Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Ghost on May 12, 2005, 06:10:55 pm
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I clicked a link to //www.shatters.net/celestia/ a while back, when someone asked for a picture of a galaxy. Now then... is there any possibility we could work the solar system aspect into FS_Open? It'd be interesting to actually have a sun in the game, and hell, even gravity is a possibility. Is there any way someone could program in an actual sun, instead of that stupid decal? By which I mean it would glow and all the fanciful stuff, and you could get way closer to it(depending on where you start in the mission; obviously it'd take forever to get to the sun if you're where you usually are). And say there was a capship out there... if it got too close, it would get pulled in and destroyed. Stuff like that. Anybody?
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You'd never be that close to any star, ever.
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I know you wouldn't. Subspace malfunction on a direly needed capital ship, anyone? Henceforth mission goes badly? Also, having something like that would be really cool in a Star Trek mod, after warp gets programmed in.
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A sun, IMO is so gigantic it'd be impossible to see the end of it at a close enough range to be 'pulled in' (as you'd need to be within about 40km max for the FS2 mission cube, IIRC).
I don't think it'd look good....
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You'd end up with the Freelancer style suns at best. And that is one of the more ridiculous things illustrating bad use of scale in that game.
If I remember correctly, the ship would need Lucifer style shields to survive much closer to a star like Sol than the orbit of Mercury for more than a very short time.
It's not really good science fiction to have a star you can closely approach. Star Trek never really let plausibility get in the way of a story.
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Eh... point taken. Screw it, then... lock and/or delete at your convenience, mods.
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the only game that comes close to accurate solar system recreation would have to be frontier. solar objects actually move in orbits, things are the right size, distances are accurate. the only problem with that game is 1 its old, and 2 its really hard.
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Originally posted by Ghost
I know you wouldn't. Subspace malfunction on a direly needed capital ship, anyone? Henceforth mission goes badly? Also, having something like that would be really cool in a Star Trek mod, after warp gets programmed in.
Let me guess, you are remembering Kurn's maneuver with his BoP at the beginning of the TNG Season 5 premier (the Klingon civil war) and seeking to reproduce it?
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Of course, someone could alwaysgo the otherway and put FS2 stuff into celestia, for a bit of a lauh, ala the Celestia Motherode (http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/).
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Originally posted by Nuke
the only game that comes close to accurate solar system recreation would have to be frontier. solar objects actually move in orbits, things are the right size, distances are accurate. the only problem with that game is 1 its old, and 2 its really hard.
Independence War and I-War 2 had pretty well done solar systems as well.
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Originally posted by aldo_14
A sun, IMO is so gigantic it'd be impossible to see the end of it at a close enough range to be 'pulled in' (as you'd need to be within about 40km max for the FS2 mission cube, IIRC).
I don't think it'd look good....
What everyone should get out of their head/abandon and eradicate is the whole concept of going too close and being pulled in if you aim for scientific accuracy.
It's similar to the myth that their isn't gravity in space so that's why astronauts are in weightlessness.
Nothing is farther from the truth - the reason why astronauts are in weightlessness is that they are constantly "falling" around the Earth.
(A more sci.accurate term is they are in the same inertia system as their ship).
However the ship, the pilots and everything else in orbit are still in gravity. They are constantly accelerating towards the Earth - for that's the force that keeps them in orbit.
There is no point where gravity suddenly starts to take effect - it is always there pulling at you and you have to compensate and take it into account.
This is the reason I started the *abandoned(? - maybe not)* thread Spaceflight 101 to explain how manuevering and changing orbits is done, to clear up some misconceptions.
So near any star, planet, supernova, blackhole gravity is always there always pulling at you.
What's different is the force of the pull - the closer you get the stronger it gets in relation with the
F=C*(1/R^2) function
R = Radius, your distance from the star.
To compansate for this the closer you are the faster you will have to go on your orbit.
I originally found it a bit strange, but the further you are from the source of the gravity the slower you need to go to keep your orbit.
So, IMHO no going close to the star provided you have adequate heat shielding (and good enough predictions to know where solar flares won't happen) shouldn't really be a problem.
You would just have to go *really* fast perpedecular to the stars surface to keep your speed.
This isn't that hard however. You're in the stars gravity well - all the distance you have towards it is potential energy which will be converted to speed when you reach it. - This is actually the reason why shooting something * into*the Sun is hard - by the time the projectile reaches the Sun it will have enough momentum to stay in orbit.
From a game engine point of view you would have to make doing fast orbiting possible - so great speeds should be made aviailible around another model.
