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bgreman posted:Tangentially related to the thread, but my LP just went interstellar, and I'm looking into using SE for generating imagery for extrasolar planets. I'm wondering if anyone in this thread has had any experience with scripting up new planetary systems? I've never actually done this, but using Space Engine as a visualizer for Aurora is a really neat idea so I did some poking around. I'll probably give it a shot later to make sure it actually works as described. You can add custom systems to Space Engine with a script that modifies the list of "real" systems, adding a new body with specified attributes. There's a set of fairly comprehensive tutorials on the site forums. Start off by making a new star. You'll need to specify its location relative to Sol and some stellar characteristics. I think that Aurora gives you all this on the system information page. There are some oddities concerning creating a star vs creating a barycenter, so make sure to give the tutorial a thorough read. Once you have a star you can add some planets. You should be able to do all the planets in the system in a single script. Again, Aurora helpfully gives you all of the important characteristics, although you'll need to tweak the surface characteristics using your best artistic judgement. The custom body system seems to be pretty robust and should allow you to do some pretty weird stuff if you so desire, like make planets around black holes or black holes around planets. Edit: Gave this a whirl using the example scripts and it's pretty easy once you're familiar with the syntax. The extremely shameful planet creatively named "MyPlanet" now orbits the equally shameful star "MyStar". Don't forget to add a line in \config\universe.cfg telling Space Engine about your star and planet script files, and make sure that in the star script NoPlanets is False, else the star won't generate at all. Manually adding planets overwrites the procedurally-generated bodies anyway. Glorgnole fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Aug 24, 2013 |
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Aug 24, 2013 07:49
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10 minutes after seeing this thread, I am on watching an Aurora over an endless alien desert. A few minutes later, I see what I thought was a background image in the sky box is actually a brown and pink nebula.  This is an absolutely beautiful looking program. I'm gonna spend hours just exploring the universe with this. EDIT  Each one of these dots is a star containing planets. 
mechanicalFactory fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Aug 24, 2013 |
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Aug 24, 2013 08:14
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I'm glad the controls for this game got a little less loving ridiculous.
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Aug 24, 2013 08:27
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mechanicalFactory posted:
 Each one of these is a galaxy 
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Aug 24, 2013 12:41
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Can you explore earth like you can explore all these other worlds?
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Aug 24, 2013 13:10
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bgreman posted:Tangentially related to the thread, but my LP just went interstellar, and I'm looking into using SE for generating imagery for extrasolar planets. I'm wondering if anyone in this thread has had any experience with scripting up new planetary systems? Bohemian Nights posted:Can you explore earth like you can explore all these other worlds?
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Aug 24, 2013 13:55
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Also compared to the randomly generated planets the Earth model is very bad regardless what pack you download. You'll never get satisfying levels of terrain detail. Nowhere near google earth quality sadly.
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Aug 24, 2013 16:06
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Flagrant Abuse posted:
I have the updated textures and bump maps for Earth, they're pretty sweet. It's for an old version though and I don't think they'll work on the latest one.   
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Aug 24, 2013 19:11
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Flagrant Abuse posted:I've made a few for some PNP games. It's daunting-ish to get into, but gets much easier as you get used to it. Except for barycentres. gently caress those guys. Perhaps the greatest thing Space Engine can impart upon the player is the removal of the privileged standing of Earth among the cosmos. Just another planet, just another star. Ours, but still one among legion.
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Aug 27, 2013 14:39
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Everytime I play this, I feel that there should be something that gives it more of a game feel. Like a way to mark areas as discovered and to share it with others, or just a challenge in finding particular types of planets. Even an external program that does this would be pretty sweet.
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Sep 3, 2013 05:53
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Solvency posted:Everytime I play this, I feel that there should be something that gives it more of a game feel. Like a way to mark areas as discovered and to share it with others, or just a challenge in finding particular types of planets. Even an external program that does this would be pretty sweet. The developer talked for awhile about adding space ships and objectives, but I'm honestly pretty glad he didn't. I'd rather he focused on making an awesome universe instead of cramming a bunch of gameplay in, because I guarantee that a game like X3 will have done things better.
