Biomes for Jool

[Rath]

On February 1, 2016 at 11:49 PM, Snark said:

Pre. Very, very pre, as in 0.23.5.  

Wow, I just felt really old...

that's when I got the game.

 

 

i totally support this.

but let's give it highly detailed "biomes" , cause I need another craft  to balance out my laythe plane on my mothership, and a Jool verision would be perfect.

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Rath said:

but let's give it highly detailed "biomes" , cause I need another craft  to balance out my laythe plane on my mothership, and a Jool verision would be perfect.

I dunno, a very simple set of biomes just seems to me to "fit".  There's no surface.  The clouds all swirl around, there's not a lot in the way of permanent features.  IRL, the few gas giants we've been able to observe have certain persistent cloud patterns (in bands), but other than maybe a big spot or two, are otherwise fairly "blurry" over time.

In the little mod I wrote, I just added four biomes.  It would be easy to increase that somewhat (e.g. have "north pole" and "south pole" instead of just "poles"), but for myself I'm not inclined to.  If you'd like to play around with a higher biome complexity, it's pretty easy-- just download my mod, tinker with the biome map in any paint program, and add biome entries to the Jool.cfg file to correspond to whatever biome colors you added to the map.

[AbacusWizard]

For gas giants I think it would make more sense to have different biomes based on altitude. In real life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Probe) the big challenge (beyond the high-speed atmospheric entry itself) was keeping the drop probe operational under the intense pressure and heat deeper and deeper in the atmosphere; it would be really interesting to try sending something as deep as possible to encounter new "biomes" and get more and more science out of the big green fellow.

[Snark]

12 hours ago, AbacusWizard said:

For gas giants I think it would make more sense to have different biomes based on altitude. In real life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Probe) the big challenge (beyond the high-speed atmospheric entry itself) was keeping the drop probe operational under the intense pressure and heat deeper and deeper in the atmosphere; it would be really interesting to try sending something as deep as possible to encounter new "biomes" and get more and more science out of the big green fellow.

From the standpoint of both realism and gameplay, I totally agree.  For example, right now there's just "flying" and "upper atmosphere", which works fine for terrestrial planets, but gas giants have much deeper atmospheres.  Would be really cool to give players a reason to go really deep into the atmosphere-- i.e. a big engineering challenge, but a huge science payoff if you can manage it.

However, doing that would be a significant addition to the game mechanics, so that would be a bigger "ask" for Squad.  Simply adding different geographic areas that you can see on a map is a much more lightweight task (heck, I put together a mod to do it, and didn't have to write a single line of code, and it took me less than a day).

So I guess what I'd say is:

• Please give us different biomes based on geographic locations, like other planets.  It's a lightweight feature and should be straightforward to add.
• Please give more science options for different altitudes of gas giants.  It's a more expensive request, but ultimately results in more interesting gameplay.

I suspect that if they did implement this, it would be in terms of a new "situation" rather than a new biome.  e.g. in addition to "upper atmosphere" and "flying", they could add "deep atmosphere" as a science situation, which would be available only on gas giants.

[AlphaMensae]

I was thinking the same thing--altitude-based biomes for gas giants--then AbacusWizard beat me to it.

Yup, more science situations for gas giants would seem most likely to happen.  "Upper" could be the clear region above the clouds, "Middle" could be the cloud layer, "Lower" could be below the clouds, and "Deep" could be a bit above the "surface" or ship-killing point with the highest temp and pressure that could be survived and returned from.

 

[Snark]

3 hours ago, Laguna said:

Yup, more science situations for gas giants would seem most likely to happen.  "Upper" could be the clear region above the clouds, "Middle" could be the cloud layer, "Lower" could be below the clouds, and "Deep" could be a bit above the "surface" or ship-killing point with the highest temp and pressure that could be survived and returned from.

This piqued my interest ("oooh, can I write a mod to add new science situations?"), and I went and took a look at the API.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Squad has implemented science situations as an enum, which means they've got a hard-coded list of possible situations that can't be modified in any way.  So it's basically impossible to mod a new situation in.  Maybe you could make the game act like you'd added one, as far as the player is concerned... but it would be like pulling teeth, the code would be complex and clunky and not interoperable with other mods.

So what this means is, we don't get any new science situations unless Squad decides to add them.    Which I kinda doubt will be coming any time soon, because I would imagine it would be very low on their priority list-- it's kind of an edge case, there are a lot more important fish for them to fry.  I'm just bummed that it's not readily moddable.

