TWO-SUN SOLAR SYSTEM

Those projectiles have a very short lifetime, so the power needed to simulate them would spike and then die off as units died.

Suns would have to constantly orbit and be controlled and corrected and this would go on throughout the life of the game.

it's not pseudo-science yo!
putting that aside, to answer you, no. I'm quite certain out of the two SimPro takes a bigger CPU load by at least a factor of ten.

tatsujib, while the current orbits are not 'true physics' it's actually a pretty close approximation of what the orbits would be, just more stable. The problem is, that this approximation (or 'rails' as some call it) is only valid for a single sun. If there are multiple stars then you have to do the full physics to get anything even close to realistic, and the problem is that it tends to be unstable (things crashing, flying off in funny directions and unpredictable) which generally makes for bad gameplay.

I understand you mentioned you wanted it for the cool shadows you'd get, but you'd either have to switch to the full physics or make it a purely visual change, which at that point why are we doing it?

Eh, I fail to see how this would have any appreciable impact on gameplay. Sure it'd look cool, but the team have more important things to worry about.

I like this, 86% has also shown intrest in more then 1 star (sun). It would be nice if the ground work was done so it could be modded in later. Adding a planet with just the sun texture probably isn't that hard. Programming the light coming of the 2 stars at the same time, is very hard from what I've heard. Adding this would take a lot of work and time (time Uber currently doesn't have), but maybe it can be add afterwards, if possible.

It is possible for a small star to orbit a large star.
Different sizes and colors suns would be awesome!
Because 2 stars are shinier then 1 star.

Systems with multiple stars should definitely get more attention, this game is suitable for it. It reminds you these strange things exist. So it's a +1 from me.

WHY?
planets can't influence the sun's position. I don't know how you suppose the human eye could ever tell the difference between rails and realistic simulation and even then why the hell do we need that all the sudden, it's not like we have orbits for space units.

lastly why does everyone have this obsesion that simulating the orbits of TWO UNITS is way too tough for any machine to handle?

pretty much
though I think leaving the game open so that it can be modded essentially comes down to doing 90% of the work.

I think the difficulty is more in simulating and doing all the shadows for two separate light sources, potentially of different magnitude, colour etc (although I know nothin of programming so I could be wrong)

As I said before, this is a cool idea and would look great, but I can't really see how it would have much of a gameplay impact. Definitely a job for the modding community not the devs.

most of the reason is how incredibly aesthetic it would be.

then there's the slaloming between the two suns that might occur to get to planets.

then there's the version where both solar systems lie entirely in between each suns meaning you could have a set of solar systems in play. you could have one team start on one solar system and another on the other for massive games.

again for me the interest is mostly aesthtic and technical, this means we're de-castrating the engine from having a center point in which there's always a sun of one appearance, size , one single, never edited type of point light that always originates from the origin of the playing field and can't be moved and making it into something more flexible that you can mod more.
by making a game that alows for multiple suns we're breaking some rules that would otherwise be set for the engine (for simplicity and coherence) and opening up the doors to who knows what kind of intresting mods.

The difficulty is NOT running the simulation, that part is easy. The difficulty is making sure the simulation will be stable in the long run (i.e. a moon gaining a little bit of extra speed and flying off into a orbit that crashes it into another planet). Our solar system is not this crazy because we had a few billion years to work out the crazyness. One source of these issues is that there are tiny tiny errors in computer floating point math, that over time add up to cause these problems. The other is the planets having force on each other (seriously, Jupiter is pulling on us), and if you watch the solar system for billions of years at a time it's not actually stable (but it looks like it is at human scales).

The reason the human eye can tell the difference between 'rails'(it's not actually rails, its a simpler form of simulation and physics otherwise we'd have no asteroid engines) and realistic simulation is that the 'rails' system will stay the same forever if left alone, the realistic one will likely fall apart after some time. This is because the physics of the 'rails' method has a solution, a equation for a the 'rail' that can be refereed back to and to put the planet on to deal with the computation errors. A realistic simulation does not have that, and so it tends to fall apart as time goes on.