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Sep 3, 2013 06:11
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You can save areas in the Locations menu, if that's what you're talking about. You can then copy and paste them to places to share them, eg:code:
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Sep 3, 2013 13:13
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Dr. Stab posted:You can save areas in the Locations menu, if that's what you're talking about. You can then copy and paste them to places to share them, eg: Can you then import them into your game, so you can see what areas have been discovered by others?
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Sep 3, 2013 17:26
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Yep, you can copy text a code like that and just paste it right into the locations menu. It's also all stored in config/places.cfg. So, if you want to send a friend your entire set of locations, just have them back up their own places.cfg and load up yours.
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Sep 3, 2013 20:22
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seravid posted:Ctrl+G will take you there; move back and forward a little if you can't see it. Two questions regarding that picture 1) What galaxy is that, is it the Milky Way? On my computer it looks nothing like that (the colors aren't quite as blue, etc) Thats leads to the next question which is: 2) How did you get it to look so crisp? On mine, when I am close to the black hole, the stars start to look very pixelated  edit: I was glancing over the SpaceEngine forums, but couldn't find any guides or posts on how to increase the visual quality outside of the menu. Does anyone know of any such guides? AngrySpork fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 20:38
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AngrySpork posted:Two questions regarding that picture It's the Small Magellanic Cloud. Plenty of galaxies in the universe, no need to stick around the ol' Milky Way. With black holes you'll want to maintain some distance as the distortion ruins image quality. There's no trick to make the game look better that I know of, though reducing the image's size helps hide the engine's flaws. There are some things you could do in post-process, like adding noise, mess around with curves, saturation and add a little sharpening. A couple more shots straight out of the camera but with some tweaks in-game (star scale, brightness) Small Magellanic Cloud  Large Magellanic Cloud  (this last one could really use more contrast and saturation)
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Sep 13, 2013 22:05
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seravid posted:With black holes you'll want to maintain some distance as the distortion ruins image quality. I just noticed in the main.config there's a line TRBlackHoleResolution which defaults to 1024 and you can increase that presumably in multiples of 2. You probably shouldn't set it too high but 4096 seemed OK, I didn't bother going higher. 1024:  2048:  4096: 
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Sep 14, 2013 03:05
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western eyes posted:I just noticed in the main.config there's a line TRBlackHoleResolution which defaults to 1024 and you can increase that presumably in multiples of 2. You probably shouldn't set it too high but 4096 seemed OK, I didn't bother going higher. Nice find! Not very taxing on the system either, always a good thing with this game (still don't like calling it a game). 
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Sep 14, 2013 03:49
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Space Engineer (the author) got the music player working within the game and is taking votes on what to include in the game; there's about there's about 400 MB of music to sift through and you can vote on it: http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/21-1796-1 Some shots of recent exploring:     
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Oct 15, 2013 00:06
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I just did my every-6-months flyby of the Space Engine site looking for a new update and saw that the guy is running a Kickerstarter-esque crowdfunding drive complete with funding milestones (including an SDK at $150k!). I did not hesitate to support this project which has brought me an amount of joy and awe that few games ever have and I encourage any of you out there who feels this is a worthwhile endeavor to do the same. edit: link helps http://en.spaceengine.org/index/funding_and_donations/0-26 Ben Nerevarine fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Oct 28, 2013 |
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Oct 28, 2013 22:59
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And if he gets 100,000$ he's going to make it a MMORPG sandbox with:quote:
 Let's just hope he doesn't get that much. The 15,000$ goal sounds nice, but even the 30,000 sounds a bit ambitious for one guy. /cynic
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Oct 28, 2013 23:59
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Fintilgin posted:And if he gets 100,000$ he's going to make it a MMORPG sandbox with: This is worrying. There are already games filling these niches and trying to combine multiple genres rarely (never?) works, and I'm talking more than one guy working on the thing. What Space Engine does is already unique and needs no gimmicks, just refining.
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Oct 29, 2013 00:59
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If he released the SDK that'd be loving sweet though, I bet there's a load of stuff a more focused group of programmers could do with this work.
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Oct 29, 2013 16:45
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El Grillo posted:If he released the SDK that'd be loving sweet though, I bet there's a load of stuff a more focused group of programmers could do with this work. $150,000 is crazy though. Blocks off the whole indie ecosystem. Any company that can afford $150k on some engine can acquire the source data set and build it from scratch.
