Planets in EE

kwadroke

daid said:

The "km" naming and actual sizes are just a shameless copy from Artemis.

We could rename "km" to anything else to fix this.

What I tell people is: That no one ever said km=kilometers, not even in Artemis.
I do agree it does need to be changed. Kx where x means "whatever we want". Or Kz, for KiloZed (Zed/Zero - aka nothing)

daid

A parsec is one of the largest distance units. As it's 3.26 light-years. In that scale even planets are tiny specs.

Klick is slang for a km.

Capt_Lapadite

1 Parsec = 3.26 Light years... so it's quite bigger.... around 30 trillions km.

kliks is a military slang for kilometers. But it could work.

I suppose if we go for an abstract unit, as long as it sounds nice it's alright.

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In the game we have 2 kind of distances that are "flattened".

Battle distances - that may work in kilometers, 10km increments, or a bit more.
Jump distances - that should be way farther than we have actually and should be counted in AU, LY or PC

For more realism, we could augment de distance between objects, allow jump on farther distances, but I'm not sure if it would serve the gameplay.

Tag

Because of the current size of fighters in-game, the km unit does not break too much immersion. I would rather be surprised to fights against several km long single-pilot fighters.

If a modification is needed I would suggest to scale down fighters, scale up nebulas and black holes, and increase the range/speed of the jump/warp drive.

Scaling could raise some issues with the main view, though. Some ships would be very small and others would fill the entire screen. I think it would be a good idea to scale the main view accordingly to the player ship size.

daid

but I'm not sure if it would serve the gameplay.

Gameplay is the most important for me. That's why blackholes are tiny compared to real black holes. And fighters not so small as they would need to be compared to capital ships.


Note, I'm not doing work on planets till I get the pull request from Kwadroke.

kwadroke

daid said:

And fighters not so small as they would need to be compared to capital ships.

Fighters don't need to be to scale, but, I think they should be smaller than the cruiser & missile cruiser. Maybe about 1/2 to 3/4 the size to show there is some difference?

daid said:

Note, I'm not doing work on planets till I get the pull request from Kwadroke.

Fine by me. I'm using this as an excuse to learn more about the game's inter-workings. I'm not making the planet to scale here either; to go with the Fighter statement above.
Right now it's working, but, needs a better model & texture. It's hard coded to the texture and model. It's a mostly a copy/paste of the asteroid.cpp for visual asteroids. Still need to fix this so we can have different looks for planets.

Capt_Lapadite

I agree with Kwadroke and Tag.

To wrap this up, I would suggest :

1. Scale down fighter size by 1/2
2. Scale up nebulaes and Blak whole by 1.5

3. Change the "km" symbol to a neutral unit that sound nice: Kx or else.

4. Planet size would vary from 5 000 km to 120 000 km diametre. I suppose they can be in sizes ranging from the actual 1km and the size of a nebulae, placed in a distant background under the ship.

5. Stars are far away and should look as distant object.

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As a scenaristic explanation we could say :

Nebulaes : They are in fact Radiation clouds, found in different size and quantity. They pose no harm to any advanced ship vessel, but will block scanner readings.

Black holes : Those present in the game are "micro black hole" anomalies of the system, or created from the release of a BH reactor from huge starships. (We could also imagine having a huge black hole in a distance instead of a star for ambiance purpose.)

Stars and dimension : Let say the map range is equivalent to de distance of one or one star system. We should have 1 star (or 2 in a binary system) in the background, and a few planets across the map. Plus the other normal space elements we find.

Units : We could use almost anything that would make sence in the universe as a spatial reference. It could be the dimension of the home planet radius, the dimension of earth atmosphere (the gap between ground and space) (Ad - atmospheric distance), Simply "space meters" sm. or Xm "xeno meters" as for a "foreign-distance", that would be called "xenos" in the game.
...Only thing we seem to be certain about, is that "km" does not really feel right. We could make a list of all ideas on the matter and elect one.

nallath

I've looked into planets at some point. My conclusion was that planets are hard.

Ideally you need LOD (level of detail) the closer you get to a planet. Because planets are big, you need big textures. Big textures are expensive. The standard approach is to use repeating textures, but those generate boring looking objects.

Interesting John

There's some fairly decent planet generators out there:
http://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/world/
http://wwwtyro.github.io/procedural.js/planet1/

kwadroke

Interesting John said:

http://wwwtyro.github.io/procedural.js/planet1/

That one looks cool, be nice if it had the obj to layout the textures on it.

daid

That's basic spherical mapping. I have code that can generate that mesh in real-time, with a level of detail.

kwadroke

daid said:

That's basic spherical mapping. I have code that can generate that mesh in real-time, with a level of detail.

Good. My texturing skills suck when it comes to spheres.

John Bono

If you ever want an excuse to not put stars the game, you can always say stars are hot and any game map that would be close enough to them to render would be so hot it would break all the ships and stations.
If you ever wanted to avoid planets in the game, "something something gravitational wells mess up warping/jumping something something."

Capt_Lapadite

In an attempt to close the "kilometers" (km) issue... why not simply use "units" (u).

It's simple, easy to understand and asbract enough to cover the realism and scifi scales.

15u

Other similar symbols you can also find on your keyboard:

15ū 15ų 15µ (micro symbol. As in "micro-lightyear" ?