So what happened to this orrery ?

dannysquid

dannysquid
From a little noodling around with log scaled Orrery type things in my spare time, one thing you soon notice is that the orbit lines become massively distorted if the system is complex in any way. This may have been because I got the maths wrong (more than likely!) but I don't think it's nearly as simple to do as it is in our collective heads.

Having said that, the Orrery View strikes me as a much better place to visualise all sorts of things.

-- You could see where the influence of different factions reached and the location of conflict zones and indicators for expansion etc which is a lot more intuitive and less dry than a text description or graphs.
-- It would be lovely to indicate traffic through a system, either with abstract representations of trade routes and piracy hotbeds or a live view of ships passing through a system (leaving trails to show their routes).
-- If live ship data was visible it might be possible to work out whether a ship is an explorer, pirate, bounty hunter or trader by observing their behaviour. Detective work is satisfying.

That sort of stuff.
 

Iskariot

Iskariot
Bigmaec said:
But for me it does exactly what I want from an orrery: I can visually plot the best course to the bodies in system that interest me.
I'm pretty happy with the orrery. Could it be shinier, more functional? Yes, of course. Is that needed? No.
Click to expand...

I love shiny things, so I would be stoked if FDev would make the orrery more pretty, but I am glad we now have what we have.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
To answer the OP: what happened was, the concept of the orrery view clearly predates the actual work on what the star systems of the galaxy would look like. Turns out that the Stellar Forge generated a whole bunch of star systems that could not possibly be rendered in that style of orrery view adequately. Even the hand-crafted star systems were going to cause headaches: how would the Alpha Centauri system look, for example? There's also the slight matter of "unrealistic" depictions there: besides the wrong-way-pointing comet, that asteroid belt is clustering in a most un-belt-like way, for example. And that little one-line system summary map in the bottom right? How would you depict a 90-object, multi-star, multi-planet, multi-moon system in that tiny space? That orrery map clearly dates from a time when ED's star systems were going to be more like "Master of Orion" star systems - simplified, just a handful of planets per star, few moons, few gas giants, few binary stars, etc.

It also dates from a time when carefully hand-crafted content was expected to cover the whole inhabited galaxy. Look a the planet description there, it's a hand-written encyclopedia entry about that particular planet. Every inhabited planet would presumably get one. So again, this indicates that it predates the actual creation of the Bubble - otherwise they'd have realised very early on that hand-crafting descriptions for 100,000 planets wasn't going to be happening, especially given that pre-Horizons, planets were only going to be backdrop scenery rather than actual destinations and all the real action would be happening at space stations. You will notice, of course, that there isn't actually a "Randar" system in the ED universe at the moment.

TLDR: that orrery concept art was created by an artist, with some experience of "space games" but with little knowledge of astronomy or knowledge about how "realistic" the ED universe was going to be.
 
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Rainbro

Rainbro
Well, looks like it got dropped from the initial launch for any number of reasons (time/effort/design issues), probably under the assumption that they could finish it later. A few years pass and they realise they haven't gotten around to it yet, so we get the minimal orrery. Probably under the assumption that they'll finish it later.
 

Micha

Micha
I'm really happy an orrery is in-game nowadays. I makes plotting more efficient routes through a system possible as well as seeing whether any interesting conjunctions are happening right now.

Along with the other suggestions above, my personal wishlist also includes:
  • Being able to fast-forward the orrery to see when an interesting conjunction will occur.
  • Having a "nav-panel" to quickly jump to a particular location (especially in VR)
 

Valorin

Valorin
Commander Anthony Sonny said:
RaL5y5h.png

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Click to expand...
To be honest, I don't really mind that we didn't get that version, but the way they were serious with scientific accuracy back then... I want that back. It's what I really love in ED. The game becomes more and more "gamey" and keeps ignoring scientific facts in favor of "coolness" or "artistic expression", which really puts me off more and more.
 

Schmack

Schmack
The orrery is ornery.

Just trying to get the star to actually respond with information is a task that should have a mission reward tied to it.
 

Schmack

Schmack
Valorin said:
To be honest, I don't really mind that we didn't get that version, but the way they were serious with scientific accuracy back then... I want that back. It's what I really love in ED. The game becomes more and more "gamey" and keeps ignoring scientific facts in favor of "coolness" or "artistic expression", which really puts me off more and more.
Click to expand...
The user base now likely is less inclined to care more about scientific accuracy than overwhelming firepower and cool explosions. Even mining has cool explosions. I like them.
 

