Let's Play: Pioneer!

[bchimself]

Brianetta wrote:
Looks like Arphi's white dwarf is somewhere inside the primary M class star. That might explain the glitches and the crashes when the white dwarf is selected as an autopilot destination.
Haha, very weird. If that happened in actual space, hmm...would it destroy the two stars or would it restart the fusion process and create a larger more stable star?

[robn]

Brianetta wrote:
Looks like Arphi's white dwarf is somewhere inside the primary M class star. That might explain the glitches and the crashes when the white dwarf is selected as an autopilot destination.
Curious. We did some work on this a few months ago and it should now be impossible for a body's orbit to be inside another body.Arphi has all sorts of weirdness as noted in the video. I'll be checking it out tonight or tomorrow sometime. I love test cases

[robn]

Just finished watching episodes 9 and 10. I love this series, mostly because its a great way to see a bit of the universe we're making. We devs don't get let out much. Creating a whole galaxy takes a while and you don't get much time off.Some notes and responses to questions you asked. From episode 9:[*:3buiq7hx]There's been no changes to terrain for alpha 18. You just found one that looked nice. There's lots of terrain variation possible, and some look nicer than others.[*:3buiq7hx]We don't have specific plans for lava flows at this time. We do have a lot we want to do with terrains though, and some realtime effects (lava, water, weather) are definitely on the list.Episode 10:[*:3buiq7hx]There's been no changes to political stuff. Anything relating to politics, factions, economy, crime, etc is on hold until we put together a coherent design that incorporates all of these things.[*:3buiq7hx]HDR does cause some flicker. We've known about it for a while but it hasn't really been investigated. Arphi certainly does it more than I've seen. I'm going to guess there's some kind of overflow in the GPU code that handles star intensity. I'll stare at it a while and see if I can make sense of it.[*:3buiq7hx]Between HDR and that white dwarf crash, Arphi is looking like a great testing system. Thanks for finding it![*:3buiq7hx]The "unstable" qualifier on the orange giant star simply means that its brightness varies over time, presumably because its in a transitional state between phases. If that's the case (its somewhat theoretical), then there's still millions of years between phases, so its not a useful instability on human scale. I'm not really good with the details of this. One of our amateur astronomers can probably provide more detail.[*:3buiq7hx]The option to remove the HUD is coming. The UI code is currently a godforsaken hellmouth. Basically almost ever UI thing you see (button, image, text, etc) exists independently of everything else, so to turn it off you have to run through them all and switch them off. Its complicated though because some things switch themselves off and on as part of their normal operation (eg the target list, navigation/comms options, etc). We're slowly restructuring it all so eventually will have a single button that performs a single "disable hud" operation, and that's the end of it. Expect it this year sometime (because I'll go quite insane if I'm still working on UI code this time next year).[*:3buiq7hx]Right now objects don't cast shadows on other objects, which is why your ship is all lit up on the dark side of the planet. There's a patch in the queue to add body-to-body shadows (ie eclipses) which we're hoping to have in by alpha 19. Full shadows everywhere will hopefully come not long after that.[*:3buiq7hx]A lot of planets and your ship are drawn overbright and washed-out when they're close to star. This is part of the way our HDR implementation currently works and as you saw, it just looks terrible in some situations. We've known we need to do something about it but nobody has really given it enough thought to know what to do exactly.[*:3buiq7hx]It would probably be good to show temperatures in kelvin and celsius. Celsius is good when temperatures are in ranges that humans are familiar with, and kelvin is good for the extremes. If we just showed both we'd deal with it everywhere.In a few videos you've wondered if something was new in the current release. The list of new stuff ships with the builds in Changelog.txt, which are also available here: https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/blob/master/Changelog.txtLooking forward to episode 11!

[bchimself]

