Creating a new sector from old design
March has been spent in part refining combat mechanics, in part creating new zone to test combat. Long ago Kyoku has designed the sector Velox which has been a masterpiece among our creations. It was most complex and most varied in space “terrain”, showcasing very best of what the engine was capable these days.
Time passed and now we have found ourselves needing a sector with many zones for spawning non-player characters to fight. We choose to recreate Velox using up to date mechanics and graphics. Below is an overall map, followed by breakdown of certain interesting places.
The sun as central part of system
Near the centre of the sector is the main star. Its presence makes a sector into a star system. Locations near the star benefit from high solar energy being available, a notable advantage. It is worthwhile to place space stations near the almost free power source. Unless other economic reasons dictate otherwise stars naturally gravitate to be production hubs.
Varied asteroid fields
Asteroid fields, rings or belts either cover a location or not, even if graphically some asteroids float a little out of the zone. One can say the layout of the floating rocks is unimportant. However, the density and relative size of asteroids does matter. Below are two potential mining zones, one fairly rich with large rocks and the other noticeably poorer with smaller ones.
Nebulae
While asteroids are generated from predefined sprite sheet by taking one asteroid, resizing, recolouring and repeating until desired density is reached, the nebulae are almost wholly the work of text to image large language models. Turns out single model is difficult to work with all our needs.
The first type, the supernova remnant nebula, expands from a central point and assumes a somewhat spherical shape.
The second type, the diffuse nebula, has no visible point of origin but spreads around an area.
Different models are naturally prone to generating one or the other types. We can use the trained model biases to our advantage.
Dark nebulae
While regular nebulae reflect light, dark nebulae are dense enough to block it. That means no solar energy reaches the location even if main star is close but also makes it easier to cloak spacecaft and perhaps even space stations. This makes it desirable to have it as a unique mechanic zone but we struggle how to properly represent it graphically because naturally dark nebulae are just swathes of blackness.
Here a dark nebula in front of regular one is visible but seems somewhat unconvincing. When placed right in space the only cue of its presence is that the area lacks background stars. It is hard to notice it is even there.
This is definitely a problem, one we do not have a good solution to. Main inspirations were the Horsehead Nebula and Bok globules but clearly we still need to work on the end effect.
Combat nearer but not yet there
Some day we would like to show you how wormholes can be present within asteroid fields, the wormholes itself partly blending into æther and take a closer look at planets, especially the gas giant with ring which itself may be good place to harvest some chemicals.
Although we are happy with the result the detour has cost us some time spent there instead of main goal. Next phase of combat system is not yet ready for testing but comes ever closer.
