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Author Topic: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod  (Read 126161 times)

boggled

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[0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod
« on: October 24, 2019, 04:48:35 PM »

[0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod

This mod has been integrated into Terraforming and Station Construction.

This thread can be locked/deleted. Thank you.

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17094.0
« Last Edit: April 07, 2020, 01:58:19 PM by boggled »
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Sundog

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #1 on: October 24, 2019, 07:27:57 PM »

Just tested it out a bit, and at first glance this seems like a really solid implementation. Most of what I checked seems very nearly up to vanilla standards of quality. AI cores have fitting effects and clicking the notification icons even opens the colony management screen, which is a good demonstration of attention to detail imo. You might already be on top of some of these, but I did see a few things that could maybe be improved:
  • I didn't see any way to check the time remaining for terraforming. Maybe I missed something, but it seems to me like that info should be displayed in the tooltip of the structure
  • Seeing the planet change types on-screen is pretty jarring. Once your testing phase is over you might want to make sure that only happens when the player is far enough away not to see it
  • I saw the notification for the water ice requirement, but that might be another thing that could be helpful in the tooltip
  • It looks like terraforming won't revert after removing the structure. That might be working as intended and I understand that it's a matter of preference, but if you're open to it I'd like to try to convince you that planets should eventually revert to their former types without terraforming infrastructure in place.
I'm looking forward to finding out how this turns out!

Timid

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #2 on: October 24, 2019, 10:19:49 PM »

I agree with Sundog's analysis. The mod deserves to be in the Mod Index for its quality.

Alavaria

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #3 on: October 25, 2019, 02:03:13 AM »

Does this require a new game to work? On adding the mod, it is possible to see and build the Ismara's Sling, but not any of the other ones.
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Yunru

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #4 on: October 25, 2019, 03:09:03 AM »

A quibble I had with one of the other ones that I see repeated here (or at least, not mentioned):
Why doesn't orbital mirrors improve low light?

cjuicy

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #5 on: October 25, 2019, 11:49:43 AM »

A quibble I had with one of the other ones that I see repeated here (or at least, not mentioned):
Why doesn't orbital mirrors improve low light?
Low light is a consequence of its distance to its parent star or the type of star the planet orbits. You can't really use a stellar mirror to amplify light that barely exists.
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Yunru

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #6 on: October 25, 2019, 11:52:17 AM »

Low light is a consequence of its distance to its parent star or the type of star the planet orbits. You can't really use a stellar mirror to amplify light that barely exists.
Sure you can.
If, for example, I shone a spotlight at a beach ball such that only half the ball is in the beam, I can improve the amount of light reaching it by reflect light from elsewhere onto it, say by sticking a mirror in the beam pointed at the ball.

Nick XR

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #7 on: October 25, 2019, 01:07:24 PM »

A quibble I had with one of the other ones that I see repeated here (or at least, not mentioned):
Why doesn't orbital mirrors improve low light?
Low light is a consequence of its distance to its parent star or the type of star the planet orbits. You can't really use a stellar mirror to amplify light that barely exists.

It's more like gathering/redirectinv light that would miss the planet altogether.

I haven't checked the.mod out yet but I'm concerned with balance.  If this could only fix a few negative traits for lotsmof time and money while angering Ludd, maybe it could be ok.

boggled

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #8 on: October 25, 2019, 04:11:00 PM »

Low light is a consequence of its distance to its parent star or the type of star the planet orbits. You can't really use a stellar mirror to amplify light that barely exists.
Sure you can.
If, for example, I shone a spotlight at a beach ball such that only half the ball is in the beam, I can improve the amount of light reaching it by reflect light from elsewhere onto it, say by sticking a mirror in the beam pointed at the ball.

My understanding is that planets illuminated poorly enough that it presents a hazard to surface operations would require mirrors larger than the planet itself to improve the brightness to something similar to Earth. If someone with a physics background wants to weigh in about this I would happily defer to them.

Does this require a new game to work? On adding the mod, it is possible to see and build the Ismara's Sling, but not any of the other ones.

I added more information about this to the top post. You can safely add the mod to a save in progress, but I don't think you can remove the mod from your save once you start building structures.