Micha

Micha
Schmack said:
The user base now likely is less inclined to care more about scientific accuracy than overwhelming firepower and cool explosions. Even mining has cool explosions. I like them.
Click to expand...

There's no reason you can't have the coolness without sacrificing the scientific accuracy. Of course certain things need to be handwaved so that it actually is a game, such as limiting speed in realspace, the incredible manoeuvrability of supertanker-sized spacecraft, sound-in-space(1), ftl (on the one hand), hyperspace (on the other), aliens, etc.

(1) this has been explained as the ship systems generating these to give the pilot better situational awareness.. which isn't so far-fetched. We're already adding noisemakers to EV's to warn pedestrians that a car is approaching...
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
dannysquid said:
From a little noodling around with log scaled Orrery type things in my spare time, one thing you soon notice is that the orbit lines become massively distorted if the system is complex in any way. This may have been because I got the maths wrong (more than likely!) but I don't think it's nearly as simple to do as it is in our collective heads.

Having said that, the Orrery View strikes me as a much better place to visualise all sorts of things.

-- You could see where the influence of different factions reached and the location of conflict zones and indicators for expansion etc which is a lot more intuitive and less dry than a text description or graphs.
-- It would be lovely to indicate traffic through a system, either with abstract representations of trade routes and piracy hotbeds or a live view of ships passing through a system (leaving trails to show their routes).
-- If live ship data was visible it might be possible to work out whether a ship is an explorer, pirate, bounty hunter or trader by observing their behaviour. Detective work is satisfying.

That sort of stuff.
Click to expand...

Please excuse this shameless advertising, but I'd love to see it used for plotting risky in-system jumps to secondary stars. Click my signature for the pitch if you fancy.

(This is a triggering subject though, so for those who'd like to inexplicably call me a CoD-loving marshmallow-glutton, please do so on the aforementioned thread ;))
 

Arioch

Arioch
SenseiMatty said:
I don't use the orrery. Too much zoom in and zoom out. It should be on a magnified scale. 1:1 is useless to me and the zoom speed is too slow (at least in VR Ive never tried it on display)
Click to expand...
That’s another thing I’d like implemented from Frontier: Elite 2 - double click +Zoom to instantly go to maximum zoom in on the selected body.
 

Schmack

Schmack
Micha said:
There's no reason you can't have the coolness without sacrificing the scientific accuracy. Of course certain things need to be handwaved so that it actually is a game, such as limiting speed in realspace, the incredible manoeuvrability of supertanker-sized spacecraft, sound-in-space(1), ftl (on the one hand), hyperspace (on the other), aliens, etc.

(1) this has been explained as the ship systems generating these to give the pilot better situational awareness.. which isn't so far-fetched. We're already adding noisemakers to EV's to warn pedestrians that a car is approaching...
Click to expand...
If you spend enough money you can have anything you want. They probably have a budget, and that wasn't on it.
 

DNA-Decay

DNA-Decay
There was an orrery view that popped up in a livestream once. Maybe a Dav and Ed one (my faves).
It was a dev tool for debugging, and when asked about it - they talked about the problems with implementing complex systems and getting it stable for edge cases.

So they had this thing that worked, and gave them useful information about systems, but it broke a lot and was super ugly. (Actually I kinda liked the way it looked. Like something you might actually use to interrogate Orbital Mechanics which, I think, is what is was good for)
 

znôrt

znôrt
Bigmaec said:
But for me it does exactly what I want from an orrery: I can visually plot the best course to the bodies in system that interest me.
I'm pretty happy with the orrery. Could it be shinier, more functional? Yes, of course. Is that needed? No.
Click to expand...

indeed. it's nice to see all the orbits, that little adds a lot.

funny that nobody has started an orrery shot thread? i have seen some strange 'mobiles' spinning there.
 

Riverside

Riverside
DNA-Decay said:
There was an orrery view that popped up in a livestream once. Maybe a Dav and Ed one (my faves).
It was a dev tool for debugging, and when asked about it - they talked about the problems with implementing complex systems and getting it stable for edge cases.

So they had this thing that worked, and gave them useful information about systems, but it broke a lot and was super ugly. (Actually I kinda liked the way it looked. Like something you might actually use to interrogate Orbital Mechanics which, I think, is what is was good for)
Click to expand...

I don't remember the tool you describe but the external camera started out the same way - a Dev tool that was added to the game.

I don't use the in-game orrery, I have always flown with orbital lines on in supercruise & never felt any need for an external view of the system I'm in. Occasionally I wonder whether that image in the OP was drawn before or after Supercruise was added to the game.
 
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