SpaceSimCentral

bchimself wrote:


bchimself wrote:
1 Galactic year = the time it takes Sol to completely revolve around the galaxy.Year 1 would be 13.8 billion Solar Years ago at the Big Bang. How many Galactic Years has it been since then? I'd be interested to know.
Answered my own question. Has a handy time-line of events:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_yearCheck out the rotation of some of the other star systems...they aren't following basic orbits yet Sol is (unless that's due to our perspective and frame of reference). Very strange!Humanity has been around for less than 1 GY...Earth exists in the "green zone" of our star, not too far, not too close. Now, based on that gif of solar system orbits, it seems that Sol is in the "green zone" of the galaxy. We are just close enough and just far enough to have a nice circular orbit around the center. If you watch some of the other systems with their irregular orbits, they may be colliding with other star systems, being thrown into the supermassive black hole at the center, or otherwise damaged by coming in close vicinity with other systems. This makes me wonder if there is a "green belt" of life-filled star systems along or near our orbital route, and that in the future we might hone our searches for life to these systems, in the same way that we look for life in the green zone of the star systems themselves.(now we're way off topic, sry)
Lol it's called the GHZ apparently. Galactic Habitable Zone.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_zone#Galactic_habitable_zone

I agree with Geraldine about setting Pioneer time to GMT. Strangely, I never noticed that is wasn't.

l'anno galattico,buona idea, ma è un decisamente troppo lungo per le sessioni di gioco. a mio parere il tempo dovrebbe iniziare con l'inizio del gioco, ed essere basato giorni, ore secondi, terrestri. l'anno e il mese varia da pianeta a pianeta, e sulla terra hanno funzioni, che nello spazio non avrebbero necessitàd'essere considerate Credo però che la questione comprenda anche un'altro aspetto . il tempo in pioneer è funzionale solo per le missioni con scadenza, perciò, per queste ultime, non sarebbe più semplice adottare un sitema a conto alla rovescia basato sempre su giorni ore secondi terrestri?

Hello,What kind of temperature will trigger the "hull temp" display ?I ask becayse i was thinking that on this kind of planet that close to a sun, the hull should start to display a little temperature ?

Robsoie wrote:
Hello,What kind of temperature will trigger the "hull temp" display ?I ask becayse i was thinking that on this kind of planet that close to a sun, the hull should start to display a little temperature ?
It should, and one day it will. At the moment, the only thing that will warm your hull up is atmospheric friction.Take a look.

Thanks, good to see that heat management is planned.

Sorry, guys, it took me so long.Russian.txt

I need some help getting my ground stations additions onto github. I've been following the help.github instructions and have set up Git, forked a repo, cloned it to my machine and made my changes. I'm stymied about how to push my commit into my fork so I can make a pull request. I got up to '$ git push origin master'. It asked for my passphrase, then reported that everything is up to date. No changes show up in my branch. Do I use the clone command or what?

Кочевник wrote:
Sorry, guys, it took me so long.Russian.txt
https://github.com/Brianetta/pioneer/commits/russianUnfortunately, it doesn't work properly. I converted the file into UTF-8, and then I had to remove the following tokens (which have been removed, or have changed):
Code:
PLANET_DETAIL_LEVEL Уровень детализации планет:JETTISONED "Выброшена 1 тонна: "SOMEWHERE_SPACEPORT " Космопорт"SOMEWHERE_STARPORT " Звездный порт"HYPERSPACE_X_CLOUD Гиперпространственное %s облакоARRIVAL прибытиеDEPARTURE отбытие
These are GONE now, but Russian doesn't work at all. I'd be grateful if you could check out the file itself, just in case you can see something wrong there.https://github.com/Brianetta/pioneer/blob/russian/data/lang/Russian.txt

Well, the first thing I think might be the cause is this:
Quote:
# Настройка / игровое управление
Not sure if the lines wiht # symbol should be translated.Btw, what do you mean by "doesn't work". Doesn't it appear in the list of languaches or cannot be displayed?First of all, does the game support cyrillic fonts? It might well be the cause.

