[UTILITY] Realistic Planetary Systems Mod Utility

[Soviet_Onion]

The executable is fine enough.
A few screenshots could make some teasing.

I'll have a look to your mod to recover some elements.
What you did is really, really interesting.
The generation is very detailled. I love when realism can serve a game.

 

[primem0ver]

There is only one main screen and an error popup that shows when an error in a script/template is encountered. I have included three screenshots of the main screen to give you a look at the values that are used to determine the placement of objects in each star system. Note that some of these values are calculated and some are set by me to produce the best results. (Most distances are calculated to be realistic (big numbers) ... a few of them are calculated using parameters (smaller numbers) that are arbitrarily set by me such as the base planetary distance between planets).

 

[Soviet_Onion]

I cannot see the pictures. Even when I copy paste the urls into the browser.

 

[primem0ver]

Hmmm... weird. I can see them just fine in the post. Not sure why that would be. Does your ISP block content from Google photos?

 

[primem0ver]

Hey everyone (particularly Soviet_Onion)
Sorry about the delay in meeting your request. While trying to deal with a "minor" issue with planet spacing and resulting counts, I hit a major snag in my algorithm for this aspect of the utility. I had to redo the algorithm and now it is MUCH cleaner... working without having to do any guesswork at most aspects of adjusting game distances to be playable versus the huge distances one would normally encounter. Any adjustments to this in the future should be much more smooth.

If you guys are still interested in a "demo" I may be able to release it this weekend.

 

[primem0ver]

Hmm... now I am having the same problem you are onion. I will see what I can do to fix it.

 

[Soviet_Onion]

Hmm... now I am having the same problem you are onion. I will see what I can do to fix it.

Many thanks.

I'm still interested in a demo. But don't rush.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

I would love to see a demo.

Also, I don't think your pictures are working because you probably have whatever album they're in set to private. I've never used Google Photos, but if's anything like Docs, you need to set a photo/album to public.

 

[Seomis]

http://imgur.com/

 

[BerthNerd]

Hey there, how's it going? Your algorithm sounds really great and it seems many of my mod ideas overlap with your "Final Frontier" mod, as well as with Soviet Onion's "Space is an Ocean" mod.

I would love to see some teaser screens if you could upload them somewhere else and I too would be very happy over a demo version, but as Soviet Onion said: No rush ;-)

 

[primem0ver]

UPDATE:
The core utility is now working adequately. Just a few more things to clean up. I have also completed and tested the basic "template" engine that allows on the fly creation of custom systems using the "shorthand" I described earlier. This will allow mod developers to create and change their templates very easily without having to search a huge file for everything they are looking for. Here is an example of a template file, an include file (used to copy large, standardized sections), and the resulting empire initializer file. I should be able to post an alpha version this weekend.

The file name should make it obvious which is which. FYI these are the currently planned starter system generators for the Final Frontier Mod.

 

[primem0ver]

Ok guys... you have a demo. You will find the output in the output folder. This file requires .NET 4.0

 

[BerthNerd]

Thanks a lot! Looks pretty interesting and I'll look more into it later. Though, one thing I noticed: I can't rearrange the column width for all the columns before "FrostLine" the values are all properly shown, but I can't read the column headers.

 

[primem0ver]

Thanks a lot! Looks pretty interesting and I'll look more into it later. Though, one thing I noticed: I can't rearrange the column width for all the columns before "FrostLine" the values are all properly shown, but I can't read the column headers.

Yeah. I made it so that the numbers cannot be edited (this would be a bad idea since they are calculated). However, I may be able to make it so that column widths can be edited. For now just uncheck the first box on top (Report Game Distance instead of Km). This will make the presentation wider (though not wide enough for some things) as km requires more space. You may be able to hold the mouse over the heading and get the full name (can't remember ATM).

 

[BerthNerd]

Is there anything to do other than generating the files, and put them into a mod? The game crashes when I try to start a game.

 

[primem0ver]

Um... of course it crashes. You asked for a demo. Not a working mod. There are items (references) in the new files that do not exist in the vanilla file. I also need to fine tune the output (some references are missing quotes). The utility does not export the planet or star definitions. I have not decided if this is worth including. So far I have been doing that manually.

EDIT: Please note that the purpose of this utility is NOT to create a working mod. It is to make editing mod files relating to system generation (especially large ones) easier.

 

[BerthNerd]

okay, thanks for the clearup, as there were those example files, I had a wrong assumption ;-)

 

[BerthNerd]

when it's finished, will you write an at least basic "manual" on what it can do and how to use the utility and it's output? That would be great

 

[primem0ver]

when it's finished, will you write an at least basic "manual" on what it can do and how to use the utility and it's output? That would be great

That was always part of the plan. It is why I left room (3 extra placeholder posts) for including information about how to use the utility. The structure of how to use the utility will change a bit because of scripting support which was not part of the original plan.

Keep in mind that at least for the time being, use of the utility for mods other than my own will require modification of the source code. This is because I am certain that not everyone will want to use the same set of planets as me. I have made this relatively simple (if you know how to program in C#) since most of what will need to change is the content of the lists done in a specific section of code. The only planets that should NOT be messed with (unless you know what you are doing) is ringed gas giants as these are explicitly used in "accretion" (young) star systems. All other planet references are lists. You can add, change, or extend these lists at a specific spot in the source code.

EDIT: Also keep in mind that changes to the types of planets may require changes to the template files (if you remove planet types). Making this type of editing easy is why I purposefully separated planet type data from tile and effect data (which is included in the "include" file).

 

[Seomis]

Ehh what's this windows stuff? Source?