While last week I was very busy with pak.Excentrique (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=3702.0), the one or other might have wondered why there are no news since a while. The answer is easy, I was busy with something else ;D
Long ago I had been working on an Elite II - Frontier clone. The project overall didn't succeed, but I had the galaxy and solar system generators mostly done, also a bit of the space flight and planet surface exploration parts.
I was reminded of this, and I tried to revive parts of the old code. Particularly the solar system generator was of interest for me, and so I started to port that to Java:
=> http://sourceforge.net/projects/solarex/
It's a Java Applet, and it needs the Java runtime version 5 or newer installed (the browser plugin should be installed and registered automatically with the Java runtime). I might port more of the old code and bring together something like a space exploration game some day. For the moment, you can generate any number of solar systems there, from random seeds, or seeds of your own choice.
If you experience oddities, problems, failures or have other, positive feedback I'm very interested.
Have fun playing with the solar system generator :)
Edit:
If someone has good ideas how to determine which planets should be bare rocks, or with an atmosphere, and then how dense that atmosphere should be, please let me know. Also, and linked to this problem, is, how to calculate surface temperatures for such planets. Currently the temperature calculation is really a very co**** guesswork.
Edit 2: Updated link to current project site.
I can't offer any help with the physics behind... how do you do the randomization now?
The one thing that caught my eye was lack of canvas to the right ;)
It's really funny, trying out all the various PINs that a modern man has to memorize to live... I can almost see it as a forum game - eg. what does it create from your phone number?
I'll add a scrolling area in the next version. I hope that should solve the problem of systems with too many planets being clipped.
The randomization is simple. With the seed a random number generator is seeded which is used for all subsequent steps, so a seed should always create the same system. It's been some years that I designed this, but if I remember right, first a sun type is chosen, then a sun size that fits to the type.
Then it's a normal distribution that is also randomized a bit - biggest planets use to appear in the middle, but there can be exceptions. Then a few rough guessing rules are applied what kind of planet might fit to the size and temperature of the chosen spot.
For each planet there is a number of moons rolled, and an optional space station. I had a version with moons for moons and stations for moons, but that caused problems. But I think such arrangements could exist in real, and will see if I can fix the problems.
I like that if you give a seed of "1", the sun is named "Zero".
This seems really neat!
Okay, I am hooked... I've been feeding it crc32 checksums of random text for some time... instead of doing schoolwork as I hoped ;D
Also, m****es of these bodies are nowhere to be seen.
But it's fun already like this :)
Seems it was a good idea then to put it online :)
I still have dreams to make a space exploration game some day. The planets need to get resources then, and I must also port the galactical map code to Java. That shouldn't be too hard though.
I'll see if I can find references for the average densities of rock, ice and gas planets. With that it should be possible to calculate the m****es. Surface gravity could be interesting for the next step, of planet exploration.
Updates for v0.12 since yesterday, v0.11:
- Added ring planet image
- Added scrollbars for systems with many planets
- Reduced download size by about 100kb
Now the jar archive is versioned, so browsers should recognize the new file and download it:
[link lost]
Hehe :) These automated systems are full of surprises ;D
Usually there's a band at a certain distance from the sun in a system where solar radiation isn't too high or too low to sustain life. This would depend on the intensity of the star. It will also depend on the composition of the planet in question, the strength of its magnetic field (to deflect radiation) and other things, like its rotational period and size and so-forth.
I think it'd be best to generate the size, distance from sun, rotational period, magnetic field, moons, rings etc. initially, then use those factors to determine how likely life is to exist on the planet. Some measure of chemical content for the planet and atmosphere (simplified of course) could also factor into this.
It'd also be cool to generalise this enough so that "strange" combinations could exist, e.g. life-bearing planets orbiting gas giants outside the normal habitable region of a solar system owing to additional energy from that large body. Or even systems with life-bearing moons orbiting a brown dwarf star in orbit around another star.
Dual-sun systems and so-forth would also be cool, and don't forget to add other forms of celestial phenomena to explore (e.g. pulsars, nebulae, black holes etc...)
I don't actually have Java installed here, so I can't play with it :(
I've tried to improve the selection of such band. Actually this makes earth type planets even less likely, but will create some more venus type planets, with dense atmospheres.
I also fixed the creation of venus type planets far from sun. Those will now be ice bodies. I had an example of 7 Kelvin surface temperature, and surely most gas has condensed to fluid or ice even at that temperature.
I've also added "reverse temperature modifiers", so after the first step of temperature calculation, the base temperature will be modified by atmosphere (plus), ice (minus), and a few other factors. Seems to work good enough overall :)
Magnetic field and rotational period would be new attributes. But I guess both make good sense and I'll try to add those. The chemistry is on my plan too, but needs definitely some more planning, since if this will become a space exploration game some day, the question which minerals or valuable elements can be found on a planet will be important to the player.
Brown dwarfs I had forgotten. Will try to add such. Pulsars I want to add too. Black holes seems fairly extreme, but it could be fun to generate one, rarely, just for variety.
I'm currently wondering why I never see systems where moons have moons again. The code should permit that if the parent moon is big enough, and far enough from the planet. Maybe the criteria is too narrow. But I suspect other bugs.
Nowadays flash is more popular, but I know Java pretty well and hoped it would be common enough so that a lot of people can use the applet ... ah well. maybe some day or on another PC you get the chance to test :)
Edit:
Update to v0.13!
I've started to work on a new feature, a "galactical map". At the moment it's only proof of concept to generate many systems on a map structure. Eventually I want to link the map and the system view so that one can inspect the systems from the galactical map in the system view.
Other than that, v0.13 has slightly improved planet generation rules, and creates less space stations than before.
=> [link lost]
I'm disappointed that seed 8675309 isn't named "Jenny" ;-)
@Isaac: Maybe some day ;) Just keep searching, maybe you find more funny matches.
A small update, v0.14 - Systems now can be clicked on the galactic map and will open in the tabular system view for inspection.
=> [link lost]
An extremely nice (and apart from space station not really unphysical time killer ... ) Well done!
Thank you!
It's been fun to make, good to know that it's fun to toy with too :)
I've compiled and uploaded a new version, 0.15
The biggest change is that moons can now have moons on their own, and that space station can orbit moons. This required a new system layout algorithm, and I'm not quite sure how well the new code will work. Also, I once had a failure in system generation during development, but the released version seems to work alright after adjusting some parameters. If you notice problems, please let me know.
Changes since v0.14:
- Moons can now have moons on their own if big enough
- Space station now can orbit moons
- More space station names
- Changed naming of planets slightly
- Changed number format to locale dependent formatting
- Info label will be positioned below the inspected column
=> [link lost]
In case something doesn't work alright I left the old version as a fallback:
=> [link lost]
One suggestion. The distances should be in AUs (Astronomic Units) instead of km. The figures would be smaller and clear.
1 AU = 1,495 978 70 × 1011 m .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit
Some interesting improvements for future versions: comets and asteroids.
Ok, thanks for the suggestion. I'll do that, it will make the numbers more comprehensive :)
Does someone know where to find tables of the frequency of sun types - I mean something like "15 in 1000 suns are red giants" or such. Particularly I need to know how rare brown dwarfs, pulsars and black holes are, but it'd be good to have a more natural distribution of the other sun types, too.
Also, is it "white dwarf sun" or rather "white dwarf star"? I feel uncertain about the use of sun and star in this context.
What I want to work on next is m****, gravity and orbital periods.
