More than one star???

[stonedzen]

I just installed the Frontier 55 Cancri mod in orbiter. Its a pretty cool idea, so props to the developers (even though many of the moons are obviously duplicate textures).

Anyway, my question is whether or not its possible to make scenarios load with more than one system.... ie Sol AND 55 Cancri. If not, is it possible to manually add the Star and planets of one system config file into another? All my attempts have been unsuccessful.

Ideally, I want to create a scenario where a vessel can leave our system and travel the many light years to another system (and yes I know this would take forever even with 100000x time acceleration)

 

[tl8]

I just installed the Frontier 55 Cancri mod in orbiter. Its a pretty cool idea, so props to the developers (even though many of the moons are obviously duplicate textures).

Anyway, my question is whether or not its possible to make scenarios load with more than one system.... ie Sol AND 55 Cancri. If not, is it possible to manually add the Star and planets of one system config file into another? All my attempts have been unsuccessful.

Ideally, I want to create a scenario where a vessel can leave our system and travel the many light years to another system (and yes I know this would take forever even with 100000x time acceleration)

Short answer No, Long answer..... No with a but...

 

[stonedzen]

Short answer No, Long answer..... No with a but...

Thanks for the quick answer but what the hell do you mean? What is the "but"?

 

[tl8]

Thanks for the quick answer but what the hell do you mean? What is the "but"?

No you can't, Only 1 source of light is allowed in Orbiter, however that said, there is something (I can't remember where) that may be what you were after on the old M6 forum

 

[SlyCoopersButt]

I assume a method worth trying is to create a planet with star like nature with an orbit around the sun that is a few light years out that has moons for planets. Never tried that but it may work. But as said, Lighting will come from the sun only so set the ambient light setting to maximum so night shadows won't exist and just use your imagination.

 

[tgep]

I assume a method worth trying is to create a planet with star like nature with an orbit around the sun that is a few light years out that has moons for planets. Never tried that but it may work. But as said, Lighting will come from the sun only so set the ambient light setting to maximum so night shadows won't exist and just use your imagination.

I've done it and it works. What you need to do is alter your Sol File so that the second star is writen in as a planet( Planet X = Star55Cancri). The planets will be written as moons and their moons will be moons of moons. Make sence ?

Now get down to the engine room and bring the Jump engines on line. Your gonna mneed 'em.

 

[stonedzen]

Bummer... but thanks for the answers, i guess Ill try something else

 

[James.Denholm]

Uh oh, he posted at the same time as tgep, meaning he didn't see tgep's post... stonedzen, read tgeps post.

 

[SlyCoopersButt]

I've done it and it works. What you need to do is alter your Sol File so that the second star is writen in as a planet( Planet X = Star55Cancri). The planets will be written as moons and their moons will be moons of moons. Make sence ?

Now get down to the engine room and bring the Jump engines on line. Your gonna mneed 'em.

My theory exactly. Knew that principle works but I was mostly worried that oribiter might not react very well with such a huge distance from the sun. As for a way to get such a distance, I'd use this, [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=2297"]WarpDrive MFD Mk2[/ame]

 

[Linguofreak]

I've done it and it works. What you need to do is alter your Sol File so that the second star is writen in as a planet( Planet X = Star55Cancri). The planets will be written as moons and their moons will be moons of moons. Make sence ?

Now get down to the engine room and bring the Jump engines on line. Your gonna mneed 'em.

Two problems:

First is that moons of moons, last I knew, don't work in Orbiter, so the planets of the second star can't have moons. Second is that, IIRC, there are some funky things that happen when you get too far out from Sol. You can model binary systems, though.

 

[stonedzen]

First is that moons of moons, last I knew, don't work in Orbiter, so the planets of the second star can't have moons.

I dont think this is true, or at least there are ways around it....in fact one of the moons in the Frontier 55 Cancri mod has a small astroid for a moon.

Second is that, IIRC, there are some funky things that happen when you get too far out from Sol. You can model binary systems, though.

Please elaborate on this if possible... im confused?

 

[Ursus]

The position of a vessel or planet in orbiter is stored and calculated as three double precision floating point values that represent the object's position relative to the center of the star system (the star). Each of the floating point numbers consists of a fixed-length number and an exponent.

While these values can't be calculated exactly even for relatively close distances, the margin of error is small enough not to be noticeable. The further one gets from the star, however, the higher those numbers have to be, and due to the nature of floating point number representation, the less precise they can be. This would wreak havoc on the simulator's ability to calculate relative positions (two objects' positions relative to each other, or an object's position relative to its position in the previous time step...).

 

[Linguofreak]

I dont think this is true, or at least there are ways around it....in fact one of the moons in the Frontier 55 Cancri mod has a small astroid for a moon.

"That's no moon, it's a space station."

Actually, I haven't DL'ed or looked at the 55 Cancri mod, but I think it's fairly likely that that asteroid moon is represented by a vessel. If the mass of the object in question is small, that would be a possible workaround to the "moons can't have moons" problem.

I'm not entirely sure since I haven't looked at the addon, but I couldn't resist the Star Wars line.

 

[SlyCoopersButt]

Haha, I like that! Must be what it is! As for the position effect, I have seen that in the Deep Star 50000 years of flight scenario included with Kulch's Energia project. I placed a Delta Glider near it with scenario editor and it has a very shaky looking movement. Does that straighten out once near a new system?

 

[computerex]

Orbiter only supports one light source. You guys may want to check this out: http://orbithangar.com/searchauth.php?search=raftdood

 

[jedidia]

screw the idea of two systems in the same config. It's not worth the effort, allthough it might work in a way that Orbiter doesn't crash.

At a distance of lightyears, a double won't be much more precise than a hundred meters! meaning the smallest unit they can represent (and therewith the smallest step your ship can make) is a hundred meters (uneducated guess, might be much more or a bit less). Try docking like that, you'll be lucky if you even come close enough to see the airlock! (Basically it's like playing counterstrike at an fps of... probably 5 frames per second?)

There IS however salvation for those who believe in the allmighty hack, which in this case would be booting a new scenario within Orbiter. Make a dll that specifies at which distance from a star a new system should be loaded, and there you go. And since this is possible for quite some time now, one of our relentless developers of course couldn't resist the temptation to do it for you.

This is what you're looking for:

http://orbithangar.com/advsearch.ph...uthor=default&category=default&subcat=default

allthough it will be difficult to plug Cancri in without having the source code, but it shows that the concept works quite perfectly, and maybe you'll get the source if you ask the developer.

 

[tgep]

Hmmmmmm, I had the Vega Starsytem loaded in my sol cfg and was able to bring ships from earth to auto dock for scenario building. oF Of course you had to fly to jupiter or saturn before you could lock on to the sytem as a target for MFD usage but there was very little shake or slow down for me.

I wouldn't recomend it for low end or limited memory computers though.

 

[tgep]

Maybe if I had taken out the Kuiper belt planets first .............