Кочевник wrote:
Well, the first thing I think might be the cause is this:
Quote:
# Настройка / игровое управление
Not sure if the lines wiht # symbol should be translated.Btw, what do you mean by "doesn't work". Doesn't it appear in the list of languaches or cannot be displayed?First of all, does the game support cyrillic fonts? It might well be the cause.
It cannot be displayed. Not only that, but it has some parameter errors in place of strings in some places.Lines beginning with # are comments, and are ignored by Pioneer.

Hi all, just registered for a bit of feedback and some thoughts, hope I can post it here. First of all, I'm really impressed by your work so far, and especially with the outlook of having features I always dreamed of in good old Frontier. Persistent character entities for example, with skills and die rolls, wow, that could lead to some very interesting RPG-like mission types.I have tried Alpha 18 a few days before and now Alpha 19, and have to say that I like the controls much better now. You can simultaneously roll with the keyboard and pitch/yaw with the mouse, and with the right keymap (for me, Enter/RShift: accel/decel, 2x3 block directly left of that: strafe/roll) I have complete control for complicated maneuvers... that is really a step towards immersion. Also, only the relative mouse movement after the right-click matters now, instead of having to hit the middle of the screen as before.I have one issue though: when unpressing the right mouse button while rotating, the ship has to reach the last assigned rotation before I can click the right mouse button again, so now I'm forced to keep it pressed for fast response. edit: sorry, seems to be a problem with my system (compiled under Ubuntu 11.10 64, Radeon HD 5850, OpenSource or fglrx drivers): just every second right mouse click is recognized. After closing Pioneer, the desktop doesn't respond correctly until the rmb is pressed again (?).Regarding general combat, for me it doesn't really have the right feeling in the current state. From the other thread about combat I understand that it is more like a placeholder and that you are in the process of finding general concepts before deciding on implementation, and probably you discussed that a lot already. So excuse me if I'm stating old things now, but maybe it can generate new ideas.After getting used to it, I liked the newtonian combat in Frontier a lot, especially in combination with infinite-speed beam lasers. For me, it's main points were a 3D tactical battle about relative angular speeds and timings of firing. This was because the computer AI did not have a perfect aim: the precision depended on the relative angular speed of the target (and distance). So to evade the 20+MW instakill of an Imperial Courier, the first thing for me to do was to accelerate perpendicular to the firing axis of the AI (and minimize my hit surface) and try to circle in towards the ship, because low distance means high angular speed (at constant velocity). This also meant I couldn't simultaneously fire, because the main thrusters had to be used for highest acceleration in other directions. When I felt sufficiently safe, and the AI was beginning to overheat it's lasers and turn away, I could reduce relative speeds and carefully finish it off, even with a 1MW-Beam in a weak ship.This was complicated by missiles, and even further by additional enemies. Imagine to have to find the best evasion trajectory from two powerful ships simultaneously in the heat of battle! You had to carefully separate them to have a fighting chance, but it was incredibly satisfying to succeed at last. That was real tactics, compared to the typical non-newtonian dogfight of "rotate towards enemy and shoot". I mean, I also liked X-Wing etc... but Frontier felt special.I would really like to see that in Pioneer. But on the other hand, I'm also too old to perfect my firing accuracy as in Frontier, trying to hit sub-pixel targets 15km away. That's not tactics, that is a FPS-skill. What about following change: laser mounts are basically fixed in relation to the ship, but also have (depending on type, quality) a computer-assisted aiming help (like image stabilization in digital cameras). This assistance is not perfect, and is limited to a maximum angle (e.g. 1 degree from center, so you still have to aim), and is dependent on a number of factors (target surface, relative angular speed, electronic warfare, own weapons skill, enemy pilot skill). From these numbers, dice could be rolled to determine if it hits (and where the beam shoots). You still have to aim your ship accordingly, but the focus of the combat is on your skill to prepare the battlefield in terms of positioning, velocities and timing. It would maybe feel a bit like Star Trek, but still different. What do you think?

