one old, long not asked question

Hi mdvalley,

I have been working with Grandpatrout and the rest of the Epic team for around a year now. I have worked mainly on background nebula and planet textures. In the course of this I fooled around with the lightwave setup files for the Middlestates quite a bit. As such, I would be curious to see what you have done with your verison. If you could send me the file to the email address in my user profile, it would be greatly appreciated. If your Middlestates file is more than 2 megs, I could arrange an alternative means of delivery.

Cambragol

Cambragol I am glad you posted. I couldn't remember if mdvalley was a name of yours, and you were just joking with me!

Mdvally: hook up with Cambragol. He does everything nebula in Epic. Post up some screen shots, if you can!

-Gtrout

Cambragol, your e-mail isn’t listed on your profile, and the “send e-mail� link leads to a javascript window where I could only send text, not attachments, probably to keep spambots out.

And I’ve been working on stars and planets more than pretty nebulae. In fact, I just used the “north� nebula for all of them, figuring that if these stars are in a cluster, then they should all have the same view of the rest of the universe.

Right now I’m trying to figure out the L-Point alignments. After I get those (or give up), I’ll populate the systems with stations, and maybe work on the station_formula.ini file.

Hi mdvalley, are you interested in working on Epic? There are a few project pieces open. The station setup and most of the nebula work is assigned (or even complete).

One open piece is Cambragol would really appreciate your help in lining up the clusters stars in the .LWS file. Send him and email, and I am sure he will mail you right back.

Another piece is setting up a system for use as the location that the hacking simulation takes place inside. It would be cool to have a computer green screen kind of effect for the background. And some planet textures - that look like tracery of cities of light. Again kind of green, or perhaps blue neon. Like you are looking down on just the cities fibre optic network grid.

Another special purpose system would simulate capsule space. This system should be all gray scale. Ghostly. Like you are just seeing everything with X ray vision. No color, just gravity, mass, energy. With some planet textures that simulate suns. This special system is for a later development that will let the player pilot through capsule space, trying to dodge hitting objects like suns, gravity wells, and dense nebula. I wrote a POG based gravity simulator for it.

The economy is on hold until after this first release and testing. The major problem is that the current loadout system is really sensitive to cargo changes. And that scrapped the current plan. So something new needs to be worked out. If you want to talk economics though, please do post. It is pretty fun stuff. And I can post up some more bits on what has been worked on.

-Gtrout

Mdvalley’s guide to aligning L-Points:

Step 1:
Get your desired direction in an angle between –180 and +180 degrees. 0 is south (as seen on the starmap), 90 is east, -90 is west, +-180 is north. Values outside this range will NOT work!

Step 2:
Divide your angle by 2. You heard me. Divide by 2 so it falls in the –90 to +90 range.

Step 3:
The cosine of your new angle is the first rotation value for the L-Point. The sine of the angle is the third rotation value.

Now all you have to decide is whether to point your L-Points at the moons or the planets. The original game has them both ways. The Samarkand L-Point points at Samarkand, while the Alexander L-Point points at Alexander (maybe they point at their namesakes?).

For the geog program, in the source file, replace the PlaceLpoint section with this:

This will point all L-Points at the moons. If you prefer pointing at planets, then remove the negative signs from the atan2 function.

And I already aligned all of the stars in the LWS files. Position, color, luminosities, brightness with distance, and some vertical variation. Got a nice lil’ Excel spreadsheet I used to calculate it all.

The hacking sim background sounds intriguing. Though I never played with the sim much.

Fantastic!!! I spent several days trying to get this too work. I am glad you found this. I will incorporate it.

You seem just the person to do some experimenting on building the hyperspace sim. What happens is a minature version of the whole cluster needs to be created and placed inside one system. The whole thing should only be 100km across. The trick is calculating relative positions correctly.

Stars need to be tested to see if they can be made very small. And the same with planets. On the order of 1km or less. (otherwise we just use models).

The save type program could kick out a system map with all the objects placed. If it knew how to calculate positions.


[edit] Just incorporated the changes. It worked great!

-Gtrout