Improved Universe

[TheOmega]

Yay! More controversial topics!

Okay, first off, THIS IS THE SUGGESTION THREAD. It is for suggestions.

Now here's the thing, planets and things are not to scale, and that's not what I'm worried about. I'm thinking an actual solar system with the planets we currently have, or whatever they decide to do with planets in the future.

Basically, we have the planets orbiting a star, and they would be much bigger, and the stars would be bigger, and the planets would have moons that were about as big as the planets are now. Space stations could be placed anywhere, so you could have a network of orbiting satellites around your home planet or whatever. Also, everything would be on orbits perfectly circular to reduce processing power. Solar systems would be very far apart. Pretty much just adding orbital mechanics at a very basic level into the game. No third body physics or anything like that.

Of course this would mean getting rid of the current sector and system system.

I forgot to mention there could be gas giants and an asteroid belt too, mainly the asteroid belt.

Shops would be scattered on random orbits around the solar systems, so no giant space tubes floating in the middle of nowhere.

Feel free to add your ideas.

 

[Snk]

The universe update is on it's way.

 

[MineCatFTW]

There would still need to be a sector system of some kind, otherwise finding anything would be impossible.

 

[TheOmega]

Well, there would, but not the current one because everything would be moving.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Nooooooo! Not the moving solar systems! It makes minimaps almost impossible, so please no moving solar systems!

 

[TheOmega]

Well, who actually uses minimaps these days? What's a minimap? (sarcasm)

 

[FunnyBunny14]

They are going to improve it, so when that day comes you're really going to want it (and this improvement is a fact, btw).

 

[TheOmega]

Glad they're finally updating it, and the UI could use a bit of work too, it seems kinda old now. That's probably at the bottom of their list though.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Kupu and bench are working on a new UI.

 

[TheOmega]

Great! Can't wait for it now.... DANG YOU FUNNYBUNNY14!

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Great! Can't wait for it now.... DANG YOU FUNNYBUNNY14!

It is going to be a while though. But rest assured, the devs know that a new GUI is needed and we will get one in due time. Just don't expect to see it for a while. That way you can't be disappointed, and it only makes it more incredible once it comes out.

 

[TheOmega]

Now you make me want it more.... GRRR.

 

[Snk]

The universe update is on it's way

 

[ltmauve]

While I would also like full-scale planets (~10,000km across) it's that most computers don't have space for that. The surface area of an earth-like planet is 5.1 * 10^14 m^2. That requires 1.5 petabytes to store that information. Just to store the blocks on the surface. To store the blocks beneath would probably require about 8x the memory. Let's assume a planet can be up to 14.4 MB in size. That's 4.8 million blocks, or 400,000 blocks per plate. Let's assume we can get away with an average depth of 8, and we have an area of 50,000 per plate. That's an edge length of 170m, with leads to a radius of about 200m, depending on how you measure it.
If you have a gigabyte of space, that's 330 million blocks, which is about 25 million blocks per plate, leading to an edge length of 3800, leading to a radius of 5 km.
Now obviously, no one is going to want planets 1 GB in size. Shrinking it down to 1km radius gives us a file size of 40MB. Planets are going to take up a lot of file space. Maybe it could be possible to proceduraly generate blocks as they get removed, bringing file sizes down significantly. On the other hand, a large salvager would generate a lot of lag then.

If you want orbits, you'll probably have to settle for square ones, since having moving (inside the sector) planets would be a huge pain. Instead. the sectors could change places and move through a square path around the stars. There's also the difficulty in getting to a given planet in one of those sectors. I imagine the best way to define it would be system : orbit : position so 0 0 0:5:3 Which would tell you where the third sector in the orbit with radius 5 in the 0 0 0 system is. Also, the sun should be centered in a sector instead of in the boundary between 8 sectors.

Also, I do want moons. Can we make the moons oreos?

Also, I think the void sectors (between systems) should be larger then the system sectors. So the system sectors should be expanded to about 5km, and the void sectors should be about 25 km. Can that be done? (Though we would need sectors 5 x 5 x 25, 5 x 25 x 25, and 25 x 25 x 25)

 

[Mr.Steam]

The problem with scaling up planets, other than hardware limitation, is you would also need to radically increase flight speeds to match the more realistic planets. The Earth has a diameter of about 12000 km. A satellite travels about 7 km/sec in low earth orbit. This means a satellite takes about 1700 sec to travel a distance equal to the earths diameter. In 1700 sec our ships at standard server speed of 75 m/s would travel 128 km. To be the proper scale with our standard server speed an earth like planet would need to be 128 km in diameter. In my opinion even that is way too big. The whole system would be taken up by one planet. They could make the ships travel 1000 times faster than they do now, but it would destroy combat balance. Dogfighting in spaceships would be more like trying to hit one speeding bullet with another speeding bullet. Even modern jet fighters don't dogfight anymore since they are so fast, they just use lock on missiles. And they are SLOW compared to spacecraft.

 

[ltmauve]

Yeah, I don't think it's practical to have planets much larger than 1km radius. That gives 16 km^2 of surface area, which is plenty of room for planets, or even a hanger for most titans.
Also, regarding planets: can the "floor" get removed, so we can build below the normal bottom of the plates?

 

[TheOmega]

First off, I didn't say realistic sized, i said more realisticLY sized. just making them bigger is all. Secondly, the current sector system would be replaced with a new one, and it would probably be something like the star name that you could type in in the navigation system, then the planet name, then the moon if needed. The orbits would be at random distances from the star, starting at maybe 10k, with at least a 10k gap between orbits. Moons could be 1k or something, I don't know. If you haven't checked out my other thread, check it out. It's about the planets being a different shape. (too lazy to get a link :D)

 

[ltmauve]

But having the planets as moving objects in the physics engine would greatly reduce performance. Currently, the planets are static in the sectors, which rotate.

 

[TheOmega]

They would technically be moving objects, but they are on fixed orbits and nothing can change them, besides maybe some admin command. It wouldn't be like ships flying in circles with collisions every 10 seconds.

 

[ltmauve]

Having a moving reference frame is easier than having a moving object.
It's be easier to have a set-up with concentric rings with different rotation speeds, for systems. For void sectors, having one big empty (and I mean empty empty, not asteriods empty) would be simple. The question is, what do you do about the fact that systems would be super flat?

Also, I think that planets should be closer in than 10km to the sun, and the sun's damage radius should go wayyyyyyy down. And each system should have a primary resource, which is a one of the normal resources that happens to show up about 5x more than the other resources.