Sounds like the right question for mr. Wolfram. However, nothing solid comes out. This might be because
a) it's an astronomical taboo,
b) it makes no sense to do this for some reason,
c) I missed some important keyword,
d) it costs $$$.
(in order of increasing probability)
If you base your search on this, you might end up with some raw data...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=star+temperature
http://www.astro.utu.fi/EG/encyclo/SpectralType.shtml
http://www.stellar-database.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_cl****ification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_catalog
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence
http://www.ucm.es/info/Astrof/invest/actividad/spectra.html
Thanks for the links, I'll check those!
At the moment I'm puzzled how to display planet m****. For example a planet with similar density like earth:
Radius=4929 km -> M****=2.7663720020915305E21 t
It seems to be right, even, compared to earth weight from wikipedia (earth is a bit bigger than this fictional planet).
That's a number with 21 digits in normal notation, and tons are among the biggest measure for m**** that people are used to ... I guess I need to make that megatons (mt ?) or use the scientific number format like above. Suns and such are even heavier :o
Does someone know how to calculate surface gravity for a planet from m**** and radius?
Edit: Maybe give weight in multiples of earth weight? Like distance in multiples of sun-earth distance (au)? What unit should be shown there, "1.5 earth m****es"?
Edit 2: Multiples of earth weight works and gives comprehensible numbers. So that problem is solved :) Still need to change to astronomical units, but the weight problem was more ... erm, heavy ;D.
The usual way planets and brown dwarfs are cl****ified are in units of Me (m**** earths) Mj (M**** Jupiter) and (Ms) M**** sun. (Apart from the official ones of course.) See the extrasolar planet catalogue: http://exoplanet.eu/catalog-all.php (here one could also get nice figures about distribution of the existing ones.
Thanks for the hints, Prissi :) The number of times that I mixed m**** and weight in my last message must have been scary for a physicist. Sorry for that.
Those planets are mostly a bit on the heavy side, because we still have problems to discover lighter ones ... so until we know better, I'll use or system as an example for distribution.
Distances are now given in AU, also.
Did you miss a planet type in the simulation so far? There are no volcanic bodies, or molten ones yet. Also no brown dwarfs. But I don't know if there are other types that I should include.
Star is the correct generic in English. I believe sun usually refers directly to Sol, though I have seen it used in a generic sense, but it sounds awkward.
I do not think there are molten planets (from rare exots apart), since for a planet to form it needs to be cold enough. Molten stone looks not like a good candidate for condensation (since it needs to be stable for aeons ...)
That's simple. With Newton's formula:
g=G.M/(R.R)
G is the gravitational constant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant
M is the m**** of the platet
R is its radius
9.8 m/(s.s) is the value for Earth, if you want to compare with it.
@Prissi: Ok, I'll leave molten bodies out. The only type that came to my mind was an ice body with atmosphere, such could exist I think.
@Isidoro: Thank you for the help. But I thought this formula ****umes that all m**** is located in one point, particularly that the distance "R" is void of m****. For a planet m**** is (not really, but for sake of simplicity I want to ****ume so) uniformly distributed in the globe, so the m**** fills all the distance "R", and even the negative "R" as well. I felt uncertain if the formula is still correct?
I'll use star, then. Thanks for the help :)
Hajo, with respect to the m**** being located in one point, it turns out it doesn't matter how the m**** is distributed in the radial direction, as long as this radial distribution is the same for all angles (a reasonable ****umption for a planet/star). If you are completely outside of the m**** (or on its surface), it is equivalent to a point m**** of M at the centre. So yes, in short, the formula still holds true (derive the calculus for it if you want to prove it... ;))
My last math lesson happened 10 years ago or so ... I definitely won't try to develop such formula on my own ;) But it's good that this project refreshes some of the math and physics basics. Thanks for help and advice :)
I hope I'll have the m**** and orbit questions solved soon, and can continue to work on the planet resources ides - space mining was always a dream of mine :)
Edit: Should red and blue giant stars have planets at all? Red giants should have eaten all the inner planets when they grew? So maybe only a few planets remained there? Blue giants don't live long (compared to other star types), and have very high radiation power. If there are planets, they need to be far away from such stars? I know this is a half-fantasy project, but I'd like to keep it sensible within some, admittedly very far, stretched limits.
Edit 2: Radiation power of a star is proportional to "star surface times surface temperature"? Surface temperature of a planet is roughly proportional to "sun radiation_power times distance from sun, squared"? Is that correct?
Atmospheric modifiers and albedo can be calculated after this co**** temperature guess, I think.
Well unitwise power/distance=Joule*speed (and is not Kelvin which could be converted to Joule). So I think there is something missing.
A real calculation appears very difficult for me, because the surface temperature seems to be the temperature where incoming power equals radiation power (since the planet is warm, it radiates). I've decided that for a toy/game an approximation that gives believable numbers is good enough.
Interesting effect: White dwarf stars have a very narrow band where earthlike planets can be, while the bigger suns have a much wider band.
I think I'll call the temperature solution "good enough" now and will dig into the orbit and orbital period questions next.
Edit:
I've uploaded a preview of the next version. I feel uncertain if it's good/stable. I tried to make star sizes more realistic, and it crashed a few times when generating real giant blue/red stars. The released version worked well for me though, so I keep hoping.
Changes since v0.15
- More realistic star sizes
- Orbits now given in au, unless distance is less than 0.0001 au
- M**** calculations for all bodies
- Planet m****es are given in "earth m****es"
- Star m****es are given in "sun m****es"
- Changed "sun" to "star" in a few places
- Changed surface temperature calculations. Seems reasonable, but I wonder if a gas giant at 40 kelvin should become an ice body rather. Suggestions are welcome :)
Preview:
=> [link lost]
About the star size issue, I've found this amazing video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q) that shows a comparison of sizes between planets and knows stars of the universe.
Everytime I get to think about these numbers and sizes ... I just feel so... well... tiny.
Great Video you found there, vilvoh - thanks for the link!
In fact, it easily forwards from:
1) Gauss' law for gravity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%27s_law_for_gravitational_fields
2) Spherical symmetry ****umption
A first approximation may be to consider stars as black bodies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body).
Then, apply Stefan-Boltzmann law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan-Boltzmann_law
There are some examples in the latter page for the sun and other stars.
Surface temperature of a planet is more difficult, I guess. Greenhouse effect plays an important
role in planets with atmospheres. Light from the star p**** through the atmosphere and
the black body radiation from the planet is kept. Consider Venus, for instance.
Because of those problems, my applet displays not the true size, but sizes proportional to sqrt(size). Thus smaller objects appear larger in comparison to bigger objects than they'd in reality.
@Isidoro: Thanks for the links! My current approximation used an "energy loss by radiation" proportional to T^2, but it's really T^4, so I might use that to adjust my approximation. I think that will help to keep inner planets cooler while the outer ones don't become so terribly cold. Must try and test :)
Greenhouse effect I have implemented very simply as a temperature multiplier for planets with atmosphere. At the moment the components of the atmospheres are not simulated, so only a very generic factor is used there, 1.1 to 1.5, depending on atmosphere density.
I think for most planets they could be most likely consider black bodies. Among our solar system only Venus shows strong deviations. (Earth is less than 25°C) While this make the difference between freezing or not, it is quite small given the other errors like internal heating from radiactive decay (earth radiates twice the erceived energy from the sun) or low level fusion (JUpiter) and HElmholtz contractions. Generally, the larger a planet, they "better" its internal heat source.
