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There is a way, Masamune...but it could get tedious and annoying, and I doubt SS has enough cröns left to implement it.
You could make it based on date rather than every X days. The easiest way to implement it would be for it to fit exactly into one month. If you were more ambitious, you could go for a full year. I doubt it would be worth it to go more than that.
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Interesting problem Masamune. Actually it had never occurred to me to have the same planet in two systems when doing the planetarium thing. Part of the attraction (in fact, the main reason for implementation in my plugin) is so that you can visit the planet at different times of its year.
I suppose, as usual, I'm beginning from a storyteller's angle - sort of similar to the Ursula LeGuin story Planet of Exile.
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Originally posted by orcaloverbri9: **There is a way, Masamune...but it could get tedious and annoying, and I doubt SS has enough cröns left to implement it.
**
I'm slightly confused, Orca. How would that fix it? The only thing I can think of is that it would allow you to add an extra "correction cron" that would move you to the correct system on startup, but that can be done with the every X days system. Could you elaborate slightly?
Martin: just so I'm clear, are you using an actual different planet in each location? So you have systems A and B, and system A has Earth(A) and B has Earth(? If so, CLICK! It starts to make sence. That will indeed start you in the right place, but it would be a major, major pain to do missions- you'd have to know exactly where the planet is. For a single planet, like you mentioned, that would be fine, or at east doable. For an entire solar system, not going to happen. This method was on of the three or so methods I mentioned earlier- it's major flaw not being functionality but useability in large scale.
Or am I missing it still? What are you up to, you crafty English devil?
Back to Orca: is this what you are talking about?
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Gee, I'm going to give far too much away here about a plugin that I may never choose to release.
If I do, please just forget you've read this.
Basically, you have a world which is on an extremely eliptical orbit around its sun. So when you go in the summer, it's baking hot, like a desert. When you arrive in the winter, it's like a huge iceberg. Obviously this is going to confuse the player like crazy, as it will seem to be a totally different planet in a different part of the solar system.
Now imagine that there are missions you can only do there in the winter, and missions you can only do in the summer. If you try delivering the wrong stuff at the wrong time of year, nobody wants it. There could be (although I haven't done it) also a spring and autumn phase where the planet is fairly temperate, which is when all the good stuff happens.
Would you want to do it for a complete solar system? Well, if you were only doing the solar system you would need to work hard in any case to have enough locations to make things interesting. You would put in your missions 'must deliver to Titan before the equinox', or stuff like that, and let the player work out for themselves that it isn't just about how many days the mission takes, but about the season you arrive in. In this way you could have effectively a solar system that had as many locations in as a whole galaxy.
I've also thought about doing a time-travel plugin using the same principles.
Originally posted by Martin Turner: **Basically, you have a world which is on an extremely eliptical orbit around its sun. So when you go in the summer, it's baking hot, like a desert. When you arrive in the winter, it's like a huge iceberg. Obviously this is going to confuse the player like crazy, as it will seem to be a totally different planet in a different part of the solar system.
Would you want to do it for a complete solar system? Well, if you were only doing the solar system you would need to work hard in any case to have enough locations to make things interesting. You would put in your missions 'must deliver to Titan before the equinox', or stuff like that, and let the player work out for themselves that it isn't just about how many days the mission takes, but about the season you arrive in. In this way you could have effectively a solar system that had as many locations in as a whole galaxy. **
I thought of that idea, sort of. My idea was that you have to deliver the cargo at a certain spot in the orbit on a certain orbit. If you don't, the mission fails.
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Masamune, this is what I meant (an example):
On day 6 of any given month, Planet X moves to Y rotation point. On day 9, Planet X moves to point Z. Now, if the person starts off their pilot on day 6, 7, or 8, it will be fine. However, if they do so on day 9, 10, or 11, they will end up in rotation point Y. So, you set up a cron that activates on days 9, 10, or 11, which moves the player to rotation point Z. Understand?
However, martin Turner's approach would work perfectly, and you wouldn't have to know the exact location. The engine will allow you to land on any point in the planet's rotation. If you say that the TravelStel is X and Y is a duplicate copy with the same x/y coordinates and the same name, then the Nova engine is smart enough to determine that Y is probably a duplicate copy while the other is hidden, and allows you to land on Y in place of X.
I don't think you would want to go with mine, Martin's is far, far easier.
Ah, thanks for the elucidation, guys. Bascially, we were talking about achieving different things, if I understand correctly. With Martin's approach, the physical location of the SYST the planet is in doesn't actually change- but the planet contained inside that syst does, right? In that case, great- there would be no engine problems. Very cool, and makes more sense if you are dealing with a "traditional" galaxy-scale map.
It's all so clear now...
You could still move the systems.
Actually - though I'm not sure anyone ever noticed it - I did this for Frozen Heart. Towards the end as the black hole gets bigger, the systems around it move as space gets distorted (ok, as the visbits change). It's a subtle effect.
The point about using different spobs would be that Nova wouldn't get cross in the way pointed out.
As a general rule, I'm always trying to find ways of suddenly confusing the player on what seems to be a very bread-and-butter sort of mission. My guess is that the player would have several goes at it before he spotted that the planet (or the system) was in a slightly different place, and it would take them even longer before they realised that you could only complete certain missions in the correct season.
If you want another solution to the Solar System problem, then you could simply project the map as being edge on to the plane of the ecliptic. The planets would then only move from side to side, and more than one planet could be in the same s˙st at the same time. The s˙sts would then actually be not cartesian volumes of space, but angular deviations, and would have names like ř0ş, 10ş, 20ş, 30ş, 40ş, 50ş, up to ř180ş, or you could run it in fractions of ? radians. You would have to check the map every time you wanted to know which planets were in which sector of ellipse, which would make for an entertaining and frustrating game. Some times you would find Mars and Neptune in the same sector, but at opposite 'ends', and sometimes that same sector would have nothing in it but asteroids. Sol would be at the extreme end of every one of the sectors.
Of course, the cron maths to make this work would be very entertaining to calculate, and you would probably end up with needing almost all of the available slots for alternative systs, but it would certainly introduce a new kind of realism into the game.