Whole buncha rogue planets

[Valiant70]

So apparently there are quite a few rogue planets IRL... Supposedly more than there are planets orbiting stars. Well, that's interesting.

This phenomenon could have a really good place in Starmade's exploration content. Think about it: Planets orbiting stars are relatively easy to find because they're lit up and you know roughly where to look. Most rogue planets wouldn't have the benefit of "glowing" against the cold background of space, making them more of a challenge to find.

In Starmade, I'd like to see rogue planets with a variety of themes. Some of these might include:

• Overgrown asteroid - a place to mine
• "Oceanic" planets with seas of liquid helium - great place to grab coolant if that's ever added to the game
• Ice-shelled planet with a warm core and life deep in caverns
• Funky cold gas giant with huge rings and lots of frozen crystals flying around, hitting each other, and causing lightning

I'm not sure what sorts of mechanics will drive exploration content, so I can't suggest any particular mechanic for detecting these planets. I do think it should play somewhat like a minigame though. Think of EVE Online's probe-scanning minigame. Something with that level of complexity would be appropriate.

 

[silverfoe]

So apparently there are quite a few rogue planets IRL... Supposedly more than there are planets orbiting stars. Well, that's interesting.

This phenomenon could have a really good place in Starmade's exploration content. Think about it: Planets orbiting stars are relatively easy to find because they're lit up and you know roughly where to look. Most rogue planets wouldn't have the benefit of "glowing" against the cold background of space, making them more of a challenge to find.

In Starmade, I'd like to see rogue planets with a variety of themes. Some of these might include:

• Overgrown asteroid - a place to mine
• "Oceanic" planets with seas of liquid helium great place to grab coolant if that's ever added to the game
• Ice-shelled planet with a warm core and life deep in caverns
• Funky cold gas giant with huge rings and lots of frozen crystals flying around, hitting each other, and causing lightning

I'm not sure what sorts of mechanics will drive exploration content, so I can't suggest any particular mechanic for detecting these planets. I do think it should play somewhat like a minigame though. Think of EVE Online's probe-scanning minigame. Something with that level of complexity would be appropriate.

Sounds cool, maybe have them not even show up on the map unless som special scanner is used.

 

[Dire Venom]

+1 to this.
Purely catering to the explorers, being able to select a name for discovered objects/receive reputation/something would be pretty cool as well.
I would love for players to beable to trade star-charts as well as create points, icons and notes on various entities on the map.

Obviously someone would go around naming everything "Poopy buthole Land #345" etc but some for of naming/recognition would be nice.

 

[Valiant70]

Sounds cool, maybe have them not even show up on the map unless som special scanner is used.

Exactly! Some sort of minigame-like scanning functionality reveals them.

 

[Valiant70]

Here's an idea for multiple ways of finding rogue planets, with varying difficulties:

• Easiest: EM emissions (visible and invisible light). Equipment is fairly compact. Most rogue planets are too cold to put out infrared, but if they're radioactive or have some sort of internal heat source, they should be easy to spot this way.
• Moderate: Magnetic. Moderately sized equipment to get good detection range. If the planet has a magnetic field, you can detect it that way if you're close enough.
• Hardest: Gravimetric detection. Requires really large equipment and measurements from several locations to pinpoint the planet's location.

 

[lochenspace]

Funky cold gas giant with huge rings and lots of frozen crystals flying around, hitting each other, and causing lightning

Yeah...rogue gas giants would be pretty awesome, ESPEICALLY if the rings are done right. I'm tired of rings looking like this...

....and would MUCH prefer flying a ship through rings looking like this.

And it's not just the HUGE abundance of asteroids that really make these kinds of rings DEMOLISH the previous type, it's also the ambient fog generated by all the asteroids bumping into each other and kicking up dust, it makes it SUPER COOL! Starmade should have gas giants, and epic ring systems around some planetary bodies.

 

[jayman38]

I imagine a particle-system planetary ring could work. You'd lose the ability to "burst" through the ring with your ship, creating a hole in the ring, but at least it would look right, because the visual processing would take place on the client's GPU, instead of the server calculating physics for millions of small asteroids.

Replacing distant ring-rocks with graphic fog would be critical for good performance.

 

[Valiant70]

Mining the rings of a planet??? YES PLEASE!