Gave it a try and like what I see so far...

So i finaly got it all working and so far i am very impressed with what I am seeing. Most of the little things I would like to see changed or added are planed in the future updates. The one annoying issue I encountered was that the installer for I-War 2 and Torn Stars seem to not loke long file names. But installing the game in a path with names less then 8 characters allowed everything to install and work correctly.

I have a few questions and suggestions so bear with me a little longer. One thing I have not yet figgured out is whether the economy is dynamic or static, does the ammount of on hand goods affect selling and buying prices? If not can we make it do so?

I know that there has been some discussion about moving objects with the system orbit addon, that hinted that things with 0 mass/weight can not be moved. Why can't they just be given mass/weight? Things like astroid belt markers could be replaced with taged asteroids then move along the plane of the belts rotation, and if that works then multiple tagged asteroids could be placed at different compas heading from rotation center to allow for multiple destinations with in a feild or belt.

As for a dynamic economy I have several ideas, well more accualy but I do not have the knowlage to code them to test my theroies. Every since Eve disapointed me I have been building in my head the sim I would like to see built. Torn Stars is moving int he same directions as I envision, and the single player nature of the engine makes it less complex, so this might prove to be a good test bed for these concepts. If anyone on the dev team or in the comunity is interested in discussing these ideas or conecpts let me know, even if its just to help me learn to code in I-War so I can test some of my designs.

The cold hard void of space beckons me, but she will have to wait, for I am not yet ready to embrace her.

Hi Gimpster. Glad you like and are enjoying Torn Stars thus far. An insane amount of work went into it, mostly because everyone involved with the project are space sim junkies that simply haven't found what they need in any of the currently available (or coming) commercial products. We still have much more to come as well, in our Unstable Space release, and eventually Traffic.

We had some problems with the installer before, but solved them. Having it recoqnize the pathway better would be nice.

Now to answer your questions...first, the economy is not dynamic. In it's current form prices are based on a rather complicated, and interesting system based on centers of production, and distances from those centers of production. For our Traffic release we had already planned on making specific scripts that would help to 'simulate' a dynamic economy, by reducing or lowering the prices/availability of pods based off the movement/actions of NPC's or the player. Making a truly 'dynamic' economy for this game is not necessary, nor practical or easy to do. Provided we have the appearence of a dynamic economy, from the view of the player, it should suffice.

Your suggestion about field/belt destinations sounds feasible, though Grandpatrout would know more than me there. It sounds similar to something I suggested. However, likely it would not be possible as the asteroids in quesiton do not exist until the player goes to the asteroid belt. The engine can only have a limited amount of 'real' objects in space before it would grind to a halt.

If you have ideas for a dynamic economy, by all means post them for discussion. We always welcome new ideas. GranpaTrout has made some considerable changes to the overall code setup/structure in Unstable Space, and as far as I can tell, these changes could provide easy hooks for implimenting 'dynamic' effects on the economy. In the new code there are actual fleets of ships, navy, mercenary, pirate or others, that actually fly around the solar systems. It seems to me that it would be fairly easy to write scripts, based off these fleet movements, that would effect the prices of goods at nearby stations. So for example, a pirate fleet moves to Station A. Goods at station A are now scarce and expensive (because there is a pirate fleet nearby, pirating anything that comes near). Conversely, if a Navy fleet came near a station, the prices of goods would lower, because it is now easier for traders to get to and from the station. Anyways, just some very basic thoughts there.

Objects with zero mass can be moved. There’s just a bug in the orbit code that makes it not identify asteroid belt markers (and possibly nebulae) as something it needs to process. The thing is, you can’t make an object orbit around something that has zero mass. (If you think about it, how can you orbit around something with no gravitational pull?) If you put individual asteroids/asteroid stations in orbit around the star, they should move.

But it’s nice to see you’re enjoying my orbit mod. Everything should move realistically. At least as realistically as you can get with the rather out-of-scale systems Torn Stars has.

Hey Mdvalley, we incorporated all that awesome work you did setting up the stars of the cluster in the right positions, and I think it added alot to the sim (even though the smaller ones were absorbed into the cloud of extra stars I added). I think GrandpaTrout just used some pretty rough numbers to generate default orbital distances for planets and moons etc. Maybe you could calculate a more accurate and realistic set? I believe having those numbers worked into the cluster would just be a matter of tweaking geog.exe, then re-building the cluster. We always enjoy your forays into ultra realism.

I could, sure, once I figure it out myself. Although there is the issue of stars being grossly undersized in the game, so if the planets are a realistic distance, the star would be a tiny dot in most of the system. I found out that stars can be resized in the code by a simple call to Sim.SetRadius. However, the autopilot is too stupid to see the new size and would happily fly you into the star instead of going around.

Yeah, Jon and I had some problems with that. It was the cause of a fairly significant, and tricky to track down bug. However, it had more to do with the distance of stations from planets. We had them set to close and the autopilot flew right into the planet, ignoring it. Perhaps something similar is happening with stars. And perhaps if the planets are far enough from the star, the bug can be avoided. Actually, I guess the the problem already exists with normal stars. It is just highly unlikey that any autopilot path that gets plotted with pass close enough to the star to notice the autopilot NOT dodging the star. Just my guess though. I suppose I have seen the autopilot skirt around planets before...

Can that sim.setradius change the radius of planets too?