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Post Dynamic Galaxies
This is a compilation of suggestions regarding stars and making galaxies more interesting and whatnot.


D3X's suggestion (which caused me to branch off into these other topics) was to "terraform" a star, or stellaform it, to make planets revolving around it more suitable to colonize. i.e. reduce the energy output of the star to make planets encircling it cooler if needed, or increase it to make planets revolving around it warmer if needed. Or maybe even destabilize a star, which leads to the next point.

From the previous thought, I came up with the idea that Red Giants and/or other unstable stars should go supernova at one point in their solar lives (ranging from 30% to 90% of time elapsed into the current universe), destroying all planets, bases, and whatnot in the system.

But what's the point of building there if your stuff would be destroyed anyways, you ask?

I say that high-tier commodities should have a much higher spawn rate in the same galaxies as these unstable stars as a trade-off, making it much more of a risk to harvest things like Petroleum, Rubicite, Adamantium, and other higher-tier commodities, while at the same time making them more widespread. That way, players would be forced to build things such as Supernovae Detectors (very expensive builds) to give a rough estimate as to how long it would take for a star to explode.

Once a star does explode, everything in the galaxy would be destroyed, including planets, moons, AI bases and player bases, and any players present during the explosion would have their ships rocketted into stasis into a faraway galaxy. The only thing left would be the core of the star, a Neutron Star, or, sometimes a Black Hole.


Another idea I came up with would be the implementation of actual gravity to the game. Stars would slowly pull ships in like a tractor beam; the more mass the star has, the greater the pull.

Or, at least make Neutron Stars have this sort of tractor pull, if not all stars. And if possible, even Black Holes (whose pull would be extreme, making traversing space quite the doozy).


And lastly, MasterEnforcer's idea would be that during universe resets, players would eventually be pulled into the Sun in Sol as a result of the collapsing universe. This, in addition to the Aveksaka invasions, would make the destruction of the universe very fun and unique indeed.


Thoughts?


Thu Jul 04, 2013 3:47 am
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Post Re: Dynamic Galaxies
I know Jeff wanted to do gravity years ago (probably because it made awesome in Star Control for doing what's called a Leyland Gravity Whip), but it was impractical to do so (apparently, iterating through all solarbodies for all ships in all galaxies and applying some velocity change isn't very resource friendly).

When I added Neutron Stars, I added a thing so we could change the orbital distances for planets, and cranked that way up so the planets wouldn't be near the Neutron Star.

I like the supernova idea, I think supernovae could be pretty cool, but I don't like the idea of it destroying planets. They could do radiation damage over a massive range (like 15 or 20k) though. I was already thinking about the possibility of having supernovae, but not suns that would just go supernova, although it'd be really easy to code.

There are various things I'd like to do for galaxy (well, solarsystem) generation, generally some cool ideas sitting around and some cleaning up I'd like to do/better structured system, although I'm rather weary of being able to terraform suns, and planets being modified during the uni by changing suns.

For now, I'll keep a note of this topic. :P

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Fri Jul 05, 2013 5:51 am
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Post Re: Dynamic Galaxies
Heh, yes.

I've noticed lately that the devs have been coding more and more interesting things in the game, what with the new tech 22 ubers.

I agree that galaxy generation, and with it, stars, planets, and whatnot, should be focused on a lot more. The system's been mostly the same for the past 8 years and I believe there are changes that need to be made with the generation code. Implementing new features and whatnot would make the game a lot more interesting, especially now that everypony can build and have their own resources and colonies to manage.


Fri Jul 05, 2013 8:50 pm
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Post Re: Dynamic Galaxies
Blue Dwarf wrote:

I like the supernova idea, I think supernovae could be pretty cool, but I don't like the idea of it destroying planets. They could do radiation damage over a massive range (like 15 or 20k) though. I was already thinking about the possibility of having supernovae, but not suns that would just go supernova, although it'd be really easy to code.


Instead of supernova, how about solar flares? Certain star types are much more active, and prone to throwing massive flares much more frequently than our own sun. These could do the high-range radiation damage that you want.

I might hesitate about putting this in wild space however. There would be two options:

1) It does such low damage that its just an amusing occurence that everybody ignores, except for the handful of irradiated zebucarts that were passing through

2) It does a large enough damage that it periodically wipes out peoples CA/EE kits and causes large headaches all around.

This would be much better kept as a large damage occurrence that only happens in perilous space. It is supposed to be perilous after all! Then again, if these systems were coded to have a higher then normal suitability or commod spawning in wild space, then it would be worthwhile to build there, even with the headaches.

As per gravity, iterating through all of the solar bodies in a system is unnecessary to get a realistic enough system. Basically, Planets mass <<<<<< Star mass, so we can just completely ignore them.

Most stars in the game are fixed, and the ones that aren't are typically in tight binary/trinary pairs orbiting around their barycentre. For these, the gravitational field can roughly be modelled as a point mass at the barycenter (Doesn't work when you are close, but its simple, and wouldn't look too strange for small orbits)

To a reasonable approximation, we could then take the entire galaxy as fixed, and just create a gravity lookup table for each coordinate of the galaxy on universe generation. Then, to implement the gravity for individual ships, the server just needs to check its coordinates and it has the velocity correction.

Then again, I'm not a programmer, so maybe that is a completely stupid idea. The lookup table would be fairly large after all..

Another thing that could be done to simplify the gravity is to again only consider stars, and define 'spheres of influence'. Basically, if there are three stars in a galaxy, then each of them has a region where only one of them exerts its gravity, and the others are not considered (When you are close to said star). This way, only one stellar body would need to be considered at once. Binary/trinary orbiting stars could be handled as mentioned above, taking the barycentre as a point mass.


All of this being said, I'm not certain how gravity would pan out in the long run. It would have to be fairly weak, or it would end up being extremely annoying. However, high gravity neutron stars would make for some fun star systems...

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Mon Jul 08, 2013 1:32 pm
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