When are more planets gonna be added?

Well I wouldn't be so quick to say you have Desert... I've tried and tried and tried to make a suitable 1 but for the life of me I cannot get a desert without trees and water that doesn't have less than 2/3 of the planet covered by grey mountain ranges. How could I make Dune? Or Mars? I can't currently...

Also, I am really missing gas giants, and I still don't know how you expect us to get asteroids? Tiny moon templates?

Ah, that is a good point. Desert needs a specific biome made. I'll ask Steve about that.

As for asteroids, if you consider what they are, they are basically tiny moon biome. They may get some custom art as well, but that will be a little down the road if so.

To be honest, I dislike the strict separation of biomes into the templates, aside from the metal one. I mean, is there really a reason why we can't have regular mountains on lava planets and moons, or icecaps on desert planets (Mars)...

Planet look should really be defined by general parameters: temperature, liquids, height range (let's call it "tectonic activity"). Say, cold, dry, flat planet will be desert or moon, and hot, wet, slightly active planet will be tropical with a little bit of mountains and a couple of volcanoes. Having lava and water on one planet can be a little tricky, but I think it's possible.

Nope.

Mike

Maybe more sliders would allow for further customization but you have to think of it from a programmers perspective. Making earth template accommodate more possibilities gets exponentially harder the more biomes you make it accommodate because everything you add can possibly break something you already added. Sometimes you need the right tool for the right job. If i want a really dry earth with little water and a few trees that's really different from a completely desert, dune covered planets which is different from a barren planet with no atmosphere but has water. Having just 1 water slider doesn't account for all those possibilities and it's impossible for the editor to tell what you really want when you only have 1 template to choose from.

With a desert specific Biome you can turn trees off for instance, or have them form oasis' instead of forests. It will result in easier ways for you to make what you are actually looking for and more variants on the biomes we have.

Well, I know you can't play on a full water planet yet. Because you can't play on "experimental" systems with water height above 60 you can only play on *mostly* water planets. Any news on how that is coming along?

I can understand that it may seem that something like a map editor is an unimportant part of the game. Since unlike in other RTS games the fine structure of that map isnt that important. Think big dont worry about the small stuff.
But still i would argue that Uber is missing out on a huge opportunity to increase the emersiveness and the content of the game.

The game is more emersive if you play on sth. you have already a connection to. Like the system you have refined for hours or even our solar system. It feels like your decisions matter. Of course the same can happen with randomly generated planets but it is harder and therefore accessible to fewer players.

Also it would give the average user the ability to generate content with just the one time effort of building an editor. In the end the content generated by the users keeps the game alive. With making the game easy to mod Uber has already taken a step into that direction. The problem is not everybody has the knowledge and/or time to do this. So why dont give them the tool to generate value ?

If you make maps in the editor you will notice that the same seed with the same slider options always produces the same end result. Therefore, it is the seed (#) for the chosen biome that determines the actual features on the surface of that planet, which are then modified based on the slider values you choose. The key here, which we currently have no way of accessing, is in changing those base seeds.

I would hope that in the final game the editor comes with a sort of "seed editor" that allows us to create our own seed (say, the geography of earth for an earth template) that we can then load up in the system editor by choosing it's seed ID and play with the sliders to make a "global warming" earth with a super high water height for instance.

Based on your post I doubt that you understand what seeds and procedural generation actually are. You can already edit seeds - put any number you want in there. But you can't create exact planet you want, just like you can't build a house in Minecraft using seeds.

A seed is just an integer.

It depends on what they are using for the seed to be honest, and I wouldn't be arrogant enough to think I knew for sure how Uber did it without seeing the code myself If the seed is just a number for their algorithm to start from, then there is a number out there that will generate what you want (enough monkeys hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text...), you just have to reverse engineer it. If that # corresponds to a database ID identifying a hightmap stored on the Uber databases then Uber has x (the # of seed values in the slider) records in their database for said biome that relate to that many records in the DB that each have their own hightmap the editor is using when you specify that record as the base hightmap.

A seed is always just an integer. It may be possible to reverse some basic algorithms and get back a seed, but not in PA. There is a whole class of algorithms that will produce a result that cannot be reversed, but that doesn't matter here. Even if it can be theoretically done, your computer wouldn't finish before the universe ends.

The problem is, no matter how large the number of possible outcomes of the algorithm, number of impossible outcomes will always be infinite. That means that the outcome you want is far more likely to be impossible than possible.

The there really does need to be a free hand modify option that basically takes the seed - > generates -> does the delta modifications I made in order afterwords to reproduce a desired result kinda like a batch file.

No there is no such "need", as already explained, such a system is beyond Uber's initial scope, but could happen at somepoint, Neutrino has commented that we want to try and get all the needed hooks open so that modders could possibly create such a system.

Mike

Just because Uber can't do it, doesn't mean it isn't needed. I guess you think mods aren't needed either by that logic...?

I was hoping for maybe a ring type of template that you could select in the system builder like one of the other templates but with a ring of asteroids small rocks mixed with small moons big enough to hurl out, that you could place around the solar system. For an asteroid belt.

And maybe some simple brushes to lower and raise terrain where you would like it, but I'd certainly settle for a mod that's capable of doing that.

Basically I like both of these ideas but it's a question of priorities.

Since we don't know the priorities, we're just going to expect you to do everything.

It lends an interesting idea for an area where smaller asteroids could spawn. With a bit of clever art design you could give the illusion of a huge number of potential asteroids, but they haven't been truely spawned until after a player gives his first move order to land on one. As asteroids are destroyed or colonized 1-3 new neutral asteroids would appear in your stellar view, but at any given time only a few of the visible rocks would be "real" and consuming RAM like a planet.

In fact, not every player needs to have the same list of neutral asteroids so that no one can hog every asteroid... there's always at least one rock you could move to. Once you've given a move order to the asteroid it would become a legit target for anyone, but they wouldn't know it spawned because you selected it. It would just look like another random spawn until they scout it.

To keep infinite asteroids balanced they could spawn without metal locations, and as a player takes more rocks the spawn rate for that player's potential rocks could drop off making it difficult to over expand your solar system and crash the game.

Disposable renewable asteroids would also make it more practical to destroy them completely with a barrage of interplanetary nukes, or even break them up before they can impact a planet.