Those annoy me even more because they weren't unrealistic in the first place.
Stellar forge 'fixed' to the point of broken
- Thread starter Nutter
- Start date
Those annoy me even more because they weren't unrealistic in the first place.
"Star Bug Tours regrets having to report the closure of over 65% of our operations around the galaxy. Someone has been repairing the bugs we have been touring. We apologize for the code cleanup. We will be refunding tour package purchases to the now-repaired locations, but hope to introduce a new set of tours in 2020."
That's because many people take it as a given that if it's not working as intended that it will be fixed at some point, and if it's not unbalancing gameplay, one may as well enjoy it in the meantime.
I have quite a few videos where I thoroughly explored interesting bugs and had fun doing so. They were still part of bug reports and I would still be disappointed if Frontier had no intention of addressing them at some point.
If you weren't a second class console citizen, I could show you how to fix it yourself!
Nice neutron sunrise. I'm guessing you can't supercharge your FSD while landed though, can you?
I'd believe you, but many cheer the existance of this bug and they don't get the replies that we see here.
FD fixes bugs that are either:
FD fixes bugs that are easy to fix. Fixing the "moons flying through each other" bug was simple: add a final check to the Stellar Forge: IF [orbital radius of moon] minus [orbital radius of previously generated moon] < [radius of moon] plus [radius of previous moon] THEN [make orbital radius of moon slightly bigger]. Simple maths.
FD fixes bugs that cause problems or game crashes. FD will often leave alone "bugs" that do not.
Evidence: weirdly coloured gas giants. The Green ones are apparently harmless, so not only are they not "fixed", their existence is canonized by inclusion in the Codex. The pink ones and glowing-white ones looked just as cool, but caused problems and other errors which affected gameplay. So they got edited away. Now, we would all agree that we would have liked the "buggy" planets to be "fixed" while somehow retaining their special-ness (after all, Glowing-white giants had surface temperatures of over 9000K, something that hot is supposed to be glowing!). But it was quicker and easier to simply make the bugs go away.
A moon which was given contradictory orbital data and as such orbits at ludicrous speed? Harmless. Mitterrand Hollow is cool-looking and, most importantly, it can't kill you. So it gets canonized, or at least unofficially "adopted" - even if no-one ever actually tries in-game to explain how this moon can exist.
A moon which flies through another moon and inexplicably emerges intact out the other side? How many players got killed, called for rescue by FD or had to exploit their way out of an impossible situation, because they went to watch this phenomenon? Keeping it there would be "high maintenance"; each time it happened, they'd have to do a lot of rescuing and troubleshooting. The easiest, quickest solution to fixing the "people dying when planets collide" bug is to make sure planets never collide. So it gets deleted.
Finally, a reality check.
The moons-colliding-bug was "popular" because it was repeatable. Someone found two moons, realised they would collide, went back to tell everyone about it, then people calculated how long it would take for the second event. The next "collision" was witnessed by many more people, precisely because everyone knew it was there, and roughly when it would happen.
In the real world (or a more realistic simulation), the moons would collide once, big game of moon-billiards, debris flying everywhere, then nothing left but a ring/asteroid belt. If you weren't there when it actually happened, the only way you'd know about it is if you visited the system twice, before and after, and noticed that two moons had mysteriously vanished from the system map when you visited the second time.
Another real-world comparison: moons inside rings. A moon flying through a ring in real life wouldn't be as spectacular as it liooks in ED. That's because rings in ED are simplified models: they're treated as a "solid disc", with the asteroids stuck in the disc like chips in a chocolate chip cookie. The entire disc rotates at the same rate - so that the outermost edge of the disc is moving much faster than the innermost edge. This is the opposite of how a real ring would work, with the ring forming a million-lane freeway, the particles in each lane going around the planet at a slightly different rate to its neighbours, and the innermost parts of the ring moving fastest, and the outermost slowest.
