Huge Planets/Stars Mod In Beta Stage

   Haha, some tentative success with the map resizing, i took a Huge map and took out all but 3 players, manually pulled out the planets from the immediate star well and re-sized the grav wells for the planets and stars. Just started a game, and faricon is back!!!! Yay!!!!!  So at least a little bit is getting there. Hope to get the rest under control, but we will see. I will keep you posted. 

-Teal

Are you rebalancing the planet populations and resource outputs to be 'bigger' too?

Actually, no. It is something to certainly consider, but at standard resources and standard populations, and standard weapons/shields (well, that is not quite true, i've upgraded the weapons/shields and have brought my 3 new races over to this mod, with my Starbases (not the Entrenchment ones, but my take on it) and a small host of additional ships, the mercy ships, the scoutfighters and scoutgunships, the HeavyCruiser's (twice the size and power of the standard cruiser) and the Disruptor's that disable weapons fire and hit percentage of enemy ships, as well as boarding raiders and 2 new capitals in addition to the new Starbase, the Support Deployment Carrier, and the FlagShip with extra heavy firepower. 

But no, no additional resources or populations at this time.

But it is certainly something to consider.  Thank you for asking. 

Keep Gaming and Keep Modding!!!

-Teal

Just a quick note or two before bed, i have noticed that the faricon is back on the huge map that i re-spaced the planets out from the central star. However there is still star image breakup in the zooming in and out before it steadies on the re-sized map. On a standard small map, the planets of course are almost on top of, and in some cases in the flare field of the star, but that even lacking the faricon in the standard map, there is no image breakup.

At this point i am guessing the image breakup is coming from a particular distance that the star has been set to appear and be a stable visable image.

Take care and have a good night,

-Teal

:)  Haha, almost forgot, but this is significant, i may have found a workable z-axis. When using the oversized planets on the standard small map, the ships have to rise or lower in order to jump into or out of the grav well. I had a scout enter a grav well low and then proceed to rise to get above the curve of the planet body in order to jump out. The militia of course pursued and rose off the flat grav well surface to intercept.  I will post a screen shot, it was beautiful!!! 

-Teal

FileFront image upload server is down for now, will upload tomorrow. It looks beautiful watching the ships rise to engage!!!  :) 

-Teal

Will upload the HP Beta 0.1 mod tonight, or tomorrow morning, but its not completely done of course. Lots of cool stuff, but lots of quirks to work out too.

will post the link when i finish uploading it.

-Teal

Well... here is the link, this will be a work in progress until i can get this worked out, so it may take some time, but interesting i think.

Huge Planets Link:

HP_v0.1_Test.zip

-Teal

What version is this for?

It is for version 1.16 Vanilla Sins.

This is a Mod in Progress, so it is not perfect by any means, there are serious issues that still need to be fixed. But if you want to give it a try and let me know what you think, or how i might fix some of these things you are most welcome.

-Teal

Cool, I'll go for it and give you my feedback.

:)  Thanks to TohKlidan, Mooster and Calienon!!!   I think we've got it!! The flickering and image breakup went away. I kept adjusting the values up (with the thought they would increase as a result of re-sizing them up) and got to a point where the flickering and the image breakup disappeared.

I also am playing on a re-sized map, to keep the planets from being inside the corona field of the star, and some were actually inside the body of the star :(  Oh my!!!  But the re-sized maps do the trick of moving the planets out away from the new re-sized star and it plays normal now.

There are some consequences of this size change of course, one being that the jump behaviour is now back to normal and my z-axis discovery with the jump angles is gone. But that may be a good thing, and i believe that IC had ships rising and falling in combat anyway, so my little discovery wasn't as big a deal as i first thought, haha, but now with the re-sized planets and stars, the galaxy "Feels" HUGE!!   Haha, silly maybe i know, but i like how it feels to play in such a large playground. 

Oh also, since i re-spaced the planets out farther to avoid the overlap with the star, the distances to the other planets is now significantly longer, some as much as 4 or 5 times longer. But that is ok too, i dont mind. Feels like "real" travel, haha, but for those who want a fast and down and dirty game, its gonna be hard to get used to.

Also of course it makes the games longer as a consequence, with the longer phase lanes to reach the enemy and perhaps the limited ability to re-inforce (at least quicklly) your forces that are spread out over a much larger system or set of systems.

