Public Review: Star system/planet generation

Past public reviews and discussions.
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Tyreth
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#31 Post by Tyreth »

I'm having a little difficulty seeing the important differences between the two systems.

Forgive me if I'm wrong in my interpretations...
Both systems use percentages (as equally as both systems don't). Nightfishes doesn't rely on percentages as he said.

The difference seems that Drek's has had more specifics detailed.

The important facts are that both systems for the average gamer should have options like universe age, average planets, number of stars, etc. The difference is all behind the scenes - for modders. Editing a text file/text files to make the changes. Dreks' sounds easier to modify, but I admit I don't really understand either system. Dreks' sounded easier to comprehend to me.
Could be just that I'm feeling *very* sleepy tonight, which is strange since I've had more sleep the last few days than I had each day for the week before. Maybe it's catching up.

Am I missing something?

drek
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#32 Post by drek »

No, not missing anything.

I think the differences are almost entirely superficial.

*shrug*

Mostly I view this review as a chance for programmers and other interested parties to peek at this piece of v.2, to make certain that everyone's comfortable with it before including it in any requirements document.

tsev
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#33 Post by tsev »

Both proposals are very similar....absolute numbers can always be converted to percentages and percentages can always be converted to absolute numbers. I think the absolute number values in drek's are a little easier to work with, though NF's environmental preference wheel makes a lot of sense....however I'm not sure that belongs in a discussion about universe creation.

I vote using drek's system, but also using the wheel....I can see that being very easy to implement and is also very intuitive.
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drek
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#34 Post by drek »

Both systems have a wheel....as the wheel was already passed on the old forums. My wheel is in the order that the planets are listed. It's not explict in my desciption in anticipation of the economy section of v.2.

krum
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#35 Post by krum »

Um, the question mught seem dumb and OT, sorry about that, but it is final that we're not having planetary gravity, is that right? Cause I had this idea to factor planetary gravity in ship or orbital construction cost. Because it can be quite expensive to lift something in space.

I even remember this short story where humans were communicating with advanced senitent life in the "surface" of Jupiter, but they weren't spacefaring 'cause they still couldn't get out of the gravity well.

Anyway, I thought this could give and interesting strategic importance to rich asteroids and smaller planets, despite their small habitability. But if it is a final "no" to gravity, so be it :)

Nightfish
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#36 Post by Nightfish »

I don't think gravity has been brought up so far. At least, I never saw a public review or something like that. So, I'd think there is no final "no" so far.

Though my personal preference would be a simple system like MoO2 had. Nothing too complicated.

mr_ed
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#37 Post by mr_ed »

utilae wrote:Doesn't the colour typically represent the age, size and amount of generated heat for the star.
Yes, it does. I'm not sure about size, except in the Red case, but blue and white ones tend to be the hottest stars.

Drek has this at the top of his page

See http://lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/users/alle ... ation.html for a summary on types

From some web site out there...
Spica: Blue-white @ 20000 degrees C
Sol: Yellow @ 5600 degrees C
Arcturus: Red giant (69 times larger than Sol) @ 4000 degrees C

Edit: Cut out redundant info
Last edited by mr_ed on Thu Jul 03, 2003 3:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.

drek
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#38 Post by drek »

If we were going to have gravity in v.2, it should have been decided in this thread. So for v.2, gravity is (98.2% certain) not in the game. Maybe we'll revisit the issue in v.3 or beyond.

Nice link ed. Thanks.

Nightfish
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#39 Post by Nightfish »

Drek, you of all the people should remember that "passed" doesn't really mean passed. And in contrast to the EP thing, we never even talked about gravity before. So, in the light of this, I forward that we use a simple system like MoO2: high gravity gives you a 50% penalty to everything, low gravity gives you a 25% to everything, to be removed with a gravity generator or something similar. I don't really see why we shouldn't have a simple system like that in our game.

jbarcz1
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#40 Post by jbarcz1 »

If we're going to start talking about gravity, I'd suggest a new thread
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Aquitaine
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#41 Post by Aquitaine »

Passed does usually mean passed.