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Oct 29, 2013 17:28
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I love the look of this game, but I guess I can forget about it with a GTX 280 right? This should also be combined with KSP.
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Oct 29, 2013 18:05
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Furism posted:$150,000 is crazy though. Blocks off the whole indie ecosystem. Any company that can afford $150k on some engine can acquire the source data set and build it from scratch. He's not selling the engine for $150K, he'll just make an SDK if he raises $150K; I doubt that happening. Anything after $15K goal I really am not interested in at all.
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Oct 30, 2013 04:08
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Trying to develop an MMO at $150k from a single person is outright lunacy. How much does the server infrastructure to run an MMO even cost, let alone development. This is an awesome sandbox and he'd probably make a shitload of money if he refined it and sold it as an education tool.
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Oct 30, 2013 04:18
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Shibawanko posted:I love the look of this game, but I guess I can forget about it with a GTX 280 right?
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Oct 30, 2013 05:29
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Shibawanko posted:I love the look of this game, but I guess I can forget about it with a GTX 280 right? I've only ever played Space Engine with that card and it worked just fine.
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Oct 30, 2013 06:39
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seravid posted:This is worrying. There are already games filling these niches and trying to combine multiple genres rarely (never?) works, and I'm talking more than one guy working on the thing. He's been trying to turn Space Engine in to a space ship game since he first made it, which was a few years ago now. If he still wants to do it, it's possible nothing's going to stop him from trying at some point.
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Oct 30, 2013 11:29
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Protip: This game and the EvE Online soundtrack go hand in hand.  e: Screenshots!  Found two(!) life bearing worlds somewhere near the galactic center. The blue one is an ocean planet.  STAAAAAAAARS. 
NihilVerumNisiMors fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Oct 30, 2013 |
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Oct 30, 2013 12:33
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NihilVerumNisiMors posted:Protip: This game and the EvE Online soundtrack go hand in hand. Damnit, now I want to resub to Eve for some reason  p.s. I wasn't suggesting above that it'd be sensible for anyone to give the guy $150k for an SDK. Just saying, it'd be loving awesome to see what people could do with it.
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Oct 30, 2013 15:27
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Looks like someone beat this guy to making a game out of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU Similar anyway.
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Dec 9, 2013 14:04
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BastardySkull posted:Looks like someone beat this guy to making a game out of this. Holy poo poo. I need this, like, yesterday.
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Dec 9, 2013 14:48
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BastardySkull posted:Looks like someone beat this guy to making a game out of this. I can't wait to see how that one turns out but with such a small team I'm wondering if there will be much substance. I also kinda dig Space Engine's more realistic cosmos way more but I'd like to see it develop into something like that.
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Dec 9, 2013 15:12
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It seems like we're slowly but surely getting closer to a game that is basically Spore done right.
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Dec 10, 2013 05:44
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In another 10 years or so, we'll finally hit the singularity where we can procedurally create a universe that's indistinguishable from reality
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Dec 10, 2013 08:06
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Hadlock posted:In another 10 years or so, we'll finally hit the singularity where we can procedurally create a universe that's indistinguishable from reality Much as we, in fact, were created.
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Dec 10, 2013 09:32
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Honestly, seeing how "easy" it is for one man to create something like this, the idea that you would just procedurally generate things down to the subatomic level as needed, and not when not needed, it no longer seems outside the realm of possibility. Two or three centuries of procedural software development could probably create a universe much more detailed than our own (sub-sub-sub quark particles, etc)
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Dec 10, 2013 09:37
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Hadlock posted:Honestly, seeing how "easy" it is for one man to create something like this, the idea that you would just procedurally generate things down to the subatomic level as needed, and not when not needed, it no longer seems outside the realm of possibility. Two or three centuries of procedural software development could probably create a universe much more detailed than our own (sub-sub-sub quark particles, etc) Surely you would hit a wall where you would have to use all the matter in the entire universe to simulate all the matter in a universe or some poo poo like that. edit: like, they can't even properly simulate subatomic stuff accurately enough to truly predict that something does or doesn't exist. Even when they do physical tests they only say that something has a 'probability' of existing.
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Dec 10, 2013 14:01
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