Well since I can't work on POIs due to the floating POI bug, I'm working on this ice planet some more
I'm surprised the devs don't want these worlds in the main game. They've got more life in them than 80% of what we've got now.
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere." -Carl Sagan
Optimization and performance is a big concern for them I think. While I try to keep performance in mind when creating planets and POIs, my benchmark is basically "does it run at 60FPS on my system?". There's a lot more freedom in a custom scenario, things don't need to be optimized or perfect. They're also adding underlying mechanics all the time, so I can see why they wouldn't be focused on adding too many new planets at the moment. That said, anyone is always free to use or modify anything from my scenario, devs included. I just ask for credit. I hope some of my stuff can inspire others. That's the real reward for me, to see more people creating their own blueprints, POIs, planets, or scenarios. I think Empyrion has a great future ahead of it, but it's going to depend on the creativity and passion of the players to realize its full potential. Sorry. Rant over.
While looking at this the idea rises to try a completly burried POI with fillerblocks on top. Something like a frozen crashed CV. So you could see it through the ice. Don't know if thats achiveable....
Would love a new texture parameter then. Opacity! Workaround could be that only antennas broke through the ice and an reduced POI visibility in the .yaml.
There's several ways I've been thinking of "hiding" buried POIs: Low MapDistance: they show up on the detector, but they don't get discovered until the player digs down. Makes for a signal hunting experience. No MapDistance and a low HudDistance: they don't show up on the detector at all, but will show up on the HUD within the specified range (250 meters?). Player must accidentally stumble upon them and be paying attention to their HUD. It makes for a nice surprise find. No MapDistance or HudDistance, with visible antenna or something else sticking up out of the ground. The player must visually see it and investigate. (I think I'll use this one for crashed ships in the ice, like you mentioned!) Another possibility on *some* planet types, is a fixed POI, with a hint elsewhere on the planet (or elsewhere in the solar system) telling you the coordinates to dig at. Like a pirate treasure map "Arrrr! I buried me treasure at 25644x1753x20 on the Ice Giant! Arrrrr!" This requires some playfield setup to ensure the terrain is deep enough to hide the POI at the given coordinates.
I usually look for drones hovering above ground when looking for POIs or ore deposits. It's way easier than looking at the compass, which can indicate various interests and you don't know after which you're flying after. This could be enhanced with a special indicator pointing directly into the direction, but the width would be proportional to the distance. So if you're at 250-240 it would be like a quarter of the circle pointing into one direction (fixed like it is now or moving). When you get closer, it could tighten to 1/8th, let's say at around 150m distance. Below 50m it could be even sharper, almost directly pointing towards the target.
How's performance in there? I've seen that performance has improved considerably since Unity 2019 but still not sure if enough for that.... The reason is performance, if mountains go above a certain high performance is hard hit, if the number of mountains that go above that specific height in an area is more than just a couple the performance is basically power point.... I've tested it as soon the new planets were implemented but not sure how is has evolved since then...
It's fine on my system flying around in godmode but I have a pretty good PC. Here's a test scenario if anyone wants to try it out. Unzip into your Empyrion - Galactic Survival/Content/Scenarios folder.
Better than it used to be but still rough on my laptop... This was around 2017, I was trying to create a planet for a HV race track for a server at that time, so I was trying to create deep crevices and high mountains with pathways between them where I could lay some tracks and bridges But performance was so bad it would never work on a server....
You made a cool looking planet too. Hopefully we'll see some more optimization in the future. Most of my planets are pretty experimental in one way or another. Great thing about making a custom scenario is it allows me to experiment with things that wouldn't normally work in the default game. Thanks for trying it out!