In real life, a moon that was suddenly placed in orbit inside a ring would be moving at virtually zero speed compared to the ring. The nearby rocks would all gently fall down onto the moon's surface, piling up into a ridge of debris around the moon's equator (like we see on the moons Iapetus and Pan). As slowly (over many, many revolutions of its orbit) the rings moved around the moon, the moon would clear a path through the ring - until you'd eventually end up with a gap in the ring, right where the moon was.
In ED, a moon travelling through a ring is usually moving very fast compared to the ring, so you have the appearance of ring-rocks slamming into the moon at hundreds or thousands of km/s.
- Easy to fix
- Cause game crashes, server meltdown or other problems that affect gameplay
- Cause random player death.
FD fixes bugs that are easy to fix. Fixing the "moons flying through each other" bug was simple: add a final check to the Stellar Forge: IF [orbital radius of moon] minus [orbital radius of previously generated moon] < [radius of moon] plus [radius of previous moon] THEN [make orbital radius of moon slightly bigger]. Simple maths.
FD fixes bugs that cause problems or game crashes. FD will often leave alone "bugs" that do not.
Evidence: weirdly coloured gas giants. The Green ones are apparently harmless, so not only are they not "fixed", their existence is canonized by inclusion in the Codex. The pink ones and glowing-white ones looked just as cool, but caused problems and other errors which affected gameplay. So they got edited away. Now, we would all agree that we would have liked the "buggy" planets to be "fixed" while somehow retaining their special-ness (after all, Glowing-white giants had surface temperatures of over 9000K, something that hot is supposed to be glowing!). But it was quicker and easier to simply make the bugs go away.
A moon which was given contradictory orbital data and as such orbits at ludicrous speed? Harmless. Mitterrand Hollow is cool-looking and, most importantly, it can't kill you. So it gets canonized, or at least unofficially "adopted" - even if no-one ever actually tries in-game to explain how this moon can exist.
A moon which flies through another moon and inexplicably emerges intact out the other side? How many players got killed, called for rescue by FD or had to exploit their way out of an impossible situation, because they went to watch this phenomenon? Keeping it there would be "high maintenance"; each time it happened, they'd have to do a lot of rescuing and troubleshooting. The easiest, quickest solution to fixing the "people dying when planets collide" bug is to make sure planets never collide. So it gets deleted.
Finally, a reality check.
The moons-colliding-bug was "popular" because it was repeatable. Someone found two moons, realised they would collide, went back to tell everyone about it, then people calculated how long it would take for the second event. The next "collision" was witnessed by many more people, precisely because everyone knew it was there, and roughly when it would happen.
In the real world (or a more realistic simulation), the moons would collide once, big game of moon-billiards, debris flying everywhere, then nothing left but a ring/asteroid belt. If you weren't there when it actually happened, the only way you'd know about it is if you visited the system twice, before and after, and noticed that two moons had mysteriously vanished from the system map when you visited the second time.
Another real-world comparison: moons inside rings. A moon flying through a ring in real life wouldn't be as spectacular as it liooks in ED. That's because rings in ED are simplified models: they're treated as a "solid disc", with the asteroids stuck in the disc like chips in a chocolate chip cookie. The entire disc rotates at the same rate - so that the outermost edge of the disc is moving much faster than the innermost edge. This is the opposite of how a real ring would work, with the ring forming a million-lane freeway, the particles in each lane going around the planet at a slightly different rate to its neighbours, and the innermost parts of the ring moving fastest, and the outermost slowest.
In real life, a moon that was suddenly placed in orbit inside a ring would be moving at virtually zero speed compared to the ring. The nearby rocks would all gently fall down onto the moon's surface, piling up into a ridge of debris around the moon's equator (like we see on the moons Iapetus and Pan). As slowly (over many, many revolutions of its orbit) the rings moved around the moon, the moon would clear a path through the ring - until you'd eventually end up with a gap in the ring, right where the moon was.
In ED, a moon travelling through a ring is usually moving very fast compared to the ring, so you have the appearance of ring-rocks slamming into the moon at hundreds or thousands of km/s.
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There would be evidence of a collisions, some of which could be quite spectacular. Consolidation and re-differentiation of a largish moon that was re-liquefied in a collision event would be readily apparent and quite long lived, relative to human time scales.