Oh, well.

(What would be possible would be if someone added a mod with a new science instrument.  It could be coded so that it would only function in very deep atmosphere, for example.  The "Atmospheric Crush-O-Meter" or whatever.  That would have the effect of giving the player a reason to go really deep in atmosphere.  However, that puts it beyond my own modest modding skills, at least until I learn to use the Unity modeler and create a new part.  I'm a dab hand with programming, but not with modeling.)

Edited February 6, 2016 by Snark

[vger]

While we're talking about biomes for gas worlds, I should mention that this would also give comets a way to be more interesting than "just a prettier asteroid."

[AbacusWizard]

Exploring the depths of a gas giant's atmosphere and the interior of a comet's tail? This is sounding more and more like an Arthur C. Clarke Short Story Simulator (which suits me fine!).

[magnemoe]

On 1.2.2016 at 3:32 AM, Snark said:

Nothing provided by the program.  If you take a ship way down there (you have to be patient, it takes forever), it eventually goes kablooie when it gets down to zero meters altitude.  And does so in a very "we didn't really spend any time coding this" way, very krakeny-looking, no visible surface, just a lot of stars-in-the-cellar graphic glitches.  It's a rough edge.  I assume they simply didn't bother spending much time on it because it's an edge case that few people try.

Just dropping an probe down into Jool is weird. 
Then you get down too 2000 meter you start seeing starts, trough the surface layer and this goes away, yes you can see Jools moons so it turn transparent. 
Had been better to just overheat craft like near sun but here it would be an superheated atmosphere so heat shields would not work. 

[Snark]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Just dropping an probe down into Jool is weird. 
Then you get down too 2000 meter you start seeing stars, trough the surface layer and this goes away, yes you can see Jools moons so it turn transparent. 
Had been better to just overheat craft like near sun but here it would be an superheated atmosphere so heat shields would not work. 

This is a great idea!

The existing glitches are happening when you get close to the "surface" because there's nothing there.  The only way to "fix" it would be to put something there, which would be a whole lot of work to create something that very few people ever see (which is presumably why nobody's fixed it yet).

So just boosting the temperature curve near the surface (a "here be dragons" approach) makes a lot of sense.  It would be trivially simple to code.  And it would give a much more satisfying "death experience" as a probe goes lower and lower:  things start to get hot... and hotter... and BOOM there go the science instruments... and hotter... and BOOM there goes the rest of the ship...  Nice and gradual, no glitches, and gives people yet another "how low can you go" challenge. 

I like it.

Best of all, it's so easy and straightforward that it's simple to mod.  Don't even need to write a single line of code, just a few lines of ModuleManager config would do it with Kopernicus.  I should add this to the JoolBiomes mod, next chance I get.

[magnemoe]

31 minutes ago, Snark said:

This is a great idea!

The existing glitches are happening when you get close to the "surface" because there's nothing there.  The only way to "fix" it would be to put something there, which would be a whole lot of work to create something that very few people ever see (which is presumably why nobody's fixed it yet).

So just boosting the temperature curve near the surface (a "here be dragons" approach) makes a lot of sense.  It would be trivially simple to code.  And it would give a much more satisfying "death experience" as a probe goes lower and lower:  things start to get hot... and hotter... and BOOM there go the science instruments... and hotter... and BOOM there goes the rest of the ship...  Nice and gradual, no glitches, and gives people yet another "how low can you go" challenge. 

I like it.

Best of all, it's so easy and straightforward that it's simple to mod.  Don't even need to write a single line of code, just a few lines of ModuleManager config would do it with Kopernicus.  I should add this to the JoolBiomes mod, next chance I get.

Well how deep you can get depend on how fast you fall and how much mass the atmosphere has to heat up. One exploit would be to put an small probe in an 1.2 meter service bay inside an 2.5 meter one inside an MK3 cargo hold. Add fuel and stuff for extra mass. now decople the parts from each other once you start to heat up. 
 

[Snark]

1 minute ago, magnemoe said:

Well how deep you can get depend on how fast you fall and how much mass the atmosphere has to heat up. One exploit would be to put an small probe in an 1.2 meter service bay inside an 2.5 meter one inside an MK3 cargo hold. Add fuel and stuff for extra mass. now decople the parts from each other once you start to heat up. 
 