However AFAIK this would be really problematic. So there is a better solution:
Fake it. Instead giving the ships a great speed and making huge models, you could trick the whole system inside out.
1) First make some calculations:
How big is the orbited body?
What's the distance at which the ships will orbit?
Calculate the speed needed to orbit at that distance. (It's not that hard to do.)
This is the tricky part: How big wil the orbited object look from that distance?
Now the trick:
Make a model of the obited body as big as it will look from that distance. Put it into a skymap.
Calculate the angle-velocity at which the whole skymap should be rotated around the model along with the model. Make it rotate so.
In mission it would appear as if the ships are in orbit around that body, and everything should appear to be in order.
SCP Needs:
-The ability to rotate the background.
-Ability to put models into the background (already possible since we have the subspace tunnel).
What about changing orbit, or an non-circular orbit? This is a lot trickier - the rotation speed and the size of the model would both change in this one. This could be worked around though IMHO in a similar manner.
What about bodies too big to put into game?
Simplyfy them - make only put in the visible part. Fake the rotation with moving maps (material system will make it possible).
Bobbau's superlodding would even allow making verybig models, and only rendering parts of them. (development time unknown, superdetailing is the babysteps in this direction along and it will need the material system too.)
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Trivial Psychic: No... When TNG Season 5 rolled around, I was still too young to remember really anything. The only concrete memory I have of TNG is Locutus being onscreen, saying "I am Locutus of Borg. Your life as it has been, is over. From this time forward, you will service us." And I haven't watched anything past 4 ever since; I started to watch all the old ones but lost interest.
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You wouldnt be orbiting fast enough to warrant a rotating skybox.
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Originally posted by FireCrack
You wouldnt be orbiting fast enough to warrant a rotating skybox.
That's a matter of closeness - as I said, the closer you are the faster you have to go to stay in orbit.
This is modified by the mass of the orbited object - and if you're orbiting a sun up close, trust me you should see the waves of hot plasma go by below.
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-insert obligatory "I'm new/first post" message here-
Would it be possible to use a system as described above to have a pseudo-terrestrial mission? I'm asking because I've been thinking about the possibilities inherant in missions where you have to attack a moon installation or something like that. The problem being that you'd need a "ground level" sort of thing that you can actually crash into, and with freespace, I'd think that'd mean needing a really freakin' huge model which would probably be bad for the engine, right? Or if not bad for the engine, at the very least really ugly...
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I dunno...looks pretty good to me... (http://www.sectorgame.com/twistedinfinities/screens/screenshot10.jpg)
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:welcome:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,30744.0.html
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Or you could just put it in anyway and say "screw science, this is a sci fi game, and it's a really neat effect"
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Thanks for those links... dude, that looks awesome. And even for the mission I had in mind! Nothing new under the sun, eh?
So, I guess adding gravity to that wouldn't be too hard, if gravity were to be implemented, which would be awesome of course.
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Originally posted by Flaser
That's a matter of closeness - as I said, the closer you are the faster you have to go to stay in orbit.
This is modified by the mass of the orbited object - and if you're orbiting a sun up close, trust me you should see the waves of hot plasma go by below.
Considering the size of these objects you could never be fesably close enough.
Assuming the sun takes 90 degrees in your FOV (distnace is sqrt2 radius
radius of the sun = 695 500 × 10^3 meters
mass of the sun = 1.98892 × 10^30 kilograms
v=sqrt(GM/R)
v=sqrt((6.67*10^-11)(1.99*10^30)/(sqrt2*695500*10^3))
v=sqrt(1.34*10^11)
v=3.67*10^5
t=2piR(sqrt2)/v
t=16823 s
t=4.67 hrs
It would take four and a half hours ingame for an object the size and mass of our sun taking up 90% of the feild of view to rotate once
divide by 360 and mulktiply by 3600
The sun would be rotating approx 1 degree every 47 seconds. IMO too slow.
at perihelion (closest to sun) mercury's distance is over 46 times the distance used in my caclulations.
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Observations of the motion of sunspots and solar flares, which are usually associated with sunspots, have shown that the rotational period of the Sun is just short of 25 days. But this figure is valid for the Sun's equator only, the sections near the Sun's poles seem to have a rotational period of 34 days.
Another interesting fact is that the Sun can have 'Sunquakes' similar in seismic behaviour to Earthquakes, in 1998, scientists observed a flare-generated solar quake equivalent to a 11.3 magnitude earthquake. It contained about 40,000 times the energy released in the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. You don't want to be around when one of those buggers goes off ;)
So, the sun, in realtime, rotates about 1 degree at the equator roughly every 1hr 40 mins.