robn wrote:
Just finished watching episodes 9 and 10. I love this series, mostly because its a great way to see a bit of the universe we're making. We devs don't get let out much. Creating a whole galaxy takes a while and you don't get much time off.Some notes and responses to questions you asked. From episode 9:[*:dqbkk3pz]There's been no changes to terrain for alpha 18. You just found one that looked nice. There's lots of terrain variation possible, and some look nicer than others.[*:dqbkk3pz]We don't have specific plans for lava flows at this time. We do have a lot we want to do with terrains though, and some realtime effects (lava, water, weather) are definitely on the list.Episode 10:[*:dqbkk3pz]There's been no changes to political stuff. Anything relating to politics, factions, economy, crime, etc is on hold until we put together a coherent design that incorporates all of these things.[*:dqbkk3pz]HDR does cause some flicker. We've known about it for a while but it hasn't really been investigated. Arphi certainly does it more than I've seen. I'm going to guess there's some kind of overflow in the GPU code that handles star intensity. I'll stare at it a while and see if I can make sense of it.[*:dqbkk3pz]Between HDR and that white dwarf crash, Arphi is looking like a great testing system. Thanks for finding it![*:dqbkk3pz]The "unstable" qualifier on the orange giant star simply means that its brightness varies over time, presumably because its in a transitional state between phases. If that's the case (its somewhat theoretical), then there's still millions of years between phases, so its not a useful instability on human scale. I'm not really good with the details of this. One of our amateur astronomers can probably provide more detail.[*:dqbkk3pz]The option to remove the HUD is coming. The UI code is currently a godforsaken hellmouth. Basically almost ever UI thing you see (button, image, text, etc) exists independently of everything else, so to turn it off you have to run through them all and switch them off. Its complicated though because some things switch themselves off and on as part of their normal operation (eg the target list, navigation/comms options, etc). We're slowly restructuring it all so eventually will have a single button that performs a single "disable hud" operation, and that's the end of it. Expect it this year sometime (because I'll go quite insane if I'm still working on UI code this time next year).[*:dqbkk3pz]Right now objects don't cast shadows on other objects, which is why your ship is all lit up on the dark side of the planet. There's a patch in the queue to add body-to-body shadows (ie eclipses) which we're hoping to have in by alpha 19. Full shadows everywhere will hopefully come not long after that.[*:dqbkk3pz]A lot of planets and your ship are drawn overbright and washed-out when they're close to star. This is part of the way our HDR implementation currently works and as you saw, it just looks terrible in some situations. We've known we need to do something about it but nobody has really given it enough thought to know what to do exactly.[*:dqbkk3pz]It would probably be good to show temperatures in kelvin and celsius. Celsius is good when temperatures are in ranges that humans are familiar with, and kelvin is good for the extremes. If we just showed both we'd deal with it everywhere.In a few videos you've wondered if something was new in the current release. The list of new stuff ships with the builds in Changelog.txt, which are also available here: https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/blob/master/Changelog.txtLooking forward to episode 11!
Glad I could provide some bug testing for you guys! Thanks for the great answers to my questions, I am very satisfied, although I'm sure more questions will pop up soon.Episode 11 currently uploading to YT, will post here once it processes!

[bchimself]

Ep. 11 up!

[bchimself]

And Episode 12! I'm working on 13 as well, might be more. I gotta make up for the time I was gone!

[bchimself]

Episode 13 is up now! I will start work on the next one at some point today but it is currently not in production.

[Brianetta]

Landing on an asteroid (and a planet, for that matter) requires that your wheels are lined up with the centre of the asteroid, not with the surface. This is why you had trouble landing on Ceay B a.

[s2odan]

robn wrote:
There's been no changes to terrain for alpha 18. You just found one that looked nice. There's lots of terrain variation possible, and some look nicer than others.
Didn't you revert the christmas changes? If you did then there will be one change, just to the amount of ice in the galaxy So a handful of terrains may have changed from planet to planet.
Quote:
Ep. 11 up!And Episode 12!Episode 13 is up now!
Cool! Plenty of cool stuff to watch tonight now :)P.S. That bright gas giant is cool

[robn]

s2odan wrote:


robn wrote:
There's been no changes to terrain for alpha 18. You just found one that looked nice. There's lots of terrain variation possible, and some look nicer than others.
Didn't you revert the christmas changes? If you did then there will be one change, just to the amount of ice in the galaxy So a handful of terrains may have changed from planet to planet.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that

[Marcel]

In Completed Models for Pioneer, s2odan wrote,
Quote:
Nice work dude!
I'm throwing that back at you, with a CC to bchimself!

[bchimself]

Marcel wrote:
In Completed Models for Pioneer, s2odan wrote,
Quote:
Nice work dude!
I'm throwing that back at you, with a CC to bchimself!
Thank you, sir!

[bchimself]

Episode 14 is up! I found another potential buggy system you guys might want to check out.

[Brianetta]

bchimself wrote:
I found another potential buggy system you guys might want to check out.
That you did, sir. I think you've already sampled in depth a greater variety of systems than most people have.

[bchimself]

Brianetta wrote:


bchimself wrote:
I found another potential buggy system you guys might want to check out.
That you did, sir. I think you've already sampled in depth a greater variety of systems than most people have.
Hah, it is a game of exploration!

[bchimself]

I've taken to checking out systems before filming and have run in to many multi-star systems that look hugely interesting. However, it seems the game crashes when trying to use autopilot in EVERY multi-star system I've been in so far. This is making filming really boring as I'm having to skip over the stranger more entertaining systems (especially with the great multi-sunrises!).Is there anything you guys can do? Should I list a couple more systems I have found (they are similar to Arphi)? Should I use a nightly build?

[Brianetta]

All the systems are generated by the same generation routines, and it looks like it's that which is at fault. My suspicion is that you're seeing many examples of exactly the same bug. It's the same in the current master branch, so a nightly build won't help you yet.

[robn]

bchimself wrote:
I've taken to checking out systems before filming and have run in to many multi-star systems that look hugely interesting. However, it seems the game crashes when trying to use autopilot in EVERY multi-star system I've been in so far. This is making filming really boring as I'm having to skip over the stranger more entertaining systems (especially with the great multi-sunrises!).Is there anything you guys can do? Should I list a couple more systems I have found (they are similar to Arphi)? Should I use a nightly build?
We already chatted in IRC today, but I'll note it here for gallery. There is a problem with the autopilot in triple and quadruple systems, and its now logged as issue #921. I'm busy this weekend but will be getting into it early next week. It should be a fairly straightforward fix, I just need to properly understand it first.

[bchimself]

Ep 15 is up! I crash a lot in this one. I got a lesson from wavemotion afterwards (aim the back of ur thrusters at the middle of the planet...duh).

[Overlord]

Thats some nice views there. How far have you travelled/got left to go?