And I had a system with habitable moon so this works too.
Habitable moons are rare, but exist :)
v0.16 seemed good enough to be moved to the official place:
=> [link lost]
One problem is known: The info label for moons/stations can sometimes overlap with the name label of big gas giants. This will be fixed in the next version. Also I've made a better image for rocky planets with atmosphere, and once more reworked the temperature calculations. Not enough changes though to already release a new version again.
Planet preview - a dry, rocky planet with thin atmosphere and pole caps:
[link lost]
You see too much pixels at big stars
Could such a planet exist in real? A earth like planet with 3,2 times earth m**** or with 351 Kelvin that are 78°C
I wanted to conserve download size, so suns only have a resolution of 256x256 pixels. And the red giants (also the blue giants) are sometimes much bigger on screen. Java scaling makes them look quite pixelated then. I decided to call that "good enough", but if needed I can supply a higher resolution image for the giant stars.
Such planets can exist, I think. Question is if it should be called earth-like. Water would still be fluid, gravity would be higher than earths, and atmosphere also more dense ... I think I made the cl****ification of earthlike go up to 80°C.
Maybe a new planet type would be needed "rock body with dense atmosphere", in opposition to the venus type planets with "corrosive atmosphere", and be placed in between the earth and the venus type planets.
Are there people here who have a background in geology and maybe astronomy as well? I'm working on planet details, and have problems with the soil and surface details.
Particularly, I want to develop this project a bit into the direction of a "space miner" game, and I need information what kind of minerals are interesting to miners, what kind of minerals are usually found in planets soils, or at least general information how to cl****ify the compounds of planet soil.
Edit:
A preview of the planet detail screen.
[link lost]
Edit 2:
A new version is out!
I've added a whole new screen to explore planetary resources. At the moment there are only atmosphere compounds calculated, but more are planned. Besides that, there have been minor improvements in star naming, a change in body temperature calculations, and the improved "rocky planet with atmosphere" image was included.
To open the new planet explorer screen, just click a planet in the tabular system view.
Since I feel uncertain if this works well, I've uploaded it as a release candidate for the time being:
=> [link lost]
Feedback of all kind is welcome as usual :)
Edit 3: I forgot to say, the box in the lower are will show the available probing and gathering drones, once I have more of the space ship idea implemented. Probing drones will be needed to find the right places for mining, and collection of surface fluids, gathering drones will use this information to do the actual job. So far, a placeholder.
Since there were no problem reports, I have moved the 0.17 release candidate to the official place:
=> [link lost]
I've made some progress with calculating metal resources on planet surfaces, but that is too little of a change to release a new version already again. I think I should work on the space station UI next, also try to sketch a few probing and gathering drone designs.
I have a background in geology, but was never really interested in soils or mining. Much too small and far too close to the surface to be of interest to me!
I think the most interesting ones for mining though are iron ore (haematite), aluminium ore (bauxite), precious metals (gold, silver platinum etc), and of course diamonds. Diamonds are a high pressure crustal mineral so should only be found in areas where the planet's crust is thick AND where they've had chance to get back to the surface, e.g. volcano (hence why you don't get them everywhere on earth...)
But I don't really know too much. You could always make exotic fictitious minerals with your own relationships (in the style of Tiberium from Command & Conquer...)
Just by chance, do you know which metals can be found as metals, and not as ores? So far I have lead, tin, copper, silver, gold, platinum on my list. I decided that on atmosphere less planets also chromium can be found as metal, and manganese occasionally on both, planets with or without atmosphere. Are there other interesting metals?
Iron ore I have on my list. Is bauxite worth something for a space miner? I think it is plentiful on most planets, and few planets will need to import bauxite? But I can add it anyways. Would there be planet types where bauxite is more frequent than on others (talking about rocky planets now, just differing in temperatures and atmosphere).
Diamonds I'll keep in mind. Are there other interesting crystals and gems?
Also, some planets might bear alien artifacts, which might be interesting to collect and sell to scientists.
Thanks for the suggestions so far :)
Regarding applet size, just optipng -o7 *.png (and deleting metadata) removed around 100 kB (~25%).
http://files.[ simutrans [dot] us (site down, do not visit) ]/files/get/eEtxSWGlko/solarex-resources-small.zip
As to ores, minerals and metals, wouldn't it make more sense to mine these from smaller bodies with lower gravity? By smaller I mean smaller than currently simulated, like asteroids...
Thank you, these better compressed images will be very useful :) I'll need to add more images at some point, and was already worried about the download size.
I'll compile the next release with these images.
Mining smaller space bodies will most likely be more sensible. But I don't have such yet in the simulation, that's why I focused on the planets first. I think the facts that I can learn about metals and minerals in regard to planets will later also help to model different space bodies. Quite some of the planets should have low gravity, though, and therefore be easy to access.
On the other hand, gravity will help to support drilling actions, also some sorts of digging.
Asteroids can be almost pure metal, though, so just catching them should do the job already.
Edit: Also fetched me this optipng tool ;D
Almost all but the Platinum, Gold, Silver are oxides and will oxidize on air. Zink ist found as an oxide, but a relatively unstable one, as far as I know. The stuff you would mine in pace as the rare stuff, like Iridium, Indium, Osmium, Hafnium, Luthecium, and so on. Of course on of the starnge superheavy elements might be important too for the energy cells. Those should be only around in young systems (with blue giants).
I'll be back with more questions about the metals.
But for today, I'm proud to present the Fanfostar Chorus-12 gas filtration drone, manufactured by Deep Breath 2001!
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/share/fanfostar.png)
It's also known as the "Thirteen Horns of Jericho", due to the enervating sound that it produces while evacuating the pressure chambers. In dark space station bars there are rumors told, that more than one space ship was shattered to pieces just from the sound waves, when readying this drone for launch. And even veteran space prospectors are said to pray once, or maybe better twice, if they consider making use of this fine piece of modern gathering technology.
Yet, it is definitely unsurp****ed in efficiency by any other gathering drone, and will endure even the most hostile atmospheric conditions - says the bundled operation manual. And it comes with a 3 day warranty.
Another fine piece of gas filtration technology is the Trompetechos Dual, manufactured by Zhoofump & Smithbone:
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/share/trompetechos.png)
Much more silent than the Fanfostar Chorus-12, the Trompetechos Dual is the preferred gas gathering drone of many aspiring prospectors. It works reliably in most atmospheres, but is allergic to dust particles and ice crystals, particularly in atmospheres with some amount of fluid hydrocarbons. Several sets of brushes and scoops are bundled with the Trompetechos Dual, and the curses of the staff are legendary when they are ordered to clean the intake horns after mission.
I've completed my list of metal candidates - those are mostly metals that can be found natively on earth, and therefore I ****ume can be found natively on other planets, too. Particularly on those planets with a less oxidative atmosphere.
Chromium, Lead, Manganese, Tin, Copper, Silver, Gold, Platinum,
Titanium, Zinc, Mercury, Iron, Nickel,
Iridium, Osmium, Palladium, Rhodium, Ruthenium,
Bismuth, Cadmium, Indium, Tellurium
Some of these are quite rare. Should I remove some from the list? Should I add other metals? Should I group the metals? Feedback is welcome as usual :)
As I said, all low temperature metals (Lead, Tin, Cupper, Zinc, Iron, Cadmium, Bismuth, Idium and Tellurium) are usually Oxides as elements. But by heating up the oxides are cracked and the metal can be obtained. But in raw ore they are oxides. Espeically Iron, apart from trace inside meteorites it is always Iron ore (FexOy). And titanium is one of the toughest oxides, it needs to be reduced by CHlorine and Magnesium to break it. THis is part of the reason, why titanium is so expensive and not its content of 0.41% on earth (one thenth of Iron, so not a rare element, it is even more common than hydrogen!).
