Solar-Sim Devlog

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:

• Fixed the /group command so if you’re grouped and you type /group with nothing after it, it doesn’t send a blank line to the group chat window anymore.

• Added /groupinfo command, which brings up the Group Information screen. A future update will bind this command to a hotkey (such as F2).
• Renamed “Combat” chat window to “TBD” (to be determined). I want to make this chat window go away, but Multiverse hard-coded the number of chat windows in several places, so this task will take more time than its worth right now. I’ll come back to it later.
• Started to investigate voice chat. I updated the server’s firewall so the voice chat server actually works, but I’ve disabled the default voice chat channel for now. The intended direction for this is group members will get their own voice chat channel (which is why I messed around with the group code).
• Added /help command. I’m not happy with the current format, and this may eventually change to pop up a window.
• Character names are now checked for uniqueness and profanity. This change consumed the bulk of the last few days, as Multiverse doesn’t ship with any code to accomplish this. 10+ years of running a M.U.D. has taught me this is a necessary feature!
• New player ships don’t spawn on top of each other anymore. New players are randomly distributed in an area very close to the Sun. A future change will likely expand this area so ships aren’t packed so closely together.
• 4 spacecraft are now tracked by Solar-Sim. These are:
  1. Deep Impact

  2. Stardust
  3. STEREO-A
  4. STEREO-B

  All 4 of these spacecraft currently share the same 3D model. Each spacecraft is shown larger than Solar-Sim’s 1mm:25km scale… otherwise they would be too tiny to see.

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 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.

Two new ships were added to the character creation screen today, and each has 5 color choices available.

As of today, a help screen pops up when you login (pictured below).  Right now it’ll pop up each time you login, so over the coming weeks I’ll work on a way to make it only pop up according to your saved preferences.

(If you’re using Firefox and the above image appears distorted, right-click on it and pick “view image”)

It is with great sadness indeed that the retirement of “Joe the bald human avatar” is announced.  Alas, he will be missed….

The character creation process now allows you to choose a ship with 5 different color options.

There’s just 1 ship model to choose from right now, but many more have been purchased and are in the model conversion pipeline. The next few models should be introduced into Solar-Sim later this weekend.

Also, the buttons to select your character’s “attributes” (strength, dexterity, etc.) have been removed as those attributes don’t apply to Solar-Sim.  The instructions on the Solar-Sim Demo page will be updated later this weekend to reflect this change.

Finally, player avatars no longer appear to “flicker”.

This has been an extremely productive day overall.  Now my yard is screaming to be mowed!

A number of improvements were made over the weekend.  Chief among them… well, see below!

This weekend I’m replacing all of the planets’ models.  The bland “white sphere” will be replaced with a model textured with images from NASA.

On an unrelated note, I also corrected an issue this week with planetary movement.  Planets would move in their orbits when the server first started up, but after a while they’d stop moving.

Much has happened since my last post!  Here’s a recap:

• Patcher / online asset repository is online.
• Succesfully tested connecting to Solar-Sim (and grabbing updates from the patcher) from a client PC.
• Replaced 8,000+ star models with a skybox texture, which improved framerates tremendously.  This took a lot of work as I built the skybox texture myself.  Do some Google searches for a realistic starfield skybox texture and you’ll definitely come up short!  (At least I did).  I got around this by writing a Perl script which reads a star catalog and generates textures for all 6 faces of the skybox.  Stars are sized according to their apparent magnitude as observed from Earth.  Especially bright stars are colored according to their spectral type.
• Added the /warp named solar body command (for example: “/warp earth”).  This allows you to instantly travel to any planet, moon, asteroid or comet currently in Solar-Sim.
• Compared screenshots in Solar-Sim against other sites on the Internet that generate 2-D images of solar bodies against a starfield backdrop.  I wanted to check, for example, that if NASA says Mercury is currently supposed to be near the Orion constellation if you’re looking at Mercury from the Sun, that Solar-Sim isn’t showing it someplace else.  One embarassing problem that I corrected with this check was the Big Dipper (and everything else for that matter) needed to be horizontally flipped because I had made a fundamental mistake when converting the star catalog’s coordinate system to Multiverse’s.
• Added Solar-Sim’s first minor planet (“Ceres”), first near-Earth asteroid (“Apophis”), and 14 moons.  (Much more will be coming soon now that I have the basics out of the way!)
• Increased Solar-Sim’s accuracy from 1 hour to 10 minutes.
• The name of each solar body floats above it as you move within range.  More distant bodies can be clicked on to display the name.

Now that all of these changes are in, I’m feeling much more comfortable about opening up Solar-Sim for “demo” purposes.  I’m not ready to call it Alpha testing yet, as there’s still some important changes and features yet to be added.

Chief among the changes needed before moving to “Alpha”:  I need to replace the player avatars from humans wearing leather armor to something a little more survivable in space (I’m thinking spaceships here, folks!).  The mini-map that appears in the top-right corner needs to be replaced as well.