General Pants' Scientific Accuracy Mod I: Stars

A mod a year in the making (literally, one year!)

Gentlebeings,

My first official installment of the Scientific Accuracy Mod, and the most scientifically accurate one, is now posted:

GPSAM I Current version beta 0.01B

From the Designer's Notes (also in beta):

This mod is intended to make the game MORE scientifically accurate. It is naturally limited by game mechanics, the state of our understanding of planetary science and astronomy, and my own abilities. There is no way to make it ABSOLUTELY accurate; all of these are moving targets, and at some point I had to simply cut off the development process and make the mod. I have tried whenever possible to document my methods and assumptions, to allow the diligent modder to adjust for different interpretations or new information. I also intend to modify as necessary in light of new information. Although, sooner or later, I WILL have to get back to real science.

This mod was begun approximately one year ago, and, apart from a couple months' hiatus, has been under continuous, incremental development since then (in parallel with other elements of GPSAM). I hope you enjoy it. Permission is given to use parts of the mod, with credit, in other mods.

Please post comments, bug reports, etc. in this thread so that I can respond as quickly as possible.

 

 

29,326 views 15 replies
Reply #1 Top

"Bug" #1: .png files need to be compressed.

 

EDIT: Misread GIMP, they are compressed by default. D'oH!

 

Reply #2 Top

Are Red Giants so damned white and yellow in real life? Wowsz?

But seriously, though, great mod and works really well! Its cool to see the stars in a closer to accurate sizing! It definitely makes me anxious to play small maps with large numbers of stars though lol!

Looking forward to your future work on making map generation a little more sane with the larger stars?

Reply #3 Top

Quoting Gauntlet03, reply 2

Are Red Giants so damned white and yellow in real life? Wowsz?

The colors are based on an RGB table of black-body radiation @ a paticular temperature from stars, and should be accurate. Star 'color' as given is just the peak output: Sol should technically be a green star, and our eyes are most sensitive in green, which is why light-enhancing apparatus pictures are green). The visible color is 'smeared' across the spectrum with a peak at the nominal color, and this smear averages out to what we see. Most artistic renderings appear to be somewhat imaginative: 'red' stars stars, in fact, all stars, should have an ugly, 'washed out' look. The smearing is less significant at low-frequency colors, where we can't see the infra-red portion, and high-frequencies where we can't see the ultra-violet and the output is less 'smeared.' Thus, we get bluish and reddish stars, but mostly white stars in the middle. The luminosity of blue stars also washes out the color further, making them even less blue. So red, it turns out, is the most similar to the color you expect from the name.

Also, most "red" giants are actually orange or yellow stars by color category (peak output). The term is used as a category to describe a stage in the star's life cycle where its temperature relative to its color takes it to the far upper right corner of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, making them reddISH and giant.

In the mod, the intensity of the star in-game is largely controlled by the internal halo, and so the core color is more accurate. It was difficult to color-match the texture to the color, so the inner color is actually MORE boldly colored than it should be, but represents an approximate balance between the lighter and darker portions of the color. The light may be seen in the surface effects is darker and more consistent, and is a somewhat more "pure" version of the true color.

EDIT: The darker red dwarfs is partially due to texture choice. This in turn represents that giants have more convection cells than dwarfs. However, the dwarfs end up a little too dark.

 

Quoting Gauntlet03, reply 2

Its cool to see the stars in a closer to accurate sizing!

This will change further as the planets fall into line. Habitable will be smaller, dead are just about right, and giants will grow larger. Indeed, giants will be about the same size as brown dwarves (due to a weird coincidence involving gravity and electron degeneracy). I'm working on this now.

 

Quoting Gauntlet03, reply 2

Looking forward to your future work on making map generation a little more sane with the larger stars?

I assume you are looking for more biggies. I will likely have to use another log-transformation so that the giants will show up at all. They are a TINY percentage of total stars, mostly because stars spend very little time in that stage. (subgiants are more common, which is why I added them to the game). Ditto almost everything else. Estimates range broadly, but between 45-80% of all stars are red dwarfs, which would make for boring play. So "sane" is relative. I am opting for sane = play value, which is my general default.

Thank you for the feedback! :)

Reply #4 Top

Installed it, it works fine, I like it.

Reply #5 Top

Excellent mod. For your time and effort an enthusiastic thank you.

Reply #6 Top

Thanks all! Next update will likely ramp down the number of habitable planets significantly, and I'll play with the probabilities for the systems to see if I can get more of the fun stars to show up.

Reply #7 Top

As of now, this mod is NOT compatible with the GRM. Will work on this!

Reply #8 Top

Running on the latest 2.3.2. Just started an immense, spiral galaxy with your mod in place and the star distribution was weird  Tried without your mod and got the expected 3-4 armed galaxy. With your mod in place, the distribution with almost completely even across entire galaxy, which is not terrible, but also not a spiral.

Is this intended behavior for a realistic mod? I know that the spiral at this scale is unrealistic, spiral arms being 10K LY across and more in our galaxy.

Reply #9 Top

Quoting dlapine1, reply 8

Is this intended behavior for a realistic mod?

I am sorry, no. This is very concerning. I will have to look at this. I'm away at the moment, but when I get home I will try to fix it!

Thank you for reporting this!

Reply #10 Top

You should give yourself more of an artistic liscence to make them.... well easier on the eyes. Especially since there's gameplay value in knowing what type of star you should get a closer look at first. The yellow and pink ones (supposedly?) have a higher chance of better planets. Considering the map screen isn't someone floating around in space looking at things with their naked eye, but a representation of things that the leader of a civ is probably looking at to see the bigger picture. I mean we all know stars are overwhelmingly bright things of light. You're not even supposed to look at the one in our solar system with your naked eye. And the other ones you can see for yourself in the night sky either look exactly like they appear in your mod, but farther away... or are too dim for us to even see.

 

Reply #11 Top

Quoting dlapine1, reply 8

Is this intended behavior for a realistic mod?

Again, my apologies for the delay. Life has been happening recently. I'll get on this soon.

Reply #12 Top

Quoting Crocell, reply 10

You should give yourself more of an artistic liscence to make them.... well easier on the eyes.

Interesting... I agree a 'prettier stars mod' would be cool, my point was to get closer to scientific accuracy.

Quoting General, reply 11

The yellow and pink ones (supposedly?) have a higher chance of better planets.

You can see the color through the fog of war, so you can plan your exploration accordingly. If you have scouted the star, you can click it to find out what type it is. The chance of planets should be better for the yellow and orange stars, but there is a slight problem with this at the Developer level (systems can only randomly generate three planets per lane). Planet quality cannot be controlled by the type of star, unfortunately.

Reply #13 Top

Quoting dlapine1, reply 8

Running on the latest 2.3.2. Just started an immense, spiral galaxy with your mod in place and the star distribution was weird  Tried without your mod and got the expected 3-4 armed galaxy. With your mod in place, the distribution with almost completely even across entire galaxy, which is not terrible, but also not a spiral.

I still have to look into this. Crushing stress at home is making it difficult to do much of anything, and I need to finish one more project before I get back to looking at stars. I am truly sorry for the delay. Everything in my life is pretty much on hold while I try to find a way to pay the bills.

Reply #14 Top


No rush at all. With 2.6 up and 2.6+ coming, no reason to see what was up with 2.3.2. I've got all mods disabled while the balance issues are being addressed.

Reply #15 Top

This mod will likely be re-done for v3.0, at which time I will examine the map issue. Hopefully the other map issues (such as max number of planets) will have been resolved, and I can expand the mod the way I had originally planned to (and had prepared for over a year to).