SpaceSimCentral

Ahh, I seldom use this view. Just looked into the code. The radius of the frame is double frameRadius = std::max(4.0*sbody->GetRadius(), sbody->GetMaxChildOrbitalDistance()*1.05); It isn't as easy to change this as it looks, as one must make sure, that the frame does not overlap with other frames. I have been there, hard to debug and not easy to fix. I do not want to go there again at the moment

@lwho, that'd be interesting and probably a good patch to have.We really need a better way of rendering the gas giants too so that we can drop the physical "surface" much deeper and have a truly thick and deep atmosphere. Why it is so huge problem to make small core about size or earth and rest just make huge fog that will after short time just cover all view. Then make this fog flash in colors like shades of specific color set for gas giants and that will give feeling of strong winds. After half way ship would be destroyed anyway. As for now gas giants are no scarry :/ I landed on all gas giants in sol system. Not mention that I landed on earth water.... Pioneer is quite old already so for me it is weird that there is not system for gas giants that would work and be believable :/

I responded to this on the other forums: it's not a problem it just takes time to write it, and there are many other things that also need doing. If you want it done faster then you're welcome to write the code yourself. I'm currently rewriting the Gas Giants rendering and a few associated pieces but I have a girlfriend, a full time job and a social life too.

I responded to this on the other forums: it's not a problem it just takes time to write it, and there are many other things that also need doing. If you want it done faster then you're welcome to write the code yourself. I'm currently rewriting the Gas Giants rendering and a few associated pieces but I have a girlfriend, a full time job and a social life too.I would love to be able to program stuff but I can't. I am into 3D graphic and have no time to learn programing :(Girlfriend is not important thing. That can be skipped lolThere is quite big chance that they may just leave us or cheat on us so why bother xDRisk sucks. As for gas giants. Pioneer is here for quite long so I was curious why that was not done in process of creating planets etc. For me those gas giants and stars should be scary things because they have huge mass and that makes huge gravity. So avoiding crashing into them gives immerse experience. If they are not scary then it is little boring :)Stars in Pioneer are scary because their gravitational pull is huge. I tested some near flights and that was fun to fight with their gravity. Maybe in future there will be mechanism that would bame that ships will start to burn near stars and explosion will occur while ship overheating. As for now I cannot see overheating near star. Similar thing would be used while entering atmospheres. As I mentioned I am not programmer but I thought that it is half day of tweaking to make gas giants look more plausible. Maybe just making one surface at size of what we see without any high atmosphere. After entering below that surface like layer player would lose view and then heat and pressure would build up and ship would slow down and would be pulled faster towards gas giant. Escaping its gravity and dense atmosphere at this point would be very hard and only small ship with good acceleration would be able to perform this more easily. I tested FFE and tried to land on Jupiter and I landed on its first layer because there is no any effect for atmosphere so game allowed me to land on its clouds :/ silly.In my only one favorite elite game (F:E2) gas giants are done in best way as for now in any game that I saw. I tried to land on Jupiter and was in its atmosphere. I saw clouds so that was cool. But I was not able to land there because gravity was to high and it causes my ship to descend at about 240 km/h so after touching ground I exploded. So only in F:E2 I was not able to land on Jupiter :)And only thing that was wrong is that there was possibility to see ground clearly. But I prefer that games like this would not allow to land on them at all. Nobody knows what is below their cloud layers. Maybe small rocky/liquid iron type of core. Or just liquid metal core. We don't know. And those winds are scary even for futuristic spaceships. Those winds would just throw ship and rotate it like crazy.Top layers should be less dangerous and after more descend there should be just point of almost no return Uncontrollable spins of ship etc. Below that gravity should done its work and just drag ship into lower atmospheres and just crash ship. That way nobody would wonder what is deeper inside those gas giants :)This is what I think with my knowledge about gas giants.Not long time ago I saw what David Braben plans to do with gas giants in Elite Dangerous and what I saw was cool. I bet after they release planetary landing I will go for gas giants and would test their "dangerousness" :] course Pioneer engine will never achieve what will be in ED but at least tricks that I mentioned would be cool.

I would love to be able to program stuff but I can't. I am into 3D graphic and have no time to learn programing  Ohh, that's fine we need a lot of 3D graphics (ships, stations, buildings) as well . If you want to contribute 3D assets, just make sure to check with nozmajner (our "art director") in the Dev forum, that what you have in mind fits to the general style of Pioneer before putting too much effort into it. A few things to bear in mind when suggesting features/improvements:While we appreciate ideas what to implement, there is often not a lack of ideas but a lack of helping hands to implement them. Often the devs also have a lot of ideas themselves and not the time to realize all of them.So, an idea "from outside" to have a chance to be realized needs to either align well with something a dev is doing anyway or be well thought-out and show that you put as much effort into the idea as you expect from the developer to put into for implementing.Contributing to Pioneer also increases chances that your ideas will be heard. And there is more than just programming: 3D models (I for one suck at everything arty, so am very grateful if others provide nice graphics), testing (reproducing bugs and giving good bug reports), balancing (working out good balancing of the various tunable parameters like prices and ship properties take a lot of time to figure out)All contributors do so for free and in their spare time, often parallel to a full-time job or full-time studies and of course family and friends. So, "just half a day" (which as experience shows often turns out to be rather "at least two days" or much more ) may well be the time budget a developer can dedicate to Pioneer in one or two weeks.

As I mentioned I am not programmer but I thought that it is half day of tweaking to make gas giants look more plausible. More like 1 to 2 months :(Some things are easy, I could render several "shells" of geometry and pretend they were cloud layers but it won't be very convincing.

@ Andy you're right : que va piano , va sano .

Also yeah we're in desperate need of 3d modellers and 2d artists!