UAs, Barnacles & More Thread 6 - The Canonn
- Thread starter Yaffle
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No. We were busy listening to them.
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What hey when !! Thread 6 !!!! I was only AFK for an hour !!! LOL
Many thanks once again Yaffle and Riz (who made me do it 
) for sorting out the new thread. Amazing work as always; and thanks to FD for continuing to provide a nice cozy home for the craziest bunch of scientists in the galaxy
Keep it up - you're doing the community proud!
) for sorting out the new thread. Amazing work as always; and thanks to FD for continuing to provide a nice cozy home for the craziest bunch of scientists in the galaxy Keep it up - you're doing the community proud!
Part of me thinks it would be a pity to see all the effort of a CG-built space station go to waste.
Part of me hopes you're right, as it could be an awesome story!
Do you mean Lasers ? ;-)
Since the last thread has been closed and my post didn't get many eyes i will post my possible finding again.
Here's a image i took of barnard's loop while in the 'vela dark region rt-r c4-0' system
And a picture of the symbol on the barnacle.
It could just be a coincidence but if it is not than it makes some sense since the regor sector borders with the vela dark region.
Here's a image i took of barnard's loop while in the 'vela dark region rt-r c4-0' system
It could just be a coincidence but if it is not than it makes some sense since the regor sector borders with the vela dark region.
This thread, seems interesting.
Yaffle
Volunteer Moderator
Apologies for that. I think I have a way of moving the last few posts across when #7 arrives to try and avoid it happening.
Yes, this!
And I was wondering if anyone dropped a UA on one and looked at what happens?
On a serious note, I missed the whole Meta-Alloy CG due to work. Life happens though, what can you do? Obsidian is still in working condition as far as I understand. Why does everyone think it'll close down soon? Did I miss a GalNet post while away (since last thursday)?
WOW!
Good find!
mmmmm...
and REP from me.
Well, I had hoped to find something in the layout of the formation, but I can't find any significant matches so I'll just post my thinking in case someone else has better insight.
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We've established that the spikes can be higher or lower compared to the center, depending on the slope of the terrain, which indicates that the formation is made up of separate independently positioned objects, rather than being a single 3D model for the entire formation. That struck me as notable, since it seems to me that it would be simpler for the entire formation to be one model which could be spawned and rendered at a single position. Instead, Frontier clearly asked their artists to create the individual pieces of the formation separately, so that they could be positioned independently of eachother. Why would they do that?
Since the barnacles are clearly meant to be at least semi organic, and E already uses procedural generation to easily create variety in other contexts, one easy explanation would be randomness. Individual 3D models would allow the spikes to be randomly positioned around the central barnacle, which would give the formations an even more organic and varied appearance (as might be expected from something growing up through the ground). But we've ruled that out: every formation, even in different star systems, has exactly the same layout. That means instead of whipping up a quick randomizer, someone at Frontier had to manually position every spike in the formation, record all of those positions, and program them in so that every time a barnacle formation spawns, it gets exactly the same spikes in exactly the same relative positions. So again, why would they do that?
Another possible explanation is, of course, that the arrangement has some meaning. In this scenario, it seemed plausible to me that the designers might have asked the art department to work on the 3D models in advance (since that pipeline can be somewhat long), leaving them free to decide later on exactly what the layout was going to be in order to encode the intended meaning.
So I started looking at the layout:
The first thing I that struck me was that many of the spikes seem to form slight arcs, spiraling out from the center (and indeed, the central barnacle itself has a distinctly spiral kind of appearance). That made me think that perhaps it was meant to be indicative of the spiral arms of the galaxy, and combined with the fact that there are always exactly two fruit-bearing spikes, I thought maybe the entire formation was meant to be a kind of map: if we could use the overall formation to align it to the galaxy map such that one of the fruits matched a known reference point (such as Sol, or the Pleiades), then the other fruit would point to another area of the galaxy. I had hoped that when zooming in on that area, we'd find a nebula that was an even more exact match for the symbol on the central barnacle.
But I haven't had any luck with that. The two fruit-bearing spikes (in yellow above) are too close to the center for either of them to correspond to us (since we're relatively far from the core). My next idea was to look for especially large nebulae, or pulsars, or something else that might line up with this arrangement on the galactic scale, but I couldn't find any clear matches there either.
So that's where I've left it for now. Hopefully someone else will see a pattern here, if there is one.
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We've established that the spikes can be higher or lower compared to the center, depending on the slope of the terrain, which indicates that the formation is made up of separate independently positioned objects, rather than being a single 3D model for the entire formation. That struck me as notable, since it seems to me that it would be simpler for the entire formation to be one model which could be spawned and rendered at a single position. Instead, Frontier clearly asked their artists to create the individual pieces of the formation separately, so that they could be positioned independently of eachother. Why would they do that?