Ismara's Sling is only buildable on cryovolcanic and water planets. Only desert-variant, tundra, jungle and frozen planets can be terraformed with the stellar reflector structures. They can be built on water, terran and terran-eccentric planets to improve conditions. They cannot be built anywhere else. Note that stellar mirrors cannot be built on planets with poor light or no light, which will automatically include all planets in a nebula or black hole system. Military Police Headquarters exists to remove decivilized subpopulations and can only be built on markets with that condition.

Just tested it out a bit, and at first glance this seems like a really solid implementation. Most of what I checked seems very nearly up to vanilla standards of quality. AI cores have fitting effects and clicking the notification icons even opens the colony management screen, which is a good demonstration of attention to detail imo. You might already be on top of some of these, but I did see a few things that could maybe be improved:
  • I didn't see any way to check the time remaining for terraforming. Maybe I missed something, but it seems to me like that info should be displayed in the tooltip of the structure
  • Seeing the planet change types on-screen is pretty jarring. Once your testing phase is over you might want to make sure that only happens when the player is far enough away not to see it
  • I saw the notification for the water ice requirement, but that might be another thing that could be helpful in the tooltip
  • It looks like terraforming won't revert after removing the structure. That might be working as intended and I understand that it's a matter of preference, but if you're open to it I'd like to try to convince you that planets should eventually revert to their former types without terraforming infrastructure in place.
I'm looking forward to finding out how this turns out!

I like these ideas and I'm going to implement the tooltips and player distance check. If you remove the reflectors, it will make the planet hot/cold again and make the farmland worse. I can make it revert the terraforming after a certain period of time if applicable.
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dk1332

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #9 on: October 25, 2019, 04:39:12 PM »

Cool, I kinda hate it when you find a good system with no good planets to colonized. Gonna try this on my current run where for some reason 90% of the planets I've seen so far are dead rocks with the average hazard of 150%....and I'm pretty sure I set it to mix.

A couple of questions:
- Does this conflict with other terraforming mods?
- Will this have the ability to terraform toxic planets and Azure planets?
- Will this support Tart's unknown skies mod?
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Sundog

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #10 on: October 25, 2019, 10:39:04 PM »

If you remove the reflectors, it will make the planet hot/cold again and make the farmland worse.
Very cool! In that case, I would just advise you to somehow make that abundantly clear to the player. Anyone who expects the changes to be permanent even if they remove the structure will inevitably do so, resulting in disappointment and regret. Some people might even report it as a bug.

Nick XR

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #11 on: October 26, 2019, 12:08:06 AM »

Low light is a consequence of its distance to its parent star or the type of star the planet orbits. You can't really use a stellar mirror to amplify light that barely exists.
Sure you can.
If, for example, I shone a spotlight at a beach ball such that only half the ball is in the beam, I can improve the amount of light reaching it by reflect light from elsewhere onto it, say by sticking a mirror in the beam pointed at the ball.
My understanding is that planets illuminated poorly enough that it presents a hazard to surface operations would require mirrors larger than the planet itself to improve the brightness to something similar to Earth. If someone with a physics background wants to weigh in about this I would happily defer to them.

Most mirrors have good refractivity of the IR range of the spectrum (heat) in addition to visible light, so the amount of additional "heat" being directed to a planet to terraform it to something other than a ball of ice, should be enough to make it not dark.  And FWIW, planets like Mars get plenty of light and are too cold for humans (aside from other factors).  So if you can provide enough heat via mirrors to make it not cold, making it not dark has likely happened unless you're using mirror that don't reflect visible light but do reflect IR.

Serenitis

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #12 on: October 26, 2019, 03:34:14 AM »

Something that might need looking at:

I started with a Tundra world with -1 farming.
I built the mirrors, and it upgraded the world to Terran while giving it +1 farming.
I then removed the mirrors just to see what would happen.
The planet stayed Terran while re-gaining it's previous cold condition. But lost it's farmland condition entirely.
Spoiler
[close]
And yet it's now producing 15 food as a size 5 colony.
Spoiler
[close]

Looks like the new conditions are being added whenever the mirror status changes, but the old ones are not being removed.
And the farmland is also being removed. (But still 'working'.)

Unrelated feedback/questions:
Possibly consider not changing the planet type, but improve the one that's already there. Having Terran planets potentially everywhere just doesn't "feel" right. (In this setting at least.)