Кочевник wrote:
Well, the first thing I think might be the cause is this:
Quote:
# Настройка / игровое управление
Not sure if the lines wiht # symbol should be translated.Btw, what do you mean by "doesn't work". Doesn't it appear in the list of languaches or cannot be displayed?First of all, does the game support cyrillic fonts? It might well be the cause.
That's right, the problem of supporting the Cyrillic alphabet.One must either enable it, or create and add to the game font with Cyrillic characters in the lower part (down 128 byte).

mihai wrote:
I have one issue though: when unpressing the right mouse button while rotating, the ship has to reach the last assigned rotation before I can click the right mouse button again, so now I'm forced to keep it pressed for fast response. edit: sorry, seems to be a problem with my system (compiled under Ubuntu 11.10 64, Radeon HD 5850, OpenSource or fglrx drivers): just every second right mouse click is recognized. After closing Pioneer, the desktop doesn't respond correctly until the rmb is pressed again (?).
Known issue. Its a bug/quirk of the underlying input library that we haven't yet figured out.

It's pretty much the reason I fly with keys... (-:

Just a quick one.Is it possible to fly direct to another system without hyperspace? Disregarding propellant. ie. If I accelerate to the speed of light, shut off the engines, turn my monitor off and come back in the required number of years, where will I be?

Overlord wrote:
Is it possible to fly direct to another system without hyperspace? Disregarding propellant. ie. If I accelerate to the speed of light, shut off the engines, turn my monitor off and come back in the required number of years, where will I be?
Not possible. Pioneer will eventually crash having hit the upper limits of the distances it can represent. Even if it could represent arbitrarily large numbers, still nothing would happen. Pioneer only builds a representation of the objects in the current system. For all intents and purposes the other systems don't exist until you jump into them.Fyi, Pioneer implements a Newtonian physics model, not an Einsteinian one. Light speed is just a milestone on your way from 0 to 1e+37 km/s

robn wrote:


Overlord wrote:
Is it possible to fly direct to another system without hyperspace? Disregarding propellant. ie. If I accelerate to the speed of light, shut off the engines, turn my monitor off and come back in the required number of years, where will I be?
Not possible. Pioneer will eventually crash having hit the upper limits of the distances it can represent. Even if it could represent arbitrarily large numbers, still nothing would happen. Pioneer only builds a representation of the objects in the current system. For all intents and purposes the other systems don't exist until you jump into them.
Is the exact limit known? Shouldn't it be possible to put a zone around a system and instance individual star systems? Need about 10B km for our system (more but we could probably get away with ignoring most of Eris' orbit). That said, I think the best way to go would probably be to create the zone around the PLAYER and everything outside it would be on a separate instance (aka "interstellar space") with it's own coordinate tracking (of individual instances, other interstellar "objects" (be they ships or other individual systems). If two objects intersected (ship entering a system), it would join that instance. Interstellar space is really kind of pointless for STL travel since you'll probably never run into anything or anyone that way. Would only be necessary if doing a Star Trek or Star Wars style FTL. Or perhaps even B5/Star Control "hyperspace."

Oh it could be done, don't get me wrong - its all just code. The trouble is that once you fact in the vast distances and enormous travel times, actually flying through that large expanse is a just a pointless thing to do. There's nothing there, and at max timeaccel its still going to take days/weeks of real time to get anywhere. If it was easy to build it might be fun, but there's actually some pretty difficult technical challenges to solve. For so little return its just not worth the effort.

Well, we now know that there's not "nothing there". There are planets that have been ejected from solar systems and who knows what else. Extremely few and far between perhaps, and probably not worth doing, but a dense nebula inhabited by some sort of space jellyfish sparks my imagination.