System Generation is Very Close: Dev Blog 2016–09–19
I finished up an initial draft of the physically-based system generator over the weekend. It appears to work:
Again, the generator is a dust & gas accretion model, similar to ACCRETE/starform/Stargen. This means it is based in real planetary science (though planet science that is slightly out of date given recent exoplanet discoveries).
The next step, which I’m working on now, it to add some “levers” I can use to tweak the output. The first and probably most important is a flag to bias the generation toward systems with habitable / Earth-like planets. I think I can do this by seeding more dust and planetesimals into the “habitable zone” around the stars and biasing the gas abundances toward Oxygen, Helium and Nitrogen away from CO2 and toxic gases.
From there, I plan to plug the system generator into the planet model generators I have already created and add a system overview scene so that I can visualize the generated systems.
I’ll likely double back and extend the generator later. It doesn’t support a lot of “exotic” planet types like carbon worlds, but I want those to be included in the game.
Speaking of carbon worlds, and their diamond volcanoes:
Needs some work but… so sparkly.
