Visible äquator while aproaching a planet - for orientation

[NeonSturm]

Read the title

I can be just a visual continuous or doted line for now.
Later we can think about adding polar lights :D but that is not even necessary.


On Earth, the equator is roughly in middle of two white poles. Radial orientation is supported by the ocean vs land and visual landmarks.


In StarMade, planets have no point of orientation regarding up/down from a distance while in reality it is often at least supported by the ecliptic plane (the plane at which circles for a planet-year are drawn.
While this plane is not directly visible, it would help to see it (or indications of it) while in a ship cockpit.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Press 'C'.

 

[NeonSturm]

Press 'C'.

This also re-orientates you. Very bad if you have relative speed to the planet.

I want orientation guidance, not being orientated to some galactic west.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

True, but it works well if you want to know what is up and what is down. Only real problem is that you do indeed face a different direction. There also is the big ship problem. One way to do it too (although it isn't really safe) is to exit your ship and de-align from your ship.

Edit: One way to not have to know what is up and what is down is if you had the same sky and light level on every segment, with different times on different sectors of course.
I never really bother with up and down currently, because I want to have the segment with the most light (so the segments facing the sun directly).

 

[NeonSturm]

using lightened surface only works without daytime :p

IRL the earth's poles have can either 24h/d sunlight or 24h/d night - dependent on summer/winter (but sun/moon in different directions)

IRL our moon always shows us the same side. I guess this may also happen on starts without a moon for the same reasons.

 

[WaffulMann]

>galactic west

seriously though, there is no up/down in space. maybe the dev(s?) could do something like what star citizen does when you select a celestial body, and put it in your hud/on a computer block.

 

[NeonSturm]

Let's say the human home planet earth is 0° or the galactic north relative to the centre of whole universe.
(There could be an alien language expression which translates to "galactic north" but is different from ours, but that is lore not fact)

Let us also assume that galactic top is above our north pole (the time when this measurement system is introduced) and in a right angle of a line through the galactic centre and earth.
Because USA (or Russland or Moon-NAZIs) were the ones first in space and they are on our north hemisphere it is the top is the north pole

Also let us assume for simplicity that Spawn(0, 0, 0) is either where earth were when this measurement system was introduced or the galactic centre itself and earth exploded (our 3rd or 4th world war killed earth, thus we can't visit it).


Not only Star-Citizen, also X2-The Treat has an ecliptic projector. Didn't know it is so difficult to find just one screen-shot with ecliptic projector active in either of 2 games.

 

[jayman38]

Generally speaking, the origin of a galaxy is a black hole in its center. There is still no real way to determine "up" and "down". Whichever civilization is most advanced, powerful, and cares to define it can say what "up" is. (generally their half of the galactic plane) Then North is always pointing to the center of the Galaxy. So ships on opposite sides of the galactic core will have North pointing in two opposite directions, pointing at each other across the core. Unfortunately, computers prefer Cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates, so I'm not sure if the devs want to deal with galactic core logic, or risk having a black hole destroying new players so close to spawn. However, I'm a fan of moving a player's default spawn point way out from the origin.

 

[Megacrafter127]

Generally speaking, the origin of a galaxy is a black hole in its center. There is still no real way to determine "up" and "down". Whichever civilization is most advanced, powerful, and cares to define it can say what "up" is. (generally their half of the galactic plane) Then North is always pointing to the center of the Galaxy. So ships on opposite sides of the galactic core will have North pointing in two opposite directions, pointing at each other across the core. Unfortunately, computers prefer Cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates, so I'm not sure if the devs want to deal with galactic core logic, or risk having a black hole destroying new players so close to spawn. However, I'm a fan of moving a player's default spawn point way out from the origin.

I think whichever civilisation defines galactic-directions bases their system on how they defined it on their old planet.
If humanity were to define it, I'd say:

The center of the galaxy serves as 0,0,0.
Galactic-North will likely be the direction from 0,0,0 to earth or to a star that happens to orbit the galactic center with the lowest or most average speed.
Galactic-South will be the opposing direction of galactic-north.
Galactic-East will likely be in the direction of the momentary movement of the object, that is used to define galactic-north.
Galactic-West will be the opposing direction of galactic-east
Galactic-Up/Top will likely be the direction you are looking at, when galactic-east is clockwise from galactic-north, and you look at a 90° angle to both galactic-north and galactic-west.
Galactic-Down/Bottom will be the opposing direction of galactic-up.

Spoiler: Meaning of vectors beeing 'clockwise' from one another

If a 2 dimensional vector is clockwise from another 2 dimensional vector, the angle, passed by a line that rotates clockwise from the latter vector to the first vector, is smaller than the angle, passed by a line that rotates counterclockwise from the latter vector to the first vector.
(if it is more than 2 dimensional, it has to be projected onto a 2 dimensional plain orthogonal to the central vector of your view)

This also allows to construct a cartesian coordinate system, since none of the directions depend on the location of the viewer, and none of them are circular if observed during a single point in time. Yes, it will rotate around the galactic center while time passes, BUT so can coordinate systems.

And now back on topic.
I'd simply suggest that pressing c, while having selected an entity, aligns you with this entity.

 

[NeonSturm]

Generally speaking, the origin of a galaxy is a black hole in its center. There is still no real way to determine "up" and "down". Whichever civilization is most advanced, powerful, and cares to define it can say what "up" is. (generally their half of the galactic plane) Then North is always pointing to the center of the Galaxy. So ships on opposite sides of the galactic core will have North pointing in two opposite directions, pointing at each other across the core. Unfortunately, computers prefer Cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates, so I'm not sure if the devs want to deal with galactic core logic, or risk having a black hole destroying new players so close to spawn. However, I'm a fan of moving a player's default spawn point way out from the origin.

My post was partially meant as joke, but partially wasn't. We humans did similar already - Intel was enforcing SSE 1..3 over 3DNow! from AMD which are competing standards. Now AMD uses Intel's SSE 1..3 and extended it with a SSE 4&5 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Instruction_Multiple_Data
Do Africans not have 2 summers? Ours and theirs?

Either 1. translate the alien<->human language with up and down interchanged as alien.up<->human.down (had this interchange-issue with higher<->höhere vs upper<->hohe MemoryAreas<->Speicherbereiche for Unreal Processor Modes in English<->German too)
Or 2. have up/down mirror-zones similar to UTC+0..24 time-zones IRL depending on which faction controls this sector/sol-system or is closer to it.
Or 3. just use +y as up, +x as east and +z as north.