I have yet to find a system without pentaxid. And almost every planet has pentaxid in some form or another. Even if it means getting out and walking on foot collecting crystals.
That doesn't mean, with RNG, that they don't exist, or cannot ever exit. It's possible to get a system that is all empty space, or asteroid belts... with no penta asteroids. Although, I suppose you could theoretically also trade for it, if whatever system has a trading station... But it IS possible with random systems, to get one without.
Green is not a color in the spectrum of black body radiation. There is no surface temperature of a "star" powered by nuclear fusion that would emit that color. The star has to be an artificial object, or a phenomena currently unknown to science (wormhole?)
One time I went to a snow planet in a warp-capable SV. My SV didn't have much pentaxid in the tank but I had a lot in cargo, huge stacks of it. I scouted the planet, set up mines, etc. In this process I took fire from a POI or two, didn't think much of it. Found out later, much later, that the cargo box containing the extra pentaxid had been blown up. I had to scour mountains to find crystals to get home. Now I always split it between multiple cargo boxes. But you usually don't think ahead like that until something bad happens.
Well, by "unknown to science" I meant "something we hadn't seen yet". Obviously, a strange quark star, wormhole, etc. might do something different but not a single one has been seen yet, and since green is a visible color, why wouldn't we have seen this already? Everything we know of that glows green naturally is because of something like radioactivity or phosphorescence. What could make something glow that bright, I don't know. "aliens"
So, I think the gas giants are a big improvement. However, I hope that in the future the implementation can be revisited. Right now they are implemented as though they are some sort of far-distant object you cannot approach. But there's no reason for that, you should be able to approach them, you just can't "land" on them. More importantly you should be able to travel between all their moons, around the planet, without warp or anything. Right now it doesn't feel at all like it should feel to go to Jupiter or whatever. Now, don't get me wrong, the game badly needed this type of variety and I'm glad we at least have this. But I hope this does not turn out to be the "final answer" for gas giants. You should be able to approach them and enter the foggy upper atmosphere, maybe set up an orbital base there, but as you descend the pressure/heat/radiation are too great and your ship is ripped apart. Why go to a gas giant at all? Extract helium/argon/hydrogen from the atmosphere, water vapor, etc. Gas mining. Not a part of the game now, would be nice to add though. But absent that, to be able to at least fly around it properly would be better.
They're physically too big to fit inside a single orbital playfield, though I agree that being able to visit them somehow would be cool.
That's a limitation of their current design which could be fixed. They may never choose to fix it, because it may not add enough value to the game to do it. But it can be done. I've actually made a "proof of concept" space engine that allows continuous exploration of galaxy size space, while still having precision at the local level. I'd actually be glad to explain how I did it to them, if they're interested, but it might be tough to "glue in" to Empyrion at this point. Basically, Unity has some limitations on its coordinate system (out of the box). Namely that it is based on 32-bit floating point values (single precision). You can define a "unit" as anything, but typically one defines it as a meter, that is what is most useful when you're walking around and stuff. If you do that, then because it is floating point, you can actually define positions down to the millimeter or less (which is needed for smooth motion) but then things get jittery when objects are distant from the origin. This happens when they're about 10,000 units away from the origin. This leads to a safe playfield size of roughly 20 km, and fundamentally explains why the sizes of playfields in Empyrion are kind of small. Now, there's things you can do to eliminate the jitter by relocating the origin dynamically, and I think they may have figured this out when they added larger planets. But even then, there's a problem viewing objects that are far away, Unity has a limit on the camera of not being able to render objects that are more than a certain distance away. (The number depends on several factors which I won't get into.) Put into a different way, because coordinates are only 32-bit floating point, the camera cannot render objects that are in front of your face (like a ship or base) that are millimeters away, while also rendering objects that are super-far away. But in another thread, I just said "Unity doesn't really have any limitations" - was I lying? Well, no, because what people might not realize is that you can actually use more than one camera, each with