Question about US3 DirectX compatibility, and a few others

[Daryl95]

Which DirectX will US3 use? Will there be a setting for this?

The reason I ask is because I have a file on my computer that will emulate a directx 9 graphics card on my laptop and I can't make it work for directx 10 or 11 nor can I upgrade my card. The reason is that the emulator I have is literally the d3d9.dll, but placed in the folder of the game and including tons of extra code that makes an actual video card unnecessary (in many cases).

EDIT:
I thought of a few other questions.
1. Is there going to be some sort of journal feature where you can write something about a specific planet you visit?
2. Is the map system fixed so that we spend hours making a system and then save the map, it won't crush the planet into its parent star? I stopped using US2 because of this.
3. Will their be an option to turn off the gravity sim if we just want a map for scifi/creative purposes?
4. This one's a long shot but, will their be planetary surface generations like in SpaceEngine?

Thanks.

[valentin123]

i think it will work with directx9 if gta iv served with directx9

[Daryl95]

i think it will work with directx9 if gta iv served with directx9

What does GTA IV have to do with US3?

[unl0cker]

2. Is the map system fixed so that we spend hours making a system and then save the map, it won't crush the planet into its parent star? I stopped using US2 because of this.
3. Will their be an option to turn off the gravity sim if we just want a map for scifi/creative purposes?

You must be doing something wrong, mine don't crash, unless I want them to. Maybe you're setting the time step too high, or missing the "auto orbit" button. If the orbit speeds are "wrong" the obj will simply fall in or fly away...

As for the gravity option I believe is just a matter of either pausing the sim, locking all the objects or using what I came to call "black hole time-step", that is, setting the time-step to 0.00000001 seconds or something like that. Time will practically stop and the scenario will not change.


EDIT:

I missed this, but you can just set 0 to the gravity! lol Here:

[Daryl95]

The thing with the planets being crushed into their stars isn't a problem with simulation as much as the way it is saved/loaded.

I had a map of our solar system, Gliese 581, and (I think, but this was a while ago) Epsilon Eridani. When I did the third system, I would save it and reload it. The planets were either closer, or crushed into the star. In the case of this simulation, I think I was actually doing a habitable moon with these results, but I've done plenty others were the game saves and loads things in different positions. I asked for help then and I even proposed two problems that it could be, although I have no idea how to fix them.

One. That the systems were too far away to hold accurate coordinates and they were being rounded.

Two. For some reason, the simulation is deciding to move them in because of gravity (which it shouldn't because I didn't let any time pass and it should've put everything right where I left it).

The problem was, it was inconsistent and it appeared at times to be either problem, so I finally gave up in frustration.

If you know a way to fix the save/load error. I'd appreciate it though.

Also, won't setting gravity to zero make everything