My past two weeks

For the System Builder, are there plans afoot to allow planets in different orbits to collide?

At present, the only way I can get planets to collide is to shrink|expand the orbit of one to fit the orbit of another. However, if I try to make them collide by making one planet's orbit elliptical such that it crosses the path of another orbit, the orbit turns red and 'snaps back'. (Perhaps I'm doing it wrong?)

I've seen quite a few systems where orbits cross paths, however not quite in the way your describing.

The set up I've most commonly seen like this is where you have 2 main planets on standard orbits that don't collide. The outer planet has a moon and the path of the *moon* intersects the orbital path of the inner planet. Eventually the moon and inner planet will collide....

Here is something @totalannihilation came up with that I have been helping turn into a mod. It really helps a lot when you need to set up very precise orbits.

@ cdrkf & cptconundrum

Thanks for your answers, I shall check those ideas out.

We haven't released yet but we will as soon as we work out the last issues.

Your picture's got me to wondering if something interesting could be done with the Lagrangian points in the game, for the Orbital layer. A 'Lagrange Platform' or something. That's where Trojan asteroids could live, to be perturbed from their stable location by a Lagrange Platform causing them to fall as meteorites upon one's enemies.

That could be cool. It isn't something we can do just with a UI mod though, because PA is really just using a 2-body simulation. On that note, totalannihilation has written a very detailed paper on the math that was involved in setting up his mod. We will probably be releasing that when we publish this mod.

Nice Work Sorian! liking the changes

Props for the update.

That screenshot makes me want to squirt. I'm a guy.

Then don't say squirt

This is a great idea, just enough rocket science!

I want my 100 dollars now

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/planetary-shields.56458/#post-870657

red line means that the perihelion (a.k.a. minimum distance to sun) is below the threshold, depending on the planet's mass, can be as low as 12500
or the redline means that the aphelion (a.k.a. maximum distance to the sun) is above the threshold which is 200000 for all planets

what i am generaly intrested in is wether there will be better ways to spread the ammound of land and water/lava better on earth/lavatypes so to make islands easier or big continents ... because for that the seeds are pretty unhelpfull and the way of toggling landmass and waterhight is pretty clunky last i played ..

Look at the amount of likes Sorian is getting compared to any other uber employee whenever they post, this is the kind of communication the community wants....we WANT MOAR! (the only other that gets close is Varrak with his graphics updates...)

So what's gonna happen when PA's sales drop off?
If the game just stopped selling now that the 50% sale is over, would we never see an update again?

I love reading these types of updates, thanks for taking the time to make it.

Would it make sense to post things like this to the kickstarter page for more publicity? If only to help reassure people that PA is still being worked on.

@sorian I thought you were the lead AI programmer? Perhaps fix the AI so that it can do something besides 1v1 360 noscope rush games? The AI as it currently is for multi planet systems is completely broken.

Like.. priorities it's units patrolling in a circle rather then going to shoot the solo enemy commander sitting 40 meters away.

Totally broken.

As far as i know Sorian is not working only on AI, he is also part of the core dev team. As an exemple he worked on Death Star. So i guess he has a priority list. So it will be probably fixed, but since Uber dev team is not made of hundreds of people, it will be fixed ... when it's fixed