Would you want new planet types and atmospheres?

Suicide Junkie · #1 April 24th, 2001, 12:16 AM

Rock, Ice, Liquid, Gas.

Not much else that applies to planets.

Trachmyr · #2 April 24th, 2001, 12:47 AM

also want: Inferno (or LAVA), and Brown Dwarves (y'know the HUGE gas giant that have recently been spotted... thought is that they're failed stars)

Sirkit · #3 April 24th, 2001, 01:40 AM

Stars would be sweet!!! It might require the combination of both the specialized race trait (all components are energy) thread as well as remote mining (their gonna need minerals from somewhere!) But if say the star gave off a signifigant amount of rads depending on it's luminocity then it could work...

I'll vote for stars but I'm sorry I'm tired of appearing in a system with nothing there to colinize.... But stars yeh.... (dumb look) that would be very cool!

Resident Alien · #4 April 24th, 2001, 01:54 AM

Were you thinking of the Chlorans from the Skylark series also by EE Doc Smith? They were nasty, made the Xi'Chung Hive look like cute friendly kittens.

ps. Skylark of Space, just re-published -check Amazon.com.

quote:
Originally posted by pathfinder:
hmmm, I know the planet atmospheres are hard-coded since I asked MM about that a while back when I tried modding in a chlorine atmosphere (EE "Doc" Smith "Lensman" series...hehe). But it WOULD be nice to be able to...

[This message has been edited by Resident Alien (edited 24 April 2001).]

pathfinder · #5 April 24th, 2001, 02:19 AM

Resident Alien: yup..me be BIG fan of that series!

DirectorTsaarx · #6 April 27th, 2001, 05:40 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Trachmyr:
I know it's hardcoded... but I don't think it would be that difficult to change, instead of it pulling the atmospheres from hardcoded variables, it could pull them from a txt file... I don't know the actual code MM is using, but from my programming experience, I can't see why it would be that difficult to implement.

I think one of the issues is that MM tried to "color-code" planets to represent different atmospheres (at least it seems that way to me, but maybe I haven't checked deeply enough); adding more atmospheres could throw off the color coding. Yeah, you would probably want to add more pictures anyway, but you'd have to find a color sufficiently different from existing colors. Or throw out the color coding...

dmm · #7 April 27th, 2001, 10:41 PM

I think it is hard coded only because MM assumed that no one would ever want more. That is SO common with programmers. (Bill Gates: "Who would ever want more than 640K of RAM in their PC?") Then getting them to admit the mistake is almost impossible.

I'd love to see planet types be moddable. My programming experience also tells me that it wouldn't be that hard.

The point about the color schemes is a good one, and maybe is the real reason for the resistance from MM -- his artistic sensibilities. Misguided artists are even more stubborn than misguided programmers! Personally, I'd like a hydrogen planet to look like a circle with an H inside.

One Last note: Towing or propulsion of planets has been mentioned before. What would happen if you towed a sodium planet into a chlorine one? Boom! You'd get a salt water asteroid field. Now THAT would require some tough coding changes.