blue/red color shift would make it look cool. If the stars are actually plotted you could do cool things like show how the constellations are distorted when you are away from Earth, etc.Just my ideas for what it's worth because I can't actually do any of this.