[INDEV]-[1.4.3] - To Boldly Go | An external application designed to procedurally generate an entire galaxy for KSP.

[daniel l.]

Anyone who wants to try my procedural planet generator can extract this into your "To_Boldly_Go" folder. Just run the EXE and it will spawn a basic planet with procedural terrain into orbit around Kerbin.

Once spawned, you may have to adjust it's orbit via Kittopia or Hyperedit, as it sometimes spawns outside Kerbin SOI.

Here is the link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4w0bpcm7ijuvusi/PlanGen.zip?dl=0

[Altaica]

Already landed on it. Would like to add some screenshots but i cant attach them and have nowhere to upload. strangest thing is that the planet looks bright white from far above and from Tracking Station but cheesy yellow from the surface. seems that moon was made of cheese

[daniel l.]

2 hours ago, Altaica said:

Already landed on it. Would like to add some screenshots but i cant attach them and have nowhere to upload. strangest thing is that the planet looks bright white from far above and from Tracking Station but cheesy yellow from the surface. seems that moon was made of cheese

It's pretty cool isn't it? Entirely procedural!

A good uploading place would be http://imgur.com though if you don't want to make accounts, try http://tinypic.com it's like pastebin for pictures.

[The_Right_Arm]

I personally prefer hostthenpost for my picture posting.  Sorry I've been gone so long guys.  Been an excruciatingly busy week at school so I don't have a lot of time and patience to do a lot of testing.  Hopefully I'll be able to visit the cheese planet soon though.

Now I just need to make a mouse shaped space shuttle...

Edited March 31, 2017 by The_Right_Arm

[Altaica]

Scansat height map shows correctly. terrain height differs from about -500m up to 2500m what i think might be a little flat for an asteroid bombarded atmosphereless moon.

Biome map at the other hand does not correspond to height map and seems to be borrowed by the Mun

ore deposit is also gernerated by the script?

my suggestion is to alter the planet building script in a manner that biome map (however that is done) is generated first and height map afterwards and according to biomes.

 

10 hours ago, The_Right_Arm said:

I personally prefer hostthenpost for my picture posting.  Sorry I've been gone so long guys.  Been an excruciatingly busy week at school so I don't have a lot of time and patience to do a lot of testing.  Hopefully I'll be able to visit the cheese planet soon though.

Now I just need to make a mouse shaped space shuttle...

thanks for the hint at hostthenpost. i think image sharing never was easier.

 

here the additional pics of the landing

Spoiler

 

Edited March 31, 2017 by Altaica
additional pics

[iliketrains0pwned]

This looks awesome!! Just wondering, are you planning on adding black holes, neutron stars, or sigma binary support later on in development?

[daniel l.]

14 hours ago, iliketrains0pwned said:

This looks awesome!! Just wondering, are you planning on adding black holes, neutron stars, or sigma binary support later on in development?

Yes

[seanth]

Dearest Koogie,

With 0.3 out, I thought you might be interested in a sort of time line where things are going. @daniel l., @bunjatec, and I exchanged messages a bit about what a timeline of what is coming might look like:

• 0.3.0.5: Planet and "astroid" generation streamlining. We're well into this, now. @bunjatec moved all the existing planet generation code out of the main file and put them into subroutines in imported files. Moving things into external files will (hopefully) make the code easier to grok, maintain, and will definitely cut down on redundant, repeated, redundant code. What needs to be done now is use a template system like what we did with stars instead of relying on lots of print statements. This is my job, so I'm the bottleneck at this point, but this should probably be done this week.
• 0.3.1: Planetary discs. Each star has a plane, and the planets orbiting it will be in that plane (with some variation). There can be a few planets with oddball orbits (rogue planets that were captured), but they will be rare. This will cut down on the crazytime looking systems. Placing the planets in their semimajor axes will still be using the existing methods, but we have plans for improvement further along.
• 0.3.2: Unique Planets from other planet packs. This will be the first release with unique planets being placed. Some of the code is already in place, but needs work. The idea is that the user can just add a single line to an existing csv file, and the planet they list will appear in the generated galaxy only once. If they want it to appear more frequently like the stock planets, they can add it to the csv file in the Data_Folder. Hopefully we'll have a video tutorial up for people explaining how to use other planet packs with TBG at this point.
• 0.3.3: Better placement of planets. This is a big step. We used real-world scaling relationships for main sequence stars and implemented them into TBG so that you start with just a mass and get all the star's attributes (radius, colour, temp, etc) from there. We'll be doing something similar with planets, but in this case we'll be placing planets in orbits that reflect their characteristics (habitable worlds in the habitable zone of their parent star for example). This will be complicated, but pretty exciting and cool when done.
• 0.3.4: Better placement of moons. Take the work done on planet placement and apply it to moons. Make sure there is some smarter calculation of relative mass of moon:parent so the moon isn't so big that you have a binary planet system.
• 0.3.5: True procedural planets. @daniel l. has previewed some of his procedural planet work and we definitely need to roll it in. There are some minor concerns about KSP crashing when there are a _lot_ of procedural worlds being made, but maybe it's enough to just warn the user.

