The Direction of The Sun

Invisible Planets

I'm designing a plug-in that takes place in Sol and deals with a futuristic technologically advanced, yet revolutionary society in 2200.

Anyway, since it'll have rotating systems, I became concerned with the direction of the sun shining on planets. Since I can't have different graphics for the planet in each orbital point, I was wondering if this solution would work.

If I were to create a "faux planet" who's graphic was merely 4 black dots in a square making it slightly larger than the actual planet graphic.. This would be the planet that you would actually land on and would be located in one of the 4 Nav Button slots. The actual planet picture (adjusted for the planet's location in its orbit) would be smaller than the faux planet by perhaps 5 pixels and would be in the upper nav slots (16-down).

Questions: Would clicking on the planet select the Picture Planet, or would it select the Faux Planet (as is desired) making the Picture Planet unselectable?

You need to talk to the Sephill Saga guys

Please do a search on thier rotating planet issues.

You know, I used to follow SS quite a bit. It's in part where I drew my inspiration for what I'm working on (that and the fact that I'd need about 1,000 more missions than is allowed for my old idea).

I'm not quite sure what to search for when looking for this, so a generic search for "Sephil Saga" returns 14 pages of results; none of them have titles that mention this effect that I'm looking for and it seems that a search for "Sephil Saga" simply returns every post in which Masamune made a reference to it.

Any better search ideas? Or an answer?

The board's search feature is utter crap. Use Google, and do a search for Sephil Saga and Rotating Planets.

Here's a link for you, from the "Cool Nova Hacks" topic that's pinned up above. I should have remembered this was there earlier. Anyway, here's the thread discussing rotating systems:

http://www.ambrosias...showtopic=89448

This post has been edited by GutlessWonder : 13 July 2005 - 08:50 PM

If you can figure this out, I'd be really happy.

This is a test of my proposal for an "untouchable" system. The plug-in should have all of the files necessary to run the file in lieu of the stock "Nova Files". If if works, then every 14-15 game days, Mercury should advance 1 orbital point, and every 18-19 game days, Venus should advance 1 orbital point. Furthermore, you should only be able to jump clockwise in orbit unless heading towards the centre of the galaxy. For example, jumping from Venus' L0 point to Venus' L330 point should be impossible, but not vice-versa. Jumping from Venus' orbit to Mercury's orbit should involve going back (L0 to L300, for example), while doing the opposite should involve going forward. Planets should appear to adapt to their position in orbit (at L0, they will bit lit from in front, at L90, they will be lit from the left). There will be two planets in each system; you should only be able to select one, which should be labelled "MercuryTrue" or "VenusTrue". If "FauxMercury" or "FauxVenus" is selected, then it's a dud. Checking that the planet remains at the correct point after leaving and entering the game again is crucial too.

Of course, all of this is conjecture. I whipped this up as a proof-of-concept in 3 hours, do not have the capacity to test it myself or debug it. Hopefully I got it right.

{edit}give me a minute to find a place to upload this file; apparently the ASWB one isn't going to take my file.

This post has been edited by theneofrenchmen : 14 July 2005 - 01:19 PM