And we could ignore the whole physics issue, and just make it a purely visual change, but you only get funny shadows in that case, is that a significant addition to the game?

Can we also please turn down the snarkyness, I'm just trying to suggest some of the issues and questions the devs may have as have been mentioned before. Specifically there was a live stream about the system editor and they showed the issue of the current system vs full simulation I believe.

have this be settled in the systam manager where paths too close to either sun would show up red and you couldn't drop the planet there nor edit the orbit to cross those zones.

I don't get it. Do you want this idea not to happen?

Closeness to a sun is not going to change the issue to much.

In my strange way, I'm trying to help you. I'd like it if this idea gets into the game eventually, especially if it had a gameplay impact of some form. But as of now I think it has issues, that if not addressed will make it so this is not implemented. Simply because the Devs have to deal with the issues of getting the game working, before we get into all the issues of all the fan suggested ideas. So, if we can sort out the idea and present a more complete workable item to the devs, the more likely it is to be implemented.

the fact of the matter is we don't have simulated orbits as of yet and have no confirmation that they will be in the final game.

(a parentheses here to say right now would be the right time to get allarmed about this, why else has the "physics" button dissapeared from the system editor)

But really if the original plan for physics orbits was that you could make planets that'll swing away from it's orbit or crash into other planets or the sun at one point why must a system with two suns be the exception to this rule?

Tatsujb, I think you're misunderstanding my points. I'm not trying to suggest we should have physics simulation. I was trying to explain that adding a second sun into a star system breaks the assumptions/math for the current rails (not trying to Binary systems should be special cases treated different, but that single star systems are the special cases that allows rails). So the way I see it either we have to deal with this problem by including more complicated mechanics which has it's own problems(which is why the devs are not going that route), or just pretend it doesn't exist and make the change purely visual. If there are other options I'm willing to discuss them.

If we go down the route of making it just a visual change then we need have to make the case as to why adding a this new purely visual system is worth it as opposed to other things the devs could be making work.

I really woul'dn't have a problem with on rail suns but I wouldn't either with physics orbits and the loss of the system over time. I'm really fine with both. I don't think anyone would notice (in the on-rail case) that the planet orbit's are kinda off when comparing them with the suns orbits. KSP veterans sure, but your casual rts-er wouldn't see it

Which is not my concern with taking the visual impact only approach. But my concern is why develop this visual only addition as opposed to say more biomes(which are both visual and gameplay relevant)? (I know it likely wouldn't be that binary a choice, but they will have a 'We can do N things right now, what makes the cut?' moment likely)

that's the thing. how much do you know about programs and stuff? because biomes are essentially images (that rorschachphoenix just turned up the contrast on for his recolor mod https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-color-adjustments-mod-ca-mod.48619/page-2#post-773466 then there's the alien mod https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-alien-and-utopian-colored-biomes.52147/ https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-custom-planet-types-framework-for-modders-52512.51066/ then splicing with existing biomes and atmospheres : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/reference-custom-planet-types-enabling-them-in-editor.49905/ )

this s hit is pretty easy to make and it's been toyed with alot and will continue to be.

the seperating from the rule that the center of the model field is always ocupied by a sun and a single point light radiates from that point and projects one set of shadows is obviously how the game was concieved. and as such, is probably one of the bottom blocks of the pyramid.

out of the two, multiple suns is more impressive both aesthetically and technically.

I've always wondered what it would be like to live on one of Jupiter's moons and see a giant planet take up 70% of the sky.

With Planetary Annihilation branching out into interplanetary warfare, they are doing themselves a disservice if they don't try to capture the richness and grander scale that space thematics can offer.

Looking at some of the multitude of possibilities, I think my favorite in terms of gameplay implications would be systems with bodies that have erratic, elliptical orbits that require specific timing windows to take advantage of. The planets are already scaled down, I think time can be sped up too and planetary bodies need therefore not be stationary.

Tatsuib, you're seeing the tree and missing the forest. I used biomes because it was the first thing that could be added post release that popped into my head.

Why should the Devs spend resources redoing a bunch of low level things on something that only changes the appearance of the game, when they could be adding things to make more interesting gameplay?