I've been using this source mainly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Metals
I think I heard of lakes or pools of liquid lead on Venus, so I'm still feeling uncertain if lead is always bound with other elements, or can be found natively (also, in which extents).
Tin I'm fairly sure is found native in Chile.
Copper can be found natively, I'm pretty sure about that, but most likely not in large quantities.
Zinc I was surprised to see on the Wikipedia list, since Zinc (unlike Lead and Tin) is not very resistant to acids ... but it can withstand oxydation? Titanium was new to me too, to be found natively. Maybe the Wikipedia list contains all metals that are found natively, even if only in very small quantities? Then it would be good to know which are more commonly found native, and which are seldom - iron for example was given, too, but besides meteoric Iron I'd doubt native iron sources on earth.
Cadmium and Bismuth I know almost nothing about, just they they are similar to lead in some aspects, and have a low melting point.
I hope this doesn't come over as critics or so. I'm just confused about the different facts that read from different sources, and trying to combine those into a usable list for my project.
Edit: Oxygen is rich in earths atmosphere because plants produce it. Lifeless planets should have an almost oxygen free atmosphere. So there could be more metals found natively? And what about planets with an atmosphere rich of hydrogen? This should be even better for metals? Panets with corrosive atmospheres definitely should have less native metals, except the most noble metals I ****ume.
Cadmium burns in air. The only reference in the world about it is cited as questionable.
Copper does exists native, but most of currents copper is again from copper ose (CuS2).
Zinc, Tin, Copper and Lead are usually exist as Sulfits (ZnS), and byproducts of their separation are Cadmium and Bismuth. Lead can be found rare in traces, though but this is more of curiosity value.
Even silver is for a good part found as sulfide ... So only very rare elements survive.
Cadmium must be removed then. That is too volatile. It seems the "native metals" page from Wikipedia is a bad source then :/
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth:
Can I read this as a confirmation that Bismuth exist in native form?
While I agree with your findings that most of those metals are found as mineral compounds, I'd like to have a list of metals that occasionally are found in native form, and I think some of the space bodies may be more friendly to metals than earth is. For example there are meteorites of native iron, which is rare or nonexistant on earth.
Cadmium definitely looks too volatile, though, and maybe I have to remove Titanium as well? Which metals may stay, and which have to go from the list? Mercury I also only know as mineral compound in nature.
Edit:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium:
If it's so resistant to corrosion and melting, I'd ****ume there are places in space with native titanium found? I guess I really need to find a forum about astro-chemistry and astro-geology.
Edit 2:
So, that is most likely the killer argument for native titanium. It really looks like that I must read up on all individual metals and make up my mind ...
Just an idea - while you are writing down mostly what is statistically important by % of m****, you might also want to consider what real industry craves. Look up hybrid cars, rare earth metals and China (http://www.google.com/search?q=hybrid+cars%2C+rare+earth+metals+and+China), for one such case. Or how about uranium... Perhaps I am too much influenced by the idea that space = expensive, but mining eg. iron somewhere else in space sounds to me like a good way to go broke (unless it's in microgravity so you can process it all "up there" and don't have to lift it from planetary gravitation well).
I think I confused myself.
Upon reconsideration, I think I originally wanted to model reality. While knowing that I neither understand astrophysics nor astrochemistry well enough, I tried to be close to reality with the solar system generator, the star types, planet types, planet sizes, temperatures and such. Close enough to make the values believable.
Finally I reached the step to think about planet details.
For the atmosphere I just did the same again. Tried to find real life data for planet atmospheres, and extrapolate potential planet atmospheres from this data. This also worked well, at least if I kept my goal in "believable" atmospheres.
After the atmospheres, I went to the planet crusts. These are made of minerals, metals, and some other yet-to-be-defined compounds.
I know very little about minerals, so I thought metals might be the easier start.
From there I tried to gather a list of metals that _might_ exists on planet surfaces. This was the list that I posted earlier today. Now I'm in the process of sorting out the metals that violate the "believable" goal. if Cadmium burns in oxygene containing atmospheres, it cannot exist there. if Titanium reacts with a lot of gases on higher temperatures, it cannot exist natively on most planets. I hope after some filtering to have a list of metals which do not break the "believable" rule.
If some of those are worth mining, the player must decide. Iron may be looked for in some systems which have no inborn industry. But I ****ume that iron will not be be a top interest of space miners.
I think the more interesting things will come once I get to the minerals list, but at the moment that looks so huge, that I don't really know where to start with. The Hood pointed me to a few minerals, Prissi also pointed out some, and now I got some more ideas from you, VS. It's growing, but still in the collection phase.
The space mining game I want to set atop of the solar system and planet generation systems - more as an application of those underlying systems.
I think also that those rare earth would be rather the goal of mining. Pure titanium asteriods might be also worth mining. And for a game, Nedynium, Lanthatnium and so one sound anyway much nicer than iron ...
Yes, the rare earths have great names :)
Would a list like this be correct English?
Marginal zinc deposits detected.
Minor gold deposits detected.
Small copper deposits detected.
Rich iron ore deposits detected.
Abundant bauxite depots detected.
Besides grammar, would those levels of size/richness be alright? Should I add more, should I use different words? Help is welcome :)
Sounds good, but I'd replace marginal with trace.
Thanks :)
What would be best of those?
"Traces of zinc detected"
"Trace zinc deposits detected"
"Trace deposits of zinc detected"
Either 2 or 3, I'd say. They all make sense :)
Good :) I think I'll chose 2 then, because it is a bit shorter.
Thanks a lot!
I've used #3 now, to have a bit variation in the list. Also it semed to be a nice idea to highlite the metal names with their respective metallic colors. That makes the list easier to read, if the player is only interested in "what is there".
A preview:
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/metals_preview.png)
Click for full size
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/metals_preview.png)
Feedback and ideas are welcome as always :)
Edit: Iron is a bit rusty in the list ... there are just too many gray metals.
Nice... maybe the metals could use bold font? The only nitpicking would be that I can't read what tab is selected.
I've not yet found out how to set the colors for selected tabs. The label color stays green, and it's hard to read indeed. I'll look into that again.
News! I've uploaded a new release candidate, v0.18.
The biggest change in this version is the calculation of metal resources for all solid planet types. Cold planets now have less water vapor in their atmospheres.
Also, this version got colored highliting for the gas and metal resource lists, which should improve their readability. The lists are sorted now, with the most common elements first.
I have made slight corrections to the star name generator so that names like "Aa" or "Yyy" are not possible anymore. Also, the "bare rocky planet" type got a better image now. All planet images are now better compressed, saving about 60kb download size compared to the former version. Thanks VS, for the hint!
=> http://www.funkelwerk.de/applets/solarex-0_18rc/
Feedback is welcome :)
Oops, now I see you have separate metals and minerals - I thought these were one category.
Metals on ice bodies? Maybe I am confused what you mean by ice body?
One very small quirk is that large stars have their info-box down below them; maybe they could use the slot of first planet, so that it is conveniently on screen right from start?