That's all. Just wanted to give you an idea of what's going on.

[Altaica]

Its cool to see, that you have already drawn a roadmap to this mod. I'm really looking forward to this.

Do you plan to let the stars move around the galaxy core? or would that be 0.3.6?

Will you support community resource pack resources in 0.3.5 (in questiones of mineral disposition)?

[daniel l.]

9 hours ago, Altaica said:

Its cool to see, that you have already drawn a roadmap to this mod. I'm really looking forward to this.

Do you plan to let the stars move around the galaxy core? or would that be 0.3.6?

Will you support community resource pack resources in 0.3.5 (in questiones of mineral disposition)?

I would prefer that the stars not move actually. Because then there would be a risk of them intersecting and messing things up.

[seanth]

Even if they did move, I think the orbital periods around the galactic core would be so long that players would have a hard time perceiving the movement even using maximum time acceleration.

As a data point, note that our sun takes about 230,000,000 years to orbit the center of our galaxy. The galaxies being made by TBG are smaller, so the orbital time would be lower, but I simply don't have the time to dedicate weeks or months of time accelerated KSP to see the stars move.

Edited April 4, 2017 by seanth

[JadeOfMaar]

On 4/4/2017 at 6:25 AM, Altaica said:

Will you support community resource pack resources in 0.3.5 (in questiones of mineral disposition)?

The CRP resources should instantly apply to all the planets. Making them sensibly apply or not to certain ones is another matter but that gives me an idea.

[Altaica]

Spoiler

On 7.4.2017 at 8:36 AM, JadeOfMaar said:

The CRP resources should instantly apply to all the planets. Making them sensibly apply (or not) to certain ones, is another matter. But that gives me an idea.

Pls use some more punctuation marks for those of us, whose native language is not english. I had a hard time understanding this last sentence. I'm not even sure its right now

And you don't want to share this idea with us yet?

[Scotskerb]

I think you should definitely add models from the New Horizons mod. You should check it out.

[seanth]

10 hours ago, Scotskerb said:

I think you should definitely add models from the New Horizons mod. You should check it out.

In the near future--you the player--will be able to add planets from any planet-pack to the galaxy made by TBG by editing one simple file.

[Cucco-Master]

Damn ... I've been hoping for a way to procedurally generate a fresh Kerbol system for each new playthrough, but this here is ... a few sizes bigger.

Awesome job in creating this, now I need to find some more spare time ... a lot more spare time

[Scotskerb]

On 4/11/2017 at 10:22 AM, seanth said:

In the near future--you the player--will be able to add planets from any planet-pack to the galaxy made by TBG by editing one simple file.

Sweet!

[electricpants]

@seanth / @daniel l., just a suggestion, but could you maybe separate the brown dwarfs into the 3 different types (L, T, Y)?

It's a very minor thing, so it's fine if you don't.

[daniel l.]

7 hours ago, electricpants said:

@seanth / @daniel l., just a suggestion, but could you maybe separate the brown dwarfs into the 3 different types (L, T, Y)?

It's a very minor thing, so it's fine if you don't.

Im not sure if they aren't already, @seanth probably knows though.

[Bedrockbreaker]

Is there going to be some config to change how far out the stars can spawn? It would be fun to see the chaos caused by stars just a few feet away from kerbin. Or, could be an extra challenge for stars further than a couple quadrillion kilometers.