Is everything in cat_barren completely untouched by these buildings?
Ie; Terraforming limited to already habitable planets.
(Fine with this btw.)

Possibly consider adding ability to frozen worlds to build Ismara's Sling.

Possibly consider adding information to the building tooltip when terraforming is stalled.

- Will this support Tart's unknown skies mod?
It would appear not. Possibly due to defing abilities by specific planet type, rather than by planet class.
Not a single US planet I tested with had the ability to build these buildings.
« Last Edit: October 26, 2019, 04:10:39 AM by Serenitis »
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Alavaria

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9)
« Reply #13 on: October 27, 2019, 04:04:24 AM »

I added more information about this to the top post. You can safely add the mod to a save in progress, but I don't think you can remove the mod from your save once you start building structures.
Thanks, yeah it wasn't a savegame problem then, just that I had exactly 0 terraformable planets in my list of colonies.
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boggled

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Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v0.9.1)
« Reply #14 on: October 27, 2019, 09:26:05 AM »

Something that might need looking at:

I started with a Tundra world with -1 farming.
I built the mirrors, and it upgraded the world to Terran while giving it +1 farming.
I then removed the mirrors just to see what would happen.
The planet stayed Terran while re-gaining it's previous cold condition. But lost it's farmland condition entirely.
Spoiler
[close]
And yet it's now producing 15 food as a size 5 colony.
Spoiler
[close]

Looks like the new conditions are being added whenever the mirror status changes, but the old ones are not being removed.
And the farmland is also being removed. (But still 'working'.)

Unrelated feedback/questions:
Possibly consider not changing the planet type, but improve the one that's already there. Having Terran planets potentially everywhere just doesn't "feel" right. (In this setting at least.)

Is everything in cat_barren completely untouched by these buildings?
Ie; Terraforming limited to already habitable planets.
(Fine with this btw.)

Possibly consider adding ability to frozen worlds to build Ismara's Sling.

Possibly consider adding information to the building tooltip when terraforming is stalled.

- Will this support Tart's unknown skies mod?
It would appear not. Possibly due to defing abilities by specific planet type, rather than by planet class.
Not a single US planet I tested with had the ability to build these buildings.

Thank you for bring this bug to my attention. I'm pretty sure it's fixed.

Ismara's Sling can now be built on frozen planets.

Tooltips added to show a rough amount of time left until terraforming is complete, or if it is stalled due to lack of water.

Low light is a consequence of its distance to its parent star or the type of star the planet orbits. You can't really use a stellar mirror to amplify light that barely exists.
Sure you can.
If, for example, I shone a spotlight at a beach ball such that only half the ball is in the beam, I can improve the amount of light reaching it by reflect light from elsewhere onto it, say by sticking a mirror in the beam pointed at the ball.
My understanding is that planets illuminated poorly enough that it presents a hazard to surface operations would require mirrors larger than the planet itself to improve the brightness to something similar to Earth. If someone with a physics background wants to weigh in about this I would happily defer to them.

Most mirrors have good refractivity of the IR range of the spectrum (heat) in addition to visible light, so the amount of additional "heat" being directed to a planet to terraform it to something other than a ball of ice, should be enough to make it not dark.  And FWIW, planets like Mars get plenty of light and are too cold for humans (aside from other factors).  So if you can provide enough heat via mirrors to make it not cold, making it not dark has likely happened unless you're using mirror that don't reflect visible light but do reflect IR.

Mirrors now remove the "poor light" condition. Still cannot be built on dark planets.

If you remove the reflectors, it will make the planet hot/cold again and make the farmland worse.
Very cool! In that case, I would just advise you to somehow make that abundantly clear to the player. Anyone who expects the changes to be permanent even if they remove the structure will inevitably do so, resulting in disappointment and regret. Some people might even report it as a bug.

Planets can now regress to their previous types before terraforming. If this is happening, there is an intel message regarding terraforming regression. Also, the stellar mirror/stellar shade conditions on the market say that if the reflectors are removed the conditions on the planet will deteriorate.

I agree with Sundog's analysis. The mod deserves to be in the Mod Index for its quality.

Thank you! Once this gets a little bit more testing I will request inclusion in the mod index.
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