Some Updates:
(mostly under-the-hood stuff so not a whole lot to show off)
-Clean-up, optimizing, and generalizing of star generation. Tweaked star sizes and spacing.
-“Apparent Luminosity” of stars is now affected by the luminosity of the star they’re being observed from. Parking at bright stars will result in much darker surroundings, whereas parking at small dark stars will give you a much clearer picture of the sky.
-Each star now has a sub-class which stores all its information. Random name generator creates (some hilarious!) names for each star.
-Galaxy generator now accepts a seed value.
-Dynamic ‘Jump Range’, play with your jump range settings, and watch your boundaries and jump lanes update to reflect that.
-Starlanes are drawn on all colonized stars, as well as the currently-selected star.
-Colonize the current star with a keypress, for testing purposes.
-Added bloom lighting, which looks really nice for the stars, but not so nice for anything else. If only I could apply the bloom to only the star objects…
Playing with creating new colonies. The ‘halos’ get cluttered up real quick…
A “true luminosity” view of the galaxy. Stars are a little smaller, the star spacing is a little tighter, and bloom lighting is making some subtle pretties.
Until a UI is in place, all star info is spat out into the console.
Stars are given a Spectral Class and a Luminosity Class. These are roughly based on
this info on wikipedia.
For example, the star “Wook” is an FIII type star, which reads as “Yellow-White Giant”.
Vekio Ryagda Tore is a red main-sequence (MV) star. Red stars are typically dwarves or smaller, but rare ‘red giants’ will be generated.
Star Luminosity will determine the temperature of planets in that system. Planets in close orbit will be hotter, while planets in far orbits will be cooler. Planets’ geological activity, surface water, and thickness of atmosphere will also contribute to temperature. Terraforming a planet’s surface to produce ideal temperatures could involve altering these elements (drying up the oceans to warm things up, or blowing away the atmosphere to cool things down, etc).
Ideas are in place to simulate some sort of ‘planetary evolution’.
Potential bodies in an orbit around a star begin as an asteroid field with a certain amount of Matter. If Matter becomes high enough, the asteroid field accretes (is that a word?) into a World with a Geosphere. If too much Matter is present, a Gas Giant is formed.
If Geosphere rises high enough, geological activity melts water ice present in the World’s crust, and creates a Hydrosphere.
If enough water is present (along with high enough temperature and gravity), the oceans begin evaporating and creating an Atmosphere.
If the right amount of heat, water, and breathable air are present on a world, a Biosphere forms.
On top of this, random ‘anomalies’ could give Worlds strange distributions of Spheres. Biospheres on worlds with no air or water, water on boiling-hot worlds, geologically dead worlds with volcanic activity, etc.