[ToneStack]

On 4/3/2017 at 8:56 AM, seanth said:

Dearest Koogie,

With 0.3 out, I thought you might be interested in a sort of time line where things are going. @daniel l., @bunjatec, and I exchanged messages a bit about what a timeline of what is coming might look like:

• 0.3.0.5: Planet and "astroid" generation streamlining. We're well into this, now. @bunjatec moved all the existing planet generation code out of the main file and put them into subroutines in imported files. Moving things into external files will (hopefully) make the code easier to grok, maintain, and will definitely cut down on redundant, repeated, redundant code. What needs to be done now is use a template system like what we did with stars instead of relying on lots of print statements. This is my job, so I'm the bottleneck at this point, but this should probably be done this week.
• 0.3.1: Planetary discs. Each star has a plane, and the planets orbiting it will be in that plane (with some variation). There can be a few planets with oddball orbits (rogue planets that were captured), but they will be rare. This will cut down on the crazytime looking systems. Placing the planets in their semimajor axes will still be using the existing methods, but we have plans for improvement further along.
• 0.3.2: Unique Planets from other planet packs. This will be the first release with unique planets being placed. Some of the code is already in place, but needs work. The idea is that the user can just add a single line to an existing csv file, and the planet they list will appear in the generated galaxy only once. If they want it to appear more frequently like the stock planets, they can add it to the csv file in the Data_Folder. Hopefully we'll have a video tutorial up for people explaining how to use other planet packs with TBG at this point.
• 0.3.3: Better placement of planets. This is a big step. We used real-world scaling relationships for main sequence stars and implemented them into TBG so that you start with just a mass and get all the star's attributes (radius, colour, temp, etc) from there. We'll be doing something similar with planets, but in this case we'll be placing planets in orbits that reflect their characteristics (habitable worlds in the habitable zone of their parent star for example). This will be complicated, but pretty exciting and cool when done.
• 0.3.4: Better placement of moons. Take the work done on planet placement and apply it to moons. Make sure there is some smarter calculation of relative mass of moon:parent so the moon isn't so big that you have a binary planet system.
• 0.3.5: True procedural planets. @daniel l. has previewed some of his procedural planet work and we definitely need to roll it in. There are some minor concerns about KSP crashing when there are a _lot_ of procedural worlds being made, but maybe it's enough to just warn the user.

That's all. Just wanted to give you an idea of what's going on.

Like the 0.3.4 Idea but It would be cool also to have the option to allow binary planet systems 

[seanth]

On 4/15/2017 at 8:52 AM, electricpants said:

@seanth / @daniel l., just a suggestion, but could you maybe separate the brown dwarfs into the 3 different types (L, T, Y)?

It's a very minor thing, so it's fine if you don't.

The brown dwarfs are not currently broken into L/T/Y classes, but they certainly could be. The only difference for the player would be slightly different names/descriptions in game.

Having said that, I have been considering whether some brown dwarfs should end up orbiting other larger stars. Right now I'm deep into thinking about planets and their placement, and with brown dwarfs being intermediate between gas giants and stars, I haven't thought of a good "rule of thumb" for how to deal with them yet. Suggestions and thoughts are welcome.

 

On 4/15/2017 at 8:02 PM, Bedrockbreaker said:

Is there going to be some config to change how far out the stars can spawn? It would be fun to see the chaos caused by stars just a few feet away from kerbin. Or, could be an extra challenge for stars further than a couple quadrillion kilometers.

There are variables in the code that are currently hardcoded, but could be moved into a human readable/editable config file. Things like SOI of the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Some of the values we are using have been chosen after sensitivity analysis (i.e. trying various things and seeing what works best) so monkeying with them might result in lolercats galaxies. For example, making a galaxy too compact would result in the SOIs of stars overlapping. The SOI of stars isn't arbitrary: we use the real-world calculations to determine the SOI, so no amount of parameter changing would alter that.

 

6 hours ago, ToneStack said:

Like the 0.3.4 Idea but It would be cool also to have the option to allow binary planet systems 

I think the Kopernicus mod by itself doesn't allow barycenters. @daniel l.would probably know better than I. Honestly, he's the project expert on what the Kopernicus mod can do. I'm just a simulation dork that's trying to help out. But there is no reason why binary systems couldn't be possible in the future. The 0.3.x releases are going to be all about smoothing out planet creation and placement, so binary star/planet systems would have to wait for a later round.

 

[Brent Kerman]

Sigma Binaries?

[DocDisco]

I'm probably just being thick, but how exactly does one install this mod properly? I have extracted it and moved it. I've moved it over then generated the Galaxy. Then I saw the already present galaxy file. I have even cleared out my GameData folder and still nothing worked. I really want to revisit one of my old favorites, so can somebody help?

Edited April 23, 2017 by DocDisco

[daniel l.]

21 minutes ago, DocDisco said:

I'm probably just being thick, but how exactly does one install this mod properly? I have extracted it and moved it. I've moved it over then generated the Galaxy. Then I saw the already present galaxy file. I have even cleared out my GameData folder and still nothing worked. I really want to revisit one of my old favorites, so can somebody help?

Can you post screenshots?