Anyway, am going to zip HP 0.2 Beta Test and upload it to FileFront and see if anyone wants to give it a try, i will include a re-sized map as well, and then of course i will have to start re-sizing all the maps, unless you make your own in galaxyforge, just make sure to space the planets out a good distance from the planets so as to not overlap, you should be fine. 

I am playing  a game now to see how it plays out and if there is anything i missed that still needs to be taken care of.

If you find anything of course give me a yell on the forums and i will take care of it. 

Thanks to everyone, and especially TohKlidan, Mooster and Calienon for there suggestions and help!!! It is wonderful to have this work (at least right now i think it does)  :)  So this mod will be a community mod when i go to 1.0 with their names on the credit list as well.  :)  As a token of my appreciation. 

Take care and keep gaming and keep modding!!!  

Isn't this Great!!!!  ???

-Teal

Also, you can count me in for a beta tester if you need one!

am i supposed do enable all of these folders for the mod to work?  i don't see the other playable factions that are in game info folder

Just pick a map and choose a race, the map size tells how many races you can have, 2 or 3 or whatever. The beta that is up now has some star problems, i have it fixed now, the meshes were messed up, mangled is a good word i suppose. Copied fresh ones in and re-sized them and now it looks very good, no breakups or disappearing icons. 

Anyway, you dont have to enable all the folders, the extra folders were meshes i was using as i went along, just load it and pick a race or two and play.

I will be uploading the fixed version probably tomorrow morning, sorry, very late and i havent finished testing just to make sure its all good, but tomorrow im hoping to get it up to FileFront for download.  That will be the good one. 

THanks for wanting to jump in, i appreciate the company and the help, let me know what you think, but keep in mind if you are getting anomolies, that that is fixed in the new version i will be uploading tomorrow, okie? 

Take care and have fun!!

-Teal

HP 0.2 Test is uploaded, link is here:

http://files.filefront.com/13637884

hope its ok, let me know,

-Teal

Also, here are the Maps, you will need them

edit:  maps got an error on upload, will post back when i can get them uploaded with no errors.

-Teal

Hi Teal,

I also tinkered around with this concept and basically doubled or tripled the mesh and gravity well of certain planets using the resize pool (linked off my sins.imperial.cc site btw)

It worked quite ok for planets...

But when I increased the mesh size of the existing 4 sun types (yellow, red, green, blue) and the corrosponding minimum navigation and hyperspace jump points I found the grid detail would go off the scale and I'd get really really laggy when I zoomed into the suns.

Also, I had issues with scounts hyperspacing into the sun wells and vanishing into the middle of the corona until they finished their jump and teleported back into the visible range.

I like the idea of suns being vastly larger than planets, but the game doesnt seem to like it.

Anyway, I'll check out your mod. One thing you might want to consider: make your mod easily compatible with other mods by only changing planet/sun entity files, gameconstants etc... and minimize (or document clearly) the changes done to galaxy entity.

I found Celestial Bodies really easy to use with Requiem (I just released v1.7 and it won't take me long to make the mini-mod that allows Requiem v1.7 and Celestial v0.88 to run together seamlessly.).

:)  Ahhh.. i had the same issues with the re-sized Stars as you did. I played with the grav well sizes and was able to get the well to display properly and once the grav wells were sized right the jump behaviour of ships into the star properly jumped to the well and not to the center of the star as you are mentioning. I think the game works fine with the re-sizes, just when the numbers for the parts, such as the grav well are properly re-sized as well.

With regards to making the mod compatible with other mods, you are right, TohKlidan did a wonderful job of documenting everything very well and it is easier to work with.

I will give it a try and see if i can do that, it will certainly make it easier to merge with other mods then.

I like your Requiem mod alot, very nice, congratulations!!!  very nice work. 

Thank you for the post and the suggestions.

Take care and keep gaming and keep modding!!!

-Teal

Resources have been "tentatively" increased, which is to say, i have left the 3 standard asteroids in place, but added nuetrals that can be captured and added, but it takes some small effort and cost. Population increase is too easy a way to get too much money. I mean, dont get me wrong, sometimes its cool, but i wanted it more standard, instead of making it too easy to get a fortune quickly, it throws things off.

-Teal

Hey teal I have a few things about v.1, I ave not tested out v.2

When I zoom out all the way on a map, the star dissapears.