Retrograde orbits aren't all that uncommon, as many moons are captured after a planet's formation, and if a moon in such an orbit were nudged into the path of a ring, the collisions could be quite violent.
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We are told that the Stellar Forge already does this. It simulates all kinds of interesting astronomical events, from passing stars and rogue planets to novas and supernovas destabilizing orbits and planetary collisions, all taking place in the deep history of the solar systems it generates. We "see the evidence" of this in the arrangement of atypical star systems, where for example the orbits are at all kinds of funky angles and such. But we don't ever get to see the events themselves, because they don't happen to the completed star systems; they only happen in the virtual history the Stellar Forge uses to create the systems. What we don't really see are remnants of the transient phenomena created by such events, such as debris clouds or protoplanetary discs. We certainly never see any of the causative agents (e.g. rogue planets passing through systems).
True. I suspect that, unless the moon was really small, its existence so close to the rings would disrupt and disperse the rings long before it actually passed through them. The Neptunian system is the only one in Sol system where a large retrograde moon in an inclined orbit coexists with a ring system, and the rings of Neptune are very small, thin and surprisingly "lumpy", so they may only be transient artifacts themselves, already suffering from the close proximity of Triton.
So I ask myself who I will trust more... Some random post on a forum, or the astronomical physicist who's building the forge... I don't think that any of the OP's complaints are particularly valid. While I agree it would be awesome to see planetary collisions, until the game can support them, I'd rather such things didn't exist. I've landed on a planet orbiting through planetary rings, and it looked silly and unrealistic.
Hey now!!!
This isn't the real world through, it a game.
As long as their some program in the background that can tell Galnet when a collision or some other event is going to happen, then us players can be there to see it happen. Not all of them but enough that their one every or every few months.
We know that a limitation of the engine is that it can't handle large particle effects and fluid effects, this is confirm by Braben, which is why we have teeny tiny water gysers instead of geysers that reach hundreds, if not thousands km into orbit like we have in the real world.
Calculations the physics of such collisions in real time would be a major challenge I would have thought, through there are ways around that, such as pre baking such simulations and just replaying them to us.
No they do not.
No they do not.
System scan complete.
Frontier fixes bugs that lets CMDRs earn too much money or jump too far in their Sidewinders. I can point you to a list of easy-to-fix bugs and console-crashing bugs that have been in the game for months if not over a year.
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Umm... what?
Planets/moons colliding - happens so rarely even if FD implemtented it, nobody will likely ever see it happening. In a stable system, one that has been around for a few million years, it should be even rarer.
Planets/moons orbiting through a star - again, not going to happen in a stable system (barring another force happening that would change the orbit). Again, implemeting something that nobody would ever likely witness is just a waste of time.
Intersecting planets/moons - ok, so you mean like the orbit of pluto? Ok, i can see that. I've seen some systems where the orbits are damn close, i'm not sure i've seen any with orbits crossing. Its not a critical thing like you seem to suggest, but might be nice to see.
Intersecting with rings - i'm not sure about this. I presume you are talking about something like the small moon of Jupiter that IIRC is within the orbit of the rings? I'm not sure about the physics here. Presume it can happen all over the galaxy. So i'd say this might be nice to have but not critical.
Even if FD went all in on something like this, for example, a new star system forming, from our perspective it would be practically a static event, and we see this with some systems where they are younger stars with proto-stars in them or failed gas giants, etc. One day, in the far future (if modelled) those systems might look quite different, but they will take millions of years, and i presume ED will be end of life long before then
Overall, while improvements to the SF are something i'm happy to see, your suggestions are not exactly on my personal priority list.
My point is that we DID have this, now we don't.
So they want supernovas, of which there have been 8 in the galaxy in the entire period of recorded human history.
Colliding planets citing our own 4 billion years ago, I'm waiting to see a reference to Kepler 107 b&c...
I wonder how common people think these events actually are.
Colliding planets citing our own 4 billion years ago, I'm waiting to see a reference to Kepler 107 b&c...
I wonder how common people think these events actually are.
We did???? :O
Well, paint me pink and call me Shirley!