Oolite Bulletins

Redspear, you mention commenting out the “sun radius” bits of planetinfo.plist. Was the intention to change these to a different number (I.e multiplying then by 3), or just leaving them commented out?

Hi phkb, I think I've owed you an update on this got quite a while. My apologies. I'll need to look at it again to be sure but IIRC...

Earlier iterations made the planets larger and then the suns scales accordingly. More recent ones also increased sun size directly (in the source code) , making them much bigger but not cooperating with the set values of planetinfo.plist. I effectively sacrificed their proportional variability relative to their planets on order to make them much, much bigger.

Incidentally, do you know the thinking re moving away from the seeded procedural system for the planets and moving to a text based one? It seems that the details stayed the same so presumably it was for some benefit moving forward?

Redspear wrote: ↑Thu Mar 27, 2025 9:55 pm

Incidentally, do you know the thinking re moving away from the seeded procedural system for the planets and moving to a text based one? It seems that the details stayed the same so presumably it was for some benefit moving forward?

I think the reason was that, by having all the text/config for a system laid out in a file, it is much easier to search/debug/mod. And it allows for the possibility of access to one galaxies data from another. Not totally sure, though, as it was before my time on the dev team.

Just to confirm: you're code tweaks on page 44 of this thread don't make any changes to OOSunEntity.m or OOSunEntity.h. Is the sun size purely related to the planet size?

phkb wrote: ↑Fri Mar 28, 2025 7:04 am

Just to confirm: you're code tweaks on page 44 of this thread don't make any changes to OOSunEntity.m or OOSunEntity.h. Is the sun size purely related to the planet size?

Yeah, I recalled that after I'd written my first reply...

I've done quite a bit of work since and perhaps the biggest change was to make the sun bigger independently from the planet and then to make the planet bigger too (which would further increase the sun size). I'm pretty sure that I did make a change to one of those files in order to achieve it.

I found that made a very satisfying difference to planetary approach in particular as I think some of my screenshots demonstrated. Make it too big and the game can struggle to create a system or outright crash so the whole thing was a balancing act.

I should have some time on my hands next month, after precious little over the last year, so I'll gather my latest code changes together and see where I got up to. Some of the later ideas around gas giants and so on hadn't been implemented and were starting into oxp territory but I think they were relevant. I mean, this all started as an experiment so why not?