Random note: 1259152454890 generates a system from every sci-fi fan's dreams!
Very interesting with the many inhabitable planets :) Now I'd like to know the surface gravity of the bigger ones, I still didn't add that calculation.
"Ice bodies" means planets with surfaces that are completely covered by ice, frozen water, or maybe other frozen substances that normally would be gas or fluids. Those can have solid cores, but don't have to.
I gave them a small chance to bear metals. Shouldn't be more than traces, except if it is a very big planet. The metals could be from crashed asteroids, or be part of the initial planet mix. Maybe I need to lower the chance of metals, since metals should not be frequent there.
The categories are not final yet. But minerals might become a big category again, even bigger than metals, so I think that will stay. I still need to get in touch with geologists to discuss the mineral problems ...
Thanks for testing and thank you for the feedback :) It's good to see where there are problems in the generators. Creating "realistic" systems would be too much, but "believable" systems is a goal of mine. So if metals on ice bodies are too odd, they must become more rare or vanish at all.
Surface gravity is really simple... g = H*M/R² where M is m****, R radius and H Gravitational constant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant). Don't forget to put them all in base units (kg, m and so on).
If you want to compare just with Earth, you can simply stuff numbers from applet directly into this:
grel = (6378 / R)² * Mrel
A few years ago I obsessed a lot over similar problem - somebody suggested that he will create a game setting on a planet with five times the surface of Earth. There is a catch, and a rather nasty one; for constant planet density you get g ~ r, which means that for "bigger earths" you'll have trouble being human ;) Of course you can break out of this by suggesting different (lower) density, but I did look and it seems you get different density in only a few varieties, either rock or gas or some frozen puddle. So... :(
I don't know at all what implications can higher gravity have for life, though, so if goal of the game is mining then no problem, you don't have to visit the places yourself...
I did some statistics and two things stand out:
Your rng is a bit broken; if you look at the list (text file), you will notice something common. That is not a feature of habitable seeds, but all generated with button (= not entered manually). And it always moves there no matter what was previous seed.
Second, earth-like moons are as abundant as standalone earth-like planets, but very often come in bundles of two or three (blue bars are breakdown of the next red one). Interesting...
Smaller life form have less problems with gravity. Insects should be well, and most likely other animals up to rat size, too. Beings like fishes should be even better off.
Plants can't grow very tall most likely. And the higher gravity might also come with a more dense atmosphere, and with that more fierce winds and storms ... but I don't really know either, just would ****ume that higher gravity requires a lot of adaptions from life, but that some lifeforms might exists.
The rng is the standard java one (java.util.Random). I would expect that one to be fairly alright, but I know that languages not always bundle good random number generators. (*)
Rather, I'd ****ume that I use the RNG in a bad manner.
I'm not quite sure what you want to tell with the lists, so I just try to explain what my program does, and maybe you can explain the problem that your lists indicate :)
The "random" button just takes the current system time, and seeds the rng with that. This number is then shown in the seed field. I think it is the system time in milliseconds since 01.01.1970. From this single seed the whole system is built, by to calling the rng for all the variable values. I don't know how independent the number sequences are for seeds that do not vary much like the slowly rising system time. I'd ****ume that they are not well distributed.
Maybe you can tell me what's the problem that you noticed? I might find ways to work around the problem, or find a real fix.
This is explainable :) Since all moons have about the same distance to the star, they are most likely all inside the habitable corridor for planets around this star, if their parent planet is inside this corridor. So, if they are big enough, and have the right atmosphere, they have a good chance to be all habitable.
Only seldom two independent planets will be inside this corridor, though, and match the other criteria.
Edit:
(*) I found a number of reviews of java.util.Random and there seem to be better alternatives, even from within the java runtime libraries. I'll check that.
Every number starts with 125917...
That is the year, month and week part of the time most likely. Let's check that again next year ;)
Newer java version seem to come with a second rng, called "SecureRandom", which is supposed to be good enough for cryptographic applications. I'll try that in the next versions. It is said to be 30 times slower, but better, and it seems to be way fast enough for the Solarex project.
What about multiple star systems. They seem to be the most common:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_system
Our Solar system with a single "Sun" is really an exception...
I'm undecided how to implement them. But they are not forgotten.
Edit: Did a few tests. Basically it works, but the graphical display isn't very nice with the existing code. Suns are very big, and having two or more in the tabular system view really disrupts the display.
Edit 2: A question about proper English again - "Solar system" seems to be our system, other are then "Star System" or "Stellar System"? And of the latter two, which one would be preferred?
I felt compelled to finally work on asteroids - well graphics only so far, but still :)
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/sts/asteroid-1.png)
Imagine it circle slowly around the longer axis, and a quiet swooooosshhhhhhhh sound when it p****es by ...
Must also work on some space ship designs ... ;D
AFAIK:
A "star system" or "stellar system" (either is good) refers to a system of more than one star orbiting one another.
A "planetary system" refers to planets orbiting a star or stars. (so the solar system is a planetary system).
I'm no expert though, and I'm sure any of those would be clear - it is a game after all!
Thanks for the help :) Wikipedia uses "star system" and "stellar system" synonymously, so I ****ume the meaning is very similar, but as a foreigner it's hard for me to know what is the more commonly used term. At the moment I decided for stellar system. Thanks again!
Your Asteroid looks like chewing gum to me ;D But I like it.
Now we know what the universe was made of: Chewing gum ;D
I think we better not dive into the question what dark matter might be then ...
Something on my roadmap for the next release, a better ice planet image. Not sure if it will be this one, but it's somehow interesting :)
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/sts/ice_planet_2.png)
I'm curious, what are you using to create the graphics?
I'm using PovRay (http://www.povray.org). I've got used to it, and overall I like it much.
For me it looks like a ball build by granite.
Maybe the most famous icy moon in our system ... at least the most interesting to me:
http://joebuckley.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/enceledus_large.jpg
I guess it's back to the drawing board ... although I'm pretty sure I won't get very close to the real one.
If it has not to bee scientific correct:
http://dilekt.deviantart.com/art/Easy-Way-of-Creating-Planets-14256218
And just searching deviantart for planets gives much more inspirational tutorials ...
I'll take a look. The first tutorial just moves the "hard" part into creating the texture. With a raytracer like PovRay the shading comes for free anyways, and the texture is the only real work to do.
But I think I should do something else for a while, it kills inspiration to work too long on the same problem. Currently I wonder how to automatically generate newspaper-like news.
Fascinating
Whee :)
This may be interesting for your project, Hajo. It's an applet that simulates how galaxies merge... http://mergers.galaxyzoo.org/
Very interesting, but I think too big in time and space scale. Finally, I want to develop it into a space prospector game, so it will be presented from a single persons scale. And a person just doesn't live long enough to experience the flow of a galaxy merger.
In another place I had posted this yersterday - I publish it here, too, to show what I'm thinking about currently. Overall I'm in a creative slump though, slight depression, having toothache and it's unlikely that I'll do any work anytime soon ... I'm just posting here for distraction, and as one can see in the other thread about Java, my bad mood also makes me more sensitive :-[
Got to know that it has display problems on Mac OS X. I'll try to find a fix till the next release, but it seems I must do the fix "blindly" since I cannot test the results, not having a Mac at hands.
A component for the project that I'd like would be some kind of news ticker. But I'm stuck already again, not knowing how to procedurally generate interesting news ...
One thing that should work for sure are news about:
- Resources found on some planet
But what else than that? Newspapers usually have news about politics, social happenings, economy/finances and sports.
