The Sun is too small...

Yes a brown dwarf is a little sun, but not brown,

Black holes would have an accretion disk close to it, which means superhot heated gas spinning and creating light through friction, planets would be some distance away. Having something like

at the centre would give such an impressive / omninous feel to it!

ah, yes my fast-thinking part of my brain was once again being stupid.


a proto-planetary disc would be also be really cool, building on planets that were 'just' born. I feel like you would get hit by asteroids all the time though.

Whats the point of doing it if it only makes it 'more realistic'? This game is the definition of fantasy, and it works, so why try to introduce realism?

I would like to See it, because i would like a bit more realism, specially in the space, I love that. But that's an opinion.

Planets are already too small compared to the sun. I want to see planets not a giant star. The star has no bearing on gameplay and so is not important to see as anything other than a background element.

agreed with bmb, and the sun already appears very large from the perspective of the planet. To make it a realistic size would require a realistic distance for it to be aesthetically pleasing.

Now that I don't mind. It looks very dramatic with the huge sun imposing itself against the night side of a planet.

Yes, let's make it to scale!

I think all those ideas about sun color, size, earth seed etc. should be implemented at some point as options either in game or in system editor. Game should not limit anybody if they want realistic size of star and planets to its orbit. Let people do it, other question is if anybody will play on such maps (like this on geers image example). But time for all of this will be around release, when they sent finalized game code for pressing cds and have time for first patch. Or just maybe open format for maps and system, so we can do editor as community.

Also when we are at it, suns are just cosmetic model in center of system (same for system skybox), why not make it 3d mesh with textures and let us import anything we want in that place. for ex. clan maps with their logo in middle, or some other crazy ideas like dwarf+black hole system, pulsars, watermelon as star. Those 2 things are purely cosmetic, we should be able to mod it freely in our maps.

Oh i am pretty sure it would be part of their plan to have the galactic war spawn various different solar system types. The sun is a purely aesthetic no-play zone, which actually gives lots of freedom for slapping whatever in the middle as long as its not large enough to encroach on the playing area. If Uber plans to go crazy with the solar system design, they COULD try and make binary star systems have effects on the orbits, but I am quite cozy with just a variation of star models including binary star system that just looks like one rather than behave like one. These kind of art assets can be left to end of production so for all we know theres a bunch of backburner stuff in the works.

I hope for scripted elliptic orbits (just like now we have for circular), full Keppler mechanic would be wishing too much.

Different sun colours might be interesting with the change in lighting it brings.

funny thing; just this morning before work i was making a new system - and I noticed how FAST those little buggers were (i'm talking about the planets) when I was trying to zoom into one after rendering.

they're already almost impossible to catch manually! by the time you're close enough to zoom to planet level, it's gone. (and the <next planet> and <previous planet> buttons were no good in the system creator)

I don't think we want to go any further down the bigger sun --> larger orbits --> faster planets road. I figure they've got it about right at this point.

I alway liked the size of the sun espacially when you were just managing stuff on a small moon and all of a sudden this yellow ball rises at the horizon lighting up your small base. Being able to change the suns parameter in the system editor would be nice though.

Theres something i always missed though espacially in the situation above. I dont like the sun being a rather lifeless yellow/orange blob in the sky. The surface should be covered by moving sunspots and shaken by solar prominences. I know that are solely cosmetic changes that could affect performance but it would look absolutely awesome if done right and might help a few people to get over the smaller size of the sun

Just to show you what i have in mind there are a few videos on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_prominence

To hell with flares, I want pulsars and supernovae in the background every once in a while:

..and nebulars and galaxies and... mostly all the fun stuff that travels around in space

…and asteroids.



Wait a minute...

Sun is too small and planet's orbit maximum radius is too small too.

But why is it too small?
Is it impacting your gameplay? Is it preventing you from doing something?
If the sun size and orbit radius is increased, doesnt that just make it proportionately the same? If they increased these and then re-balanced orbital travel time to also be proportionately the same, does this purely aesthetic change apply to gameplay mechanics? Will it make the game better or easier to navigate? Will the sun look good in the sky if it is larger? From the planets perspective, the sun is currently already very large due to its short distance from the planets.

If this is a statement based on reference observation, then yes you are correct they are not a realistic size. Video games do this thing called "Stylized Proportions", it is as much an art choice as a technical limitation used cleverly. The use of painterly textures and blocky models supports these proportions for the game as a whole. If somebody was to come out with a "realistic textures" pack, then the proportions would breach our suspension of belief because our minds accept the visual style less do to recognizing something near-realistic to be an imposter.

Personally I think the sun could be smaller just due to how it looks from the planets surface, and yet that size decrease would not be very appealing from system view. I think they are sitting comfortably on a delicate balance.