When I try to work between two planets, it really hard because the star is huge and want to focus on it more.

The proportions from sun to plantet to station to ship is done very well its realistic, however the distance between the sun and the planet is way to close, I think and large mininum distance needs to be set in place.

Yes, you are right. Part of that is the size of the standard maps. But yes, the planet to planet and planet to star distances are increased in v2 as well as the re-size on the map, 6 so far. And changed out the meshes for the stars because was getting a breakup, which i think was the meshes were messed up. I copied and re-sized new ones and dropped them in and am not getting the breakup of the star image anymore.

Am working on the maps again, had the first batch i uploaded this morning produce an error. Dont know if it was the maps or FileFront, but will work on that tonight.

Version 2 is up on FileFront now if you want to download. I would suggest making your own maps in galaxyforge 3 for now, until i can finish some of the re-sizing on the standard maps. But will upload them and post a note and link when im done. Hope to get a few up tonight, and more by the weekend.

Thanks for testing it out and for the feedback, its good to hear what other people are getting too. Take care,

-Teal

HP v0.2 Test and the Map Pack (6 maps: 2 Huge, 4 Small) are also uploaded.

Link is here:

http://files.filefront.com/13642405

Let me know what you think and if there are any problems, i'm testing now, and so far, so good!! 

Am hoping i wont find any, but well, let me know what you think, ok? The feedback helps, not just to know what is wrong, but also to know what people like, and what they feel is well, haha, not so good.  :) 

I adjusted the phaselane length in these maps, so they are more normal, i was getting used to the extra long lanes, and it made the game "feel" different, let me know if that is a good thing for you. I'm thinking of going back to the long phase lanes, guess i could include both, that way people can choose what they like.

Take care,

-Teal

Well, as of testing last night, there are still issues. I fixed the grav well re-sizing and it looked beautiful, however, the moment my scout touched the well, the frame-rate on the game ground down to what appeared to be about 1fps.

In addition, the crossover from star icon to star image (mesh) still takes several scroll-backs or scroll-forwards, there must be some settings, or a setting that controls the change over range from one to the other.

Although on the good side, the stars image (mesh) is stable now, with no breakup.

The re-sized maps have good placement, though the phase lanes as mentioned earlier are very long, it is something i could get used to, not a big deal really. But the standard maps have some issues, overlap of planet grav wells and planets embedded inside the star or star corona field most notable.

I dont quite understand why the gravity well itself would affect the game fps, but it seems to be the cause. Everything was fine, normal game speed and performance before hitting the well, and an almost grinding halt after hitting the well.

Perhaps reducing the well to a smaller radius?

Any ideas?  And/or any ideas how to correct it? Other than reducing the size of the star back down of course. 

-Teal

I think i may have figured out what went wrong. Since the grav well for the star was set at "aesthetically" the same ratio as that for planets, i set it in the trillions. This was the movement and jump distances. So it was fine, until i hit the star well with a ship, which of course, probably means the game is calculating trillions of possibilites and therefor slows to a crawl.

If i reduce the movement and jump distances for the star well to millions, or even to hundreds of thousands, the calculations for the game to consider may of course decrease enormously. I have also considered having the movement and jump distances as the same, since there may be no phyisical reason, other than appearance to make them different.

This smaller radius of the star grav well may be enough to make a difference, perhaps even a huge difference in speed. Bringing the performance of the game back up close to normal.

From the standard game, the star well, is no where near the same "look" as a planet, instead of a large expanded well, it is more of a thin belt about the center of the star, although large by planetary measurements, it is still much less "visually" in appearance, and certainly within the boundaries of what the game can calculate in a reasonable time.

I am at school now, and so will re-adjust the star grav wells when i get home and test it, but i am hoping of course that this is it. That this will be a fix and the speed performance once hitting the star grav well with a ship will not reduce the fps or the game performance.

We will see.

Thanks to all who have looked at this and for their input and suggestions and ideas. Am still moving forward on this, am not yet ready to concede defeat and give up.  :)  Certainly if i were a Dev, i would understand the parameters more and could hopefully adjust accordingly.  :)  But as a file tweaking mesh moving modder,  :)  My learning curve is a bit steeper and longer.  :) 

Here is to hoping it works, i will keep everyone posted.

Take care,

-Teal