Being in the requirements doc is what does not mean passed, as we can require things that are placeholders for things we haven't passed yet.

If we've explicitly passed it, we are not going to go back and change it without a really good reason. Which means emailing Tyreth and myself with your really good reason and getting us to re-open it. I hate to play the bad guy here, but I have to facilitate progress, and that won't happen if we don't take our passed features thread seriously.

Of course, it will be easier to take it seriously once it exists again. d'oh.

Aquitaine
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Impaler
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Stars

#42 Post by Impaler »

I will do some reserch and come up with some star types for us to us, but just off the top of my head their are

Brown Dwarf - A star too small to ignite nuclear fusion, think of it as a very large Jupiter, gives off very very feeble energy from the friction of its colapse (just like Jupiter).

Red Dwarf - fraction of suns mass, life span in hundreds of Billions of years, very cold (for a star) and dim, most energy is in the infer-red part of spectrum

Redish Orange - bit biger, burns for many Billions of years, sligtly warmer

Orange - about half the suns mass, incressingly warm, about double suns lifespan

Yellowish Orange - Just a tad smaller then sun

Yellow - The sun, gives off most light in the "visible" spectrum (organisms on earth ofcorse see in "visible" light because its the most abundant)

Whitish Yellow - Bit bigger then sun, hotter and shorter life span

White - A hot start with life span around a half Billion Years

Whitish Blue - Very hot with life span of a hundred Million years, will eventualy go super nova, gives off lots of its light in the ultraviloet

Blue - Very very Hot star with life span of a less then a million years

Blue Giant - Most masive Stars they last very briefly before SuperNovaing to Black Holes, gives off light at very high frequencies.

Red Giant - A star like our sun dieing, heat goes up but star is so large that planets are swalowed

Red Super Giant - A large Blue star becomes an even larger Red Giant before it dies, these stars are the size of our entire solar system

White Dwarf - a hot planet size cinder of a dead star, it glows only with residual heat and is incredibly dense a spoon full weights tons

Black Dwarf - a white dwarf that has coold down and no longer radiates energy

Nutron Star - an even denser star, its only a few miles across, a spoonfull has the mass of an entire mountain range. If this star rotaits rapidly with an inclined magnetic feild its a pulsar.

Black Hole - self expalamitory

Quasar - A super massive Black Hole at the heart of a Galaxy that is surounded by a huge acreation disk (It might be cool to have one of these at the center of the map)

drek
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#43 Post by drek »

NF:

Actually there's at least a couple of issues that should have been in galaxy generation and weren't.

* Mineral Richness
* Gravity

But now that I think about it you (and others) might have been waiting for the economy system's design thread to unleash these ideas. So I guess they are still fair game. My bad.

I'd like to have Mineral Richness be a planet special and Gravity ignored for v.2--obviously others favor having them as attributes attached to every planet. (although it's largely sematic issue. My method seems better if gravity/mineral richness outside of the norm is relatively rare.)

Perhaps with Aquitaine's approval we should start a design thread for dicussing planet and star system attributes--such as Specials, Mineral Richness, Gravity. We'd just have to have a disclaimer that:

A: This is stuff that belongs in v.2 only. Ideas that reference systems outside the v.2 roadmap will be ignored.
B: Rather than a yes or no, we'd be looking for "Yes for v.2" or "Maybe Later". So for example, system specials might get a "Maybe Later" and Mineral Richness a "Yes for v.2".

Nightfish
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#44 Post by Nightfish »

What do you mean by V0.2 only? In V0.3 it's out again? That would make even less than zero sense.

drek
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#45 Post by drek »

er, sorry for not being clear.

In theory, if it's in v.2 it should be in all the way up to v1.0. (with the exception of placeholder game systems, like Defensive Bases).

Just saying that if it's not in v.2, that doesn't mean it's out for good. Also, what I was really trying to say is that we don't need to be dealing with attributes that effect technology, combat, or facilities (assuming someone proposes such an attribute).

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