I guess a few of those could be made up easily. For sure there could be a sports league (or several) of some kind simulated in the backgrounds, and there could be news about recent matches?
Politics seems to be more difficult, since they might have influence to a space prospectors life - if the is a revolt in some stellar system, it should have some effect on the player if he travels there ... maybe some minor news like "A. Flubberla elected as station major of Wolf Depot in Eldobran IV" would work to entertain the player?
For social news, maybe a simulation of some noble families and celebrities could be kludged, and yielding news of marriages, affairs and scandals?
Any ideas for other types of news in the ticker? It's mostly meant to entertain the player, not necessarily to inform him, and to give an impression of a more vivid world.
I would also add news about distances, eclipses, transits, comets, planets alignments or curiosities. Mainly astronomical events. For example:
- Planet A is at its closest distances from planet B in 100 years
- Planets C, D and E will be aligned tomorrow for the first time in 5212 years
- Planet a will p**** in front to the main star and will be visible from 10 AM to 13 AM
That should fit nicely in the game, thank you :)
Besides talk and planning, I'll take a break though.
I would think rich would be bigger than abundant, but I could be wrong.
How could those two be named to make it more clear?
Both aren't used yet, so it's not a problem in the released version and there is no rush to correct it.
Perhaps abundant for the second-highest level and prolific for the highest?
Rich kind of doesn't fit the paradigm, since it would normally be used to describe the density of a specific deposit, e.g., a rich vein, rather than to describe the abundance of different deposits.
Anyone else have an opinion on these words?
I don't know if you're still developing the game, Hajo but I think this impressive video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U) will surely inspire you to come back to work on the project... :)
Maybe a black hole ate my motivation ...
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/sts/black_hole.png)
And now it's black like a pulsar:
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/sts/pulsar.png)
But there is an afterglow like in this brown dwarf:
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/sts/brown_dwarf.png)
And some day it will shine again like a sun:
(http://www.simugraph.com/misc/sonnheim/sts/sun.png)
I'm thinking often about the space flight part ... and I feel that I like to work on the graphics, also the details of the star systems. I have problems to motivate myself for the game parts of it ...
I tried to write down a few sketches for space ships designs:
http://www.funkelwerk.de/forum/index.php?topic=229.0
But it didn't catch fire really.
So there was something happening, but I had stopped talking about it. And then I turned to other work.
Thank you for the youtube link, Vilvoh :) We are blessed to live on such a jewel in space.
Unfortunately in late autumn it's all dirty, gray and dead over here. This is also a problem, brings me down often to see the world so dead and dirty. Now snow arrived, kindly covering the landscape in gentle white, hiding death until spring comes. Hopefully :)
I'd say with some confidence that some day I'll continue to work on this. I've always been a big sci-fi fan, and space exploration is one of my dreams.
A new go at an earthlike planet - still, real earth looks so much better:
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/sts/earthlike_2.png)
Is it composed from textures? I think it's the clouds, they are in reality a bit more detailed... maybe also making the blue more shiny could help some.
PovRay has some procedural texture generators. It's made from textures, but not bitmaps or pictures that I painted. I kind of programmed the procedural texture generators to produce something that looks like continents, sea and clouds. Since the last try the clouds got a bit more detailed, but they are very simple still - a highly random pattern of two shades of white, fading out at the borders.
I think the problem is that the clouds have no thickness, they are just flat.
Edit: Maybe clouds need shadows. I could map them on a bigger globe, and have them cast shadows. Must test and see :)
Hmhm... I think the clouds are unnaturally compact and opaque. As to shadows, these should be negligible since their usual altitudes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud#Cl****ification) don't really stand out compared to radius of Earth - it goes roughly like 50 << 3200.
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2084/2222523486_5e1894e314.jpg)
I see. I'll try more turbulence for the clouds, and give them more transparency in some places.
... the earth that you showed has a highlight. Is that real or just for the show? I kept the highlight settings very low for all planets.
I don't really know, it's taken straight from flickr as first suitable find; I looked more for these clouds...
(I still use a somewhat uncommon monitor settings so I can't really comment on colours you see :( )
Making some progress ... moved the clouds higher up (2% of planet diameter), and this already improved the look. A second cloud layer of smaller clouds also helped. Finally I made the water somewhat reflective, that also seemed to help.
Working on it. Hoping to have something presentable later the day. Thanks for the hints :)
Double post, because it's the forum lounge and I don't trust the "show edit as new" feature. New planet, definitely a whole lot better than before :)
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/sts/earthlike_3.png)
I'm now a bit clueless about further improvements, but this certainly was a big step. Thanks to all who helped with hints and suggestions!
I want to land there! :)
In relation to the pulsar image, I think you should add a beam of radiation on each side.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar
To understand what I mean, check
this video (http://celestia.albacete.org/celestia/celestia/videos.htm#21) of the Crab nebula pulsar.
And be welcomed by natives with flower wreaths ;)
I'll look up how to do light effects in media with PovRay - I saw renders with very nice light-beam effects in dusty air, that would work well with such beams, too.
A bit like on this image (from the povray hall of fame, not mine):
http://hof.povray.org/images/bigthumb/famille_jour.jpg
Edit:
A new version that looks a little bit better than the former one again .. I hope.
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/sts/earthlike_4.png)
I'm quite pleased with this one now. Thanks again to all who gave me inspiration, hints and advice! This is so much better now than the version from yesterday.
Project is on halt currently because I've been busy with this:
[link lost]
I think in a while I'll pick up the space miner part again. Need to work on a space station UI and I'm pretty clueless about that - it's a real roadblock currently.
Basically it needs to server these 4 purposes:
- buy/sell goods
- upgrade ship equipment, buy new ship
- sell prospected information about resources to companies
- browse news, take missions (if there will be missions)
I guess I'll need a kind of generic "space station" screen that has icons or such to open the 4 detail screens.
Maybe a 5th is needed:
- Inspect ship
where you can access your own ship
Cool! It's like the Ishar's saga, but I still prefer the old Moria. Seems you've returned to the roguelike development... ;D
I hope I can do some more in this direction :) Lately I jump often between projects, but as long as I come back to them now and then it should be alright.
A little bit of progress - I finally had some free time and worked on the so-long-not-getting-along-with projected space station UI. I finished an outline of the very first space station screen, the general information panel. It sure will be fleshed out over time, but well, this is how it looks right now:
[link lost]
I wonder how to make the portraits - there should be different races of aliens, and drawing portraits is really not a talent of mine.
In another forum I got some suggestions for adding atmosphere and flavor by descriptive texts and I tried that. I've added a short "welcome" type text blurb under the headline, with a message from the station crew.
Also a bigger text area giving your own impression of the station.
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/station_preview_2_t.jpg)
Click for full size
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/station_preview_2.png)
(Ack, I think "pools" should rather be "puddles" there in the text. I thought I had changed that before taking the screenshot, but apparently I didn't.)
I think I'll change the "inhabitants" label to "population"?
Looks nice... both easy to find important information and rich in the "fluff" (?) that makes the universe seem real.
BTW, every time I see title of this thread, I read for some reason "gastronomy" ;)
It makes hungry for more ;D
Maybe you should take a stop at this station then:
I'm trying to write more descriptions, got a few now and will try to write a few more as new ideas come up.
I've put up an experimental release. It has a number of features which are unreliable, particularly the support for dual star systems can create wacky systems. The reason to put this up was the new space station panel, and it should be good enough for testing that.
