Overview

Exploration is one of the key activities in Transcendence. Encountering wondrous and exotic settings and locations is part of the appeal of the game. This spec describes various ideas for increasing the diversity and uniqueness of star systems in Human Space.

Star System Types

Ideas for new star system types.

Planet Configurations

Ideas for new kinds of planet configurations (beyond just a planet with moons).

Gas Giant Images

We currently only have three gas giant images: a hydrogen gas giant, a ringed planet, and methane giant. At minimum we should have 20 unique images (roughly one per system), though 100 unique images would be better.

Textures

  • Smooth, deep orange/red.
  • Smooth, orange (like Titan).
  • Smooth, yellow.
  • Smooth, pale yellow (like Saturn).
  • Smooth, pale yellow/green.
  • Smooth, pale blue/green (like Uranus).
  • Smooth, pale blue.
  • Smooth, deep blue (like Neptune).

Asteroid Configurations

Ideas for new kinds of asteroid fields.

johnbwatson 23 Apr 2015:

Asteroid belts around planets would be nice, if possible.

As for star systems, perhaps ones where the star has already burned out? I imagine they'd be fairly eerie.

If petravores can enhabit smaller asteroids, a petravore infested asteroid belt would be an intense lategame threat.

the_shrike 10 May 2015:

A cataclysmic variable star would be pretty cool, if there's a way to use the particle system to visibly stream matter onto the central star from the closest orbital. Might not be the nicest place to be though.

xephyr 20 Oct 2016:

Here's some of my ideas (that are more cohesive than my Renegade attempts):

Star System Types

Carbon system

  • Deep black and desaturated red planets and asteroids
  • mix of glossy (like anthracite and graphite) and diffuse blacks
  • Methane giants

Brown Dwarf system

  • Small, dark systems with few planets (and maybe gas dwarfs?)

Tight Binaries

  • Systems with two tightly orbiting stars (eg. Procyon in TSB or Alcor in Renegade). (Note that overlapping star zones can cause jarring transitions between the two. I fixed this by putting a star on scale=world with a size zero shadow mask)
  • This would also allow for trinary/quaternary systems without getting too complex - tight binaries with another companion at the regular binary distance would work.

Planet configurations

Tidally locked objects of similar masses sharing an orbit

  • like Pluto/Charon. We would draw their orbit around their mutual gravitational center as well as their shared orbit around the star.

Gas Giant Images

Nebular Giants

I feel we should have some unique images for gas giants (and other planets) in nebulae.

Helium Giant

  • Complex texture, White/grey; very wide bands.

In general more complex gas giant textures would be nice but I know first hand how much of a pain in the ass they are

Hot Jupiter / Hot Neptune

  • Complex texture, fiery red and orange; only appears very close to stars.
  • Could also put Chthonic planets in a similar position

Ring overlays

  • We can take pre-made ring images (complete with shadow) and overlay them on gas giants - this would save lots of trouble with image size and shadow masks, as well as make the planets more diverse.

Asteroid Configurations

Comets

  • 3-5 individual comets per system, with an animated tail (as a procedural effect pointing away from the sun) and with very eccentric orbits.
george moromisato 11 Nov 2016:

@xephyr: These are awesome! The ring overlay idea is particularly good. Thanks!