Solar-Sim has been taken offline for routine server maintenance. When the server comes back up, I will be making some changes that require Solar-Sim to be taken offline again from time to time.
The biggest change I’m making this weekend is to Solar-Sim’s frame of reference. Solar-Sim currently uses an “Earth Mean Equator” frame of reference. I originally chose this because that was the only frame of reference available for the star catalog I used to build Solar-Sim’s starfield background. While this made the planets line up nicely with the constellations, flying around was a bit odd because the Solar System was essentially tilted 23 degrees.
The frame of reference is changing to use the plane of the ecliptic. This means I’ll have to reconstruct the starfield background, but your ship won’t have to be tilted as much anymore when you travel from planet to planet.
Another change happening this weekend is the appearance of some moons and planets will change. I’m conducting a review of all texture maps used by Solar-Sim, and any that are found to be copyrighted will be removed.
Solar-Sim has just been taken offline for routine server maintenance. It should be back up in about 30 minutes.
Solar-Sim and the webserver will both be offline briefly this morning for routine server security patching.
As requested by John in a comment post, a new command has been added today: /list
Typing /list all by itself will display a list of different categories of objects that you can /warp to, such as planets, asteroids, and moons (satellites).
Typing /list category will display a list of all Solar-Sim objects within that category. To see an example of how this works, type this:
/list saturn satellite
You can instantly travel to any of the listed objects with the /warp command!
The /warp command was improved today so multiple ships warping to the same object have a much smaller chance of ending up directly on top of each other. Your ship’s position will be determined by calculating a random point along an orbit 100,000km from the center of the object you want to warp to.
This orbital distance is larger for certain objects:
- Neptune and Uranus: 125,000km
- Jupiter and Saturn: 150,000km
- Sol (the Sun): 2.5 million kilometers
Your ship will automatically re-orient itself to face the object you just warped to. The only caveat with this is /warp won’t adjust your ship’s pitch. This means if you held down your right mouse button and moved your ship’s nose to face the North Star, and then you typed “/warp saturn”, your ship’s nose will still be pointed upwards at the North Star, as in the screenshot below.
Finally, the /zoom command gives you a little more help if you type “/zoom” all by itself. It’ll tell you that 2 options are available.
- A simpler version, where you can type “/zoom in” or “/zoom out”. The “/zoom in” option will narrow your field of view and also slow down your ship. This allows you to see smaller objects better.
- For experts, you can specify your own field of view by typing “/zoom #”, where # is a number between 5 and 45. Typing 45 is the same as typing “/zoom out”, and 20 is the same as “/zoom in”. Unlike the simpler mode, this option doesn’t automatically alter your flight speed… and you can narrow your field of view further than with the simpler “/zoom in” option.
The screenshot below shows what a field of view of 5 degrees looks like when orbiting Jupiter. In this view, you can see the Sun rather easily (if your ship is pointed at it). The Sun is very difficult to find from Jupiter when in the default 45 degree field of view; it is easy to miss among the starfield background.
Solar-Sim’s count of tracked Solar objects reached 100 today, thanks to the addition of moons for Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. More moons for Jupiter through Neptune will be added over the coming weeks.
For moons with currently unknown diameters, I’ve defaulted them to 5 kilometers. All moons added today use the “plain ol’ white sphere” as their 3D model, so they’re not exciting to look at… but they do appear in their best-known positions using the latest available data (thanks to the Cassini mission).
Of all of the outer planets, Saturn is the one with the most moons (40) currently in Solar-Sim. As stated above, more moons will be added and both Jupiter & Saturn will eventually exceed 50 satellites each.
Saturn isn’t properly tilted on its rotational axis right now, so its moons might not appear in their appropriate position with respect to Saturn’s ring system. Fixing this is on my “to-do list” as well!
Most of the updates made over the past few days to Solar-Sim were “behind the scenes” types of changes. Here’s a highlight of them:
Much more work is needed in the area of groups and voice chat. I was hoping Multiverse’s code in this area would be OK as-is, but I’d say these 2 features aren’t production-ready yet. Chat channels could also use some TLC… the “Local” and “System” tabs you see in the chat window aren’t used for anything (again, this is how Multiverse currently ships).
Solar-Sim and the webserver will both be offline briefly this morning for routine server security patching.
Solar-Sim was updated today with the following changes:
- 4 new ship models are available in the character creation screen.
- Saturn has rings now!
- The starfield background now includes all stars up to magnitude 8.0. Brighter “yellow” stars were changed to a non-yellow color so they wouldn’t be confused with Sol.
- Removed “that object has no action” annoyance message when right-clicking on a Solar object. (A future patch will change right-clicking to display information about the object clicked.)
- Removed the “Stats | Inv | Group” window.
If you’re having difficulty spotting the Sun from Jupiter and beyond, you can type this new command to remove the starfield background:
/starfield off
The background stars can be turned back on again by typing:
/starfield on
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