I've been trying to write a number of welcome and station flavor messages, so be sure to click several stations to explore them all. Some combinations of welcome messages and station descriptions are .. hilarious or stupid, depending on how you want to see them ;)
- Experimental support for dual star systems. Sometimes it creates very wacky systems.
- New space station general panel with randomized welcome and station flavor messages. Just click a space station in the system explorer view to open it.
- Improved earthlike planet image included.
- Better random number generator used for solar system generation.
- Experimental Mac OS X UI bugfix added.
=> [link lost]
I found a small typo - search for "asauna" in station texts. Do the messages correlate in any way? Seeing as there is "no outlaw wanted" made me wonder if there is also a text for some kind of pirate haven... that would look funny with democratic regime :D
It remembers me to the famous (and funny) novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy....a universe full of stars and systems to visit. ;D
If I can give it such a feeling, it will be a great success :)
@VS: The messages are purely random currently. I want to add some logic later to choose more fitting messages, depending on the system. The whole politics and population background data is missing though at the moment.
I had been pondering about a pirate station. Currently I have decided against because I didn't want to go into fighting and such. But maybe I find a funny option, then it will be in for sure :)
"Capt'n Hook himself runs this station, the jolly roger on the transmission tower can be seen from half an au away. But the pirates have settled, and run this purely as a tourist attraction - occasional robbery and such included in the dark corridors. You know, realistic experience and all that is very important for successful tourism."
Edit: I'll fix the sauna typo. The "church of technogology" will stay though ;D
It has a great feeling already; seeing whole systems on HD monitor makes you want to go there! No gastronomy in it though :( ...yet?
I think you have achieved that quality :)
Whee, thank you very much :)
A new question came up: The new space station panel shows government type and tech level. At the moment these are fixed values, just to have something to show. I'd like to include these values in the overall simulation algorithm, but I'm a bit clueless how to. I want to ask about the government type first.
If the stellar system generator produces a system, it's known how many inhabitable planets and moons are there, and how many space stations.
From these I can roughly calculate a total population of the system. A race can be randomly chosen, or chosen based on the planet types ... some races might prefer cold planets, others like hot planets, and there might be different needs for atmospheres, too. Different races could have different preferences for government types.
What government types would you suggest to include in the game? And given the above ideas, how would they be chosen for a particular system?
Not sure if you want to go down the route of including politics, it has the potential to open a can of worms...
That said I think these would be reasonable:
Anarchy
Feudal
Republic
Monarchy
Dictatorship
Theocracy
As always wikipedia has a lot to say on the issue... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_forms_of_government
Hehe, had been researching wikipedia a bit earlier today, but didn't post here already again. Thanks for the link, though :)
I have sketched some races and species for the Solarex universe:
[link lost]
I want to keep the number or races/species low. Five looked good to me, this way it was fairly easy to make them distinct.
Feedback is welcome.
My two cents. For some names, I just translated the english name to other languages and them I took the words that sound better to me.
- Terraneans: erztikons, geosians or gaianoids.
- Rockeaters: r'esser, rwytas, ramaour, rokkuje
- The ones who float: rhai sy'n, khto którzy or ph'ngoui.
- Poison breathers: brekers, dýkazhi, jahazerys, zehyrs
- Clonkniks: keulons, klónons, klooni, kurōns
Thanks, there are a few nice names in there!
I particularly like the Rhai Sy'n, Zehyrs for the poison breathers looks good too. Ramaour for the rockeaters seems to fit also. I think I'll use those, thanks again for the help!
I've been working on government type and population calculations for the space stations and also for the planets.
Right now I think, I have the basics of population and government type calculations in place. There is some finetuning needed, the Clonkniks seem to be everywhere, while the other races inhabit only few planets. But basically it works:
[link lost]
It also has a new, species-specific naming scheme for the space stations which works nicely, I think. In a while I want to have a better planet naming scheme, too, but that looks tricky to me at the moment.
It's an experimental release again, because it definiely lacks some polish and might have a number of yet unknown bugs and problems.
There are "Rockeaters", "Poison breathers", "The ones who float", "Clonkniks" (with a typo that makes them Clonkniki) and "Terraneans" in this preview. I left the names as I had sketched them first - I hope "Poison breathers" is not too offensive, it seems worse in English than it appeared to me initially.
Well, the Clonkniks are robotos, aren't they? therefore the range of planets they can inhabit should be wider than the rest of races. In fact, they actually don't need a planet to live, they might build space structures like dyson spheres or rings and live at the outer space.
Have you planned some kind of evolution algorithm for this universe? I mean, systems that dissapear due to the death of the star or gallaxies collapsing, or planets being born from clouds of gas.
Deep space stations of the Clonkniks are on my list.
Evolution, I think I'll not try that. The game on top of the system generation algorithm will span at most the lifetime of a space prospector, and withing this timeframe the universe can be seen as mostly static I think.
I've been pondering though to have a less uniform distribution of inhabited systems, i.e. that each race has a center from which it spread, and even if one only sees a snapshot, it will show the results of this former growth of the civilizations.
You may be interested in using variations of
Drake's equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation) to generate the amount of civillizations by galaxy and their spreading.
Probably, you will have to change some of the parameters, like
ne, that would be different for each race therefore you must define first the life support conditions for each one.
There are a number of resources like the name tables that depend on the number of species. Also I want to have portraits for them. Unless I can generate everything procedurally, these dependencies will limit the project to a fixed number of species. I think it will be alright to stick with 5, rather flesh them out some more with background stories, and detail information.
And then I need to search a portrait artist who can draw ~30 portraits for the different species. I must say though that photos of used vacuum tubes make great replacements for Clonknik heads ;D
I think I didn't explain the idea correctly. I suggested you to use that equation or a variation, to calculate the number of appereances for each race, not to calculate the total number of races.
In fact, most the values are fixed or known, like R*, fp, ne y fℓ. You can ignore L and the rest may vary depending on the universe that has been created for that game. One question, should we ****ume that all those races are intelligent?
I see. I had been pondering about a bell-shaped (gaussian?) distribution for each race. So there would be one location where they are most frequent, and the farther away from this center the less frequent they'll be found. For the purpose of this game it's good that the distribution is nowhere zero.
The 5 races are intelligent, but the Clonkniks and The ones who float might be hard to understand for humans sometimes. I don't know if this will matter, maybe if there are missions or such involved that the player can accept.
Wow, 30 portraits... that might be indeed hard.
I'll try to find someone ...
Next graphic on my list will be a Clonknik interspace station. I dream of something fractal ... wish I had more time.
Perhaps if you let each race have its own style of portraits, they could be made by different people...
That could work :)
I've tried to make a level 3 clonktal. Not sure if this works as space station, but it's a cool structure anyways ;)
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/clonktal.png)
We may consider it as a cloud of machines (sizes from nano to mega) that are sticked together, like a single alive organism.
I've also found this formula to calculate the habitable zone (HZ) around a star, that may help you to calculate the distribution of each race, or at least the possible regions where life might appear in ideal conditions:
Distance(HZ, star) = [Luminosity(star) / Luminosity(sun)]0.5, in a.u.
If you want to calculate the max and min of the habitable zone, just multiply
Distance(HZ,star) by these two factors 0.95 and 1.37.
So far I just used the surface temperatures and atmosphere for checking who might like the planet. Actually surface temperatures should follow a formular like yours; my code might not be that precise.