Since the barnacles are clearly meant to be at least semi organic, and E
already uses procedural generation to easily create variety in other contexts, one easy explanation would be randomness. Individual 3D models would allow the spikes to be randomly positioned around the central barnacle, which would give the formations an even more organic and varied appearance (as might be expected from something growing up through the ground). But we've ruled that out: every formation, even in different star systems, has exactly the same layout. That means instead of whipping up a quick randomizer, someone at Frontier had to manually position every spike in the formation, record all of those positions, and program them in so that every time a barnacle formation spawns, it gets exactly the same spikes in exactly the same relative positions. So again, why would they do that?Another possible explanation is, of course, that the arrangement has some meaning. In this scenario, it seemed plausible to me that the designers might have asked the art department to work on the 3D models in advance (since that pipeline can be somewhat long), leaving them free to decide later on exactly what the layout was going to be in order to encode the intended meaning.
So I started looking at the layout:
The first thing I that struck me was that many of the spikes seem to form slight arcs, spiraling out from the center (and indeed, the central barnacle itself has a distinctly spiral kind of appearance). That made me think that perhaps it was meant to be indicative of the spiral arms of the galaxy, and combined with the fact that there are always exactly two fruit-bearing spikes, I thought maybe the entire formation was meant to be a kind of map: if we could use the overall formation to align it to the galaxy map such that one of the fruits matched a known reference point (such as Sol, or the Pleiades), then the other fruit would point to another area of the galaxy. I had hoped that when zooming in on that area, we'd find a nebula that was an even more exact match for the symbol on the central barnacle.
But I haven't had any luck with that. The two fruit-bearing spikes (in yellow above) are too close to the center for either of them to correspond to us (since we're relatively far from the core). My next idea was to look for especially large nebulae, or pulsars, or something else that might line up with this arrangement on the galactic scale, but I couldn't find any clear matches there either.
So that's where I've left it for now. Hopefully someone else will see a pattern here, if there is one.
Well, I had hoped to find something in the layout of the formation, but I can't find any significant matches so I'll just post my thinking in case someone else has better insight.
-----
We've established that the spikes can be higher or lower compared to the center, depending on the slope of the terrain, which indicates that the formation is made up of separate independently positioned objects, rather than being a single 3D model for the entire formation. That struck me as notable, since it seems to me that it would be simpler for the entire formation to be one model which could be spawned and rendered at a single position. Instead, Frontier clearly asked their artists to create the individual pieces of the formation separately, so that they could be positioned independently of eachother. Why would they do that?
Since the barnacles are clearly meant to be at least semi organic, and E
Another possible explanation is, of course, that the arrangement has some meaning. In this scenario, it seemed plausible to me that the designers might have asked the art department to work on the 3D models in advance (since that pipeline can be somewhat long), leaving them free to decide later on exactly what the layout was going to be in order to encode the intended meaning.
So I started looking at the layout:
View attachment 98649View attachment 98650View attachment 98651
The first thing I that struck me was that many of the spikes seem to form slight arcs, spiraling out from the center (and indeed, the central barnacle itself has a distinctly spiral kind of appearance). That made me think that perhaps it was meant to be indicative of the spiral arms of the galaxy, and combined with the fact that there are always exactly two fruit-bearing spikes, I thought maybe the entire formation was meant to be a kind of map: if we could use the overall formation to align it to the galaxy map such that one of the fruits matched a known reference point (such as Sol, or the Pleiades), then the other fruit would point to another area of the galaxy. I had hoped that when zooming in on that area, we'd find a nebula that was an even more exact match for the symbol on the central barnacle.
But I haven't had any luck with that. The two fruit-bearing spikes (in yellow above) are too close to the center for either of them to correspond to us (since we're relatively far from the core). My next idea was to look for especially large nebulae, or pulsars, or something else that might line up with this arrangement on the galactic scale, but I couldn't find any clear matches there either.
So that's where I've left it for now. Hopefully someone else will see a pattern here, if there is one.
If there's any significance to the 2 fruit-bearing spikes and the map theory, then maybe they line up with the "bars" of our "barred spiral galaxy"...
exhibit A: clearly showing the bars near Sag A (ignore the red stuff)
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it is not a big deal and bound to happen in such an active thread anyway.
I thought about that too, but since none of the other spikes seem to have any distinguishing characteristics, I couldn't see what such an alignment would tell us. Unless we're meant to send people out to scour all 15 other areas of the galaxy? But that doesn't seem like Frontier's style; the UAs all pointed directly at Merope, and even narrowing down the search to one star system, we still didn't find the barnacles for quite some time afterward.
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