different coordinate systems. Just because "the camera" has a limit doesn't mean you can't do it in Unity if you understand all the features Unity does have. What I did in my engine was create a camera with a meter-scale (called the local camera), a camera with a gigameter scale (the interplanetary camera), and a camera with a petameter scale (the interstellar camera). Objects that are in front of your face render with the local camera: ships, buildings, etc. Objects that are megameters or gigameters away render with the interplanetary camera: planets, moons, the local star. Distant stars render with the interstellar camera. The coordinate stuff I based on Carlos Wilkes "Space Graphics Toolkit", but I wound up rewriting it to use my multi-camera system. He had good ideas though and I adapted them to an engine based on Entitas that dynamically sets the coordinates of each object and which camera is used to render it. The point of all this was to make it possible to explore space without loading screens, continuously. I created a real-scale version of space, that you could fly around in. What I discovered was that space was so much bigger, and so much emptier, than any person can imagine. You cannot make an engine with realistic distances and make a game out of it. Even with FTL speed, it doesn't work. I could literally go millions of miles an hour, approaching Jupiter, and I'd stare at it for 20 minutes and it didn't even look like I was getting closer. So I wound up having to compress space by a factor of hundreds, and make planets far smaller than they really are. I mean, I don't think most people understand how big Jupiter really is, or how far it is away. After spending time with these numbers, now I really get it. The scale is amazing. All of this is just to say that the playfield limitations can be fixed if they wanted. It has a cost, and may or may not be worth the time, but they may have other reasons to revisit that, because it may come with other benefits (making dynamic playfield loading possible to get smooth transitions from orbit to planet, for example).
Very interesting. Personally, I have never been that interested in continuity between distant planets and especially distant systems, though definately an interting exercise in rendering. While there may be some novelty in the long transit the first time to experience the 'vastness of space', it gets old quickly and you quickly get desperate for a decent point to point jump drive (which I think this also needs as well as its existing warp drive). However, the thing I really miss from space engineers is the continuity between a planet and orbit, especially including the transition in/out of atmosphere and gravity becoming less with distance etc and of course the need to balance thruster types between the environments such that getting to space was an endeavour in itself (as you also have factoring fuel supply for the burn period) and especially when you don't have the means to build a big powerful ship. Getting to space in SE for the first time in a new game is almost an achievement in itself. In this, I feel that space is far too easily accessible as soon as you can make any excuse for an SV. As a for eg, just doing a snow planet start and resource kind of suck there, but so long as I can scrounge together some means of getting the most minimal SV into space, then the resource issue become trivially moot.
Does anyone know what config file attribute determines whether a playfield can be built in? I was hoping to make it possible to build around suns, but I have a suspicion it may be the playfield type the controls this (and is therefore effective hard-coded).
Can't say I played much of Vanilla, but what little I did was frustrating due to lack of titanium in the starter orbit. While the small desposit on the moon is a good start, idk if it'll be able to say, build the T1 stock CV. Is the assumption that we have to build a warp-capable SV first?
It does seem that way. Gone are the days of making a CV from salvage from a load of capital ship wrecks. The thing is, because the start system is so much smaller then the original single solar system, then once you have an SV, get cobalt to add a warp drive, then suddenly you have easy access to vast quantities of everything.
Yes, you're right, and the game concept I was working on was intended to have jump gates. My interest in "continuous loading" had more to do with my basic philosophy that if you design things the right way in the first place, often things that sound hard aren't any harder to do. This was something I wanted to do right from the beginning (along with having planets actually orbit stars, and moons orbit the planets, etc.) It is ultimately super-overkill for the thing I'm currently working on, which is more of a business simulation / tycoon game, like "Patrician in space" but sometimes you do things because you enjoy them, not because they're necessary.
This post could be included in one of the knowledge base threads as it contains detailed information to customize settings for the galaxy.