Since I could not come up with proper ideas, I decided to do at least something - something is better than nothing ... for the time being I try to paint them by myself.
Constructing portraits from parts was in Elite and Elite II I think, but it worked, and since I had no better idea, I started to work on portrait parts. The images below are a mix of parts from two base portraits:
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/portrait_test.png)
It's not great but maybe something to work with until I have better ideas. I think I must work some more on the variation/individuality, as I must work on my overall portrait drawing skills, but it's a start.
Well, I'm not sure about their gender, but they're already cute :)
Thanks for the feedback. With their gender, I'm not sure either 8) At the moment I'm just practising with an easy way to create a bigger number of portraits for the races. Most likely I'll give their skin a different hue finally. Not quite decided about violet or green hues ... these will be "poison breathers", who like hot, dense and mostly oxygene free atmospheres.
An updated version, with a stronger variation in the eye-ears part of the portraits:
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/portrait_test_2.png)
Actually I never really figured how to distinguish male from female faces in portraits, but I ****ume for alien races this isn't so important. They are just different ...
Wait, those are generated as well?
It's a great work, indeed! To distinguish male from female, I suggest to emphasize certain features for male individuals. For example, the ears might be bigger for males or the eyes might be smaller for females.
Not quite. I have drawn 6 portrait elements, which will be ****embled randomly. The line shows all possible permutations of the elements. With a few more elements, there could be quite a lot of permutations possible.
A test in standard martian, erm, venusian green:
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/portrait_test_3.png)
Looks odd, but that is alright. The rockeaters will come in more vivid red-and-brown. The real skin tones I must reserve for the terraneans.
Edit: Portrait backgrounds won't be all grey finally, so I can choose colors and patterns that compliment the portraits.
Yes, that's what I meant when I said generated - of course not entirely, that wouldn't look so well :P
A first test of rockeater portraits:
(http://www.funkelwerk.de/data/solarex/rockeater_portrait_test.png)
Perhaps I'm colorblind but in some of them, it looks like a mix between pigs and tomatoes!! :D
I would use dark browns instead of reds.
Hehe ;D
I've quickly tried a darker brown, I'm not quite sure if it's better. But this is work in progress, so some changes will come for sure. More variation in color could be interesting. Also I think many of the polygons need more texture. Must try and see ;)
I've put a new version online, with a few changes - this is again a quite experimental release, and things may or may not work properly.
=> [link lost]
- It has got a new title screen with a credits list.
- I tried to fix a number of UI layout and redraw problems.
- Changed font to a bigger font in some places to improve readability.
- For the very curious, a work-in-progress version of the trade screen is included, but it doesn't show more than the list of available goods. Prices and quantities are just placeholders.
Under the hood there are more changes towards space ship data, cargo, and keeping track of the players position in space, but those aren't visible yet.
Also, the portraits are not included yet, because I'm not yet decided about the way to include them. Or just call me lazy :P
When you enter in the detailed view of the solar system with stars, planets and the rest of small elements, wouldn't be possible to use zoom levels instead of scroll ? sometimes the star is very large and it's annoying to move along the solar system.
Yes that would be possible. But if a red giant star is zoomed to the size of an average star, the planets will only be points. Let's wait and see what the others think about the idea?
Another possible solution would be to show a small window with a minimap, similar to Simutrans minimap.
That's definitely more work than zooming.
The "Commody Exchange" button in the station menu is to small.
If you are on the Commody Exchange site you cannot get back to the station menu.
Too small? You mean, the text doesn't fit in? It does for me ...
Which OS do you use, and which java version do you have?
The "Commodities Exchance" screen is work in progress. I was pondering to leave it as a dead end, but then I noticed there is the "Open system explorer" button in the bottom panel, and you can get back to the tabular system view at least, so I decided I'm too lazy to do something about it now ...
But you are right, the screen flow needs more work until this can become a game. It bothers me though that the text doesn't fit in the button, since I can only test with Windows XP, and still want to produce UIs that look alright everywhere - there could now be a whole lot of things that look different than I had seen them on my screen, and this is something that disturbs me (http://forums.tigsource.com/Smileys/derek/epileptic.gif)
Edit: Buttons in the station panel will be wider in the next version. Jonasbb if you can send me a screenshot of the problem I might be able to figure exactly how much wider they need to be.
Ubuntu 9.10 with Java 1.6.0_15
Thank you. It seems the font is a bit wider there on Ubuntu, but not much. I'll enlarge the buttons and it should be good next version.
If you spot more of such problems, please let me know :)
I'm working on the flight and traveling parts. So far one could instantly access planets and stations, just by clicking them.
Soon, one will have to actually fly there to find out the details.
I liked the "explore a galaxy on your desk" feature, which allowed instant access to all data. I think I'll try to keep it somehow, maybe as a sandbox mode or separate project. For the exploration and prospecting parts of the game it's important that data is not readily accessible, but must be discovered. Also the time factor involved in traveling seems to be necessary for a game.
Meanwhile I've started with a super simple stellar system navigation map. Planet orbits are shown as dotted circles, one can pan and zoom the view. The screenshots below show a little tour into a stellar system.
Rikon system overview. A white dwarf sun with some plants. Some of the planets have moons.
[link lost]
Closing in to Rikon 1, a ringed planet with several moons and space stations in orbit.
[link lost]
Finally a detail view of Outpost C****ini, orbiting the moon Rikon 1-3
[link lost]
I don't plan to implement a 3D space flight simulation. Travel will happen on this navigation map, in a more abstract fashion.
I noticed that the ordering of the moons was wrong often. You can see this problem in the screenshots above. This will be fixed in the forthcoming release.
I'm looking forward to play with it.. :)
I could polish a few details and a new release candidate should be ready soon. I don't know how busy tomorrow will be, so it might be good to have it out today, but I can't say yet for sure. Depends on how many bugs I discover in the next while ;D
I've put a new version online, with a few changes - this is again a quite experimental release, and things may or may not work properly.
[link lost]
- Added system navigation map.
- Improved naming for dual stars (alpha/beta).
- Extended goods list.
The biggest change is the new system navigation map. Well, navigation itself is still not included, but this is where you'll move your ship once the travel part of the game becomes more complete. At the moment you can see the planet and moon orbits, pan and zoom in and out. A new, more spatial view on the system data.
Imho, it's the perfect way of representing it. Is it going to have movement? let me suggest a few improvements. Sometimes, the representation of system distances at nav map doesn't allow you to view the whole system. The zoom option is great, but when you zoom out, some elements which are very close, are represented as a single point while others have an image of the object. Perhaps you might reduce distances by half, something like distance scale factor equal to 0.5.
The other suggestion related with nav map is the possibility of center the viewport on a particular element or on mouse pointer, specially when you're zooming in. You click on a planet, or press C key, and the program take it as the center of the zoom process.
Just one more thing. I know space is mostly empty and dark, but I would add a stars background image at nav map. After all, some regions of space are full of light and colors.. :)
I've also been pondering about drawing the objects bigger, but I must take care that the orbits aren't suddenly inside a planet.
The centering feature I've missed, too. It might be that key presses are hard to detect, so maybe it will be a double-click on the object to center it, but the feature will be included.
I'd like nice backgrounds, too, in several places. My first try to make my own failed. Also I'm a bit concerned about memory limitations. I keep this on my list, but must first get some nice free-to-use backgrounds and also find out how much additional memory I can safely use for decorations.