Yes, but that's easy.  Just set the temperature curve so that it goes up to something really insane before it gets low enough to start glitching. You'll pretty much take care of anything, no matter how matryoshka-doll you go with your ship design.  Could somebody, ever, exploit it?  Sure, maybe.  But you can make it very hard, and in any case if someone is really determined, there's not really a lot of point in stopping 'em.

In any case... if you'd like to get a feel for how easy or hard it would be to build an exploity ship design to get around the temperature ramp:  try sending a probe to get within, say, a couple of kilometers of the sun's surface without vaporizing.  Maybe not impossible (I haven't tried it post-1.0), but a lot easier said than done.

[nikokespprfan]

On 6-2-2016 at 11:32 PM, Snark said:

This piqued my interest ("oooh, can I write a mod to add new science situations?"), and I went and took a look at the API.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Squad has implemented science situations as an enum, which means they've got a hard-coded list of possible situations that can't be modified in any way.  So it's basically impossible to mod a new situation in.  Maybe you could make the game act like you'd added one, as far as the player is concerned... but it would be like pulling teeth, the code would be complex and clunky and not interoperable with other mods.

So what this means is, we don't get any new science situations unless Squad decides to add them.    Which I kinda doubt will be coming any time soon, because I would imagine it would be very low on their priority list-- it's kind of an edge case, there are a lot more important fish for them to fry.  I'm just bummed that it's not readily moddable.

ahh, that's too bad.

Altough I would like to argue about one point. Yes, Jool's atmosphere is an edge case, but also an unique edge case, in that it is the only gas giant atmosphere in the Kerbol system, and therefore, the only one in this educational game. With a little attention to Jool, SQUAD could change Jool's amosphere's status from "dangerous and not very interesting to explore" to "hey, a gas giant is different, but it makes it a very interesting place worth visiting". 

And in the end, after hours of coding on this edge case, adding a simple contract to explore Jool's atmosphere would lift it out of an edge case status (or at least a little bit).

[moogoob]

On 2/8/2016 at 11:14 AM, magnemoe said:

Well how deep you can get depend on how fast you fall and how much mass the atmosphere has to heat up. One exploit would be to put an small probe in an 1.2 meter service bay inside an 2.5 meter one inside an MK3 cargo hold. Add fuel and stuff for extra mass. now decople the parts from each other once you start to heat up. 
 

I saw this once, in an anime called Gurren Lagann. Only with giant mecha. In space. As in a character, in a giant robot, which is in another giant robot, which is in ANOTHER MOON-SIZED giant robot. It worked for them.

[BloodDusk]

On 2/1/2016 at 0:32 AM, Snark said:

Nothing provided by the program.  If you take a ship way down there (you have to be patient, it takes forever), it eventually goes kablooie when it gets down to zero meters altitude.  And does so in a very "we didn't really spend any time coding this" way, very krakeny-looking, no visible surface, just a lot of stars-in-the-cellar graphic glitches.  It's a rough edge.  I assume they simply didn't bother spending much time on it because it's an edge case that few people try.

Well...Considering Jool is a gas giant, the only possible place you would be landing it's on its core.

[AbacusWizard]

17 hours ago, BloodDusk said:

Well...Considering Jool is a gas giant, the only possible place you would be landing it's on its core.

Not necessarily; if you go down deep enough into the atmosphere you encounter an enormous black slab of what first appears to be some sort of stone, but if your lander gets close enough to OH MY GOD IT'S FULL OF STARS

[nikokespprfan]

18 hours ago, BloodDusk said:

Well...Considering Jool is a gas giant, the only possible place you would be landing it's on its core.

Welllll,

 

Not really. The core is solid, yes. But you want to land on a surface. And that doesn't exist in a gas giant. The reason the core is solid is because the high forces from the atmosphere below.

(heat=wiggglyness of molecules. More wigglyness, easier for molecules to break of from a crystal structure (solid) to loosly bound groups of molecules (liquid) that can slide past each other (flowing), which is called melting. Even more molecule wigglyness can lead to molecules entirely breaking off altogether (boiling) from the rest. Higher temperature -> more molecule wigglyness and more pressure ->  less molecule wigglyness. If you want to scienticfically correct) 

The thing is, as you go deeper, these pressures will gradually increase. The transitions between gas, liquid and solid will be gradual too. So although there is a solid core, there is no surface to land on.

Edited February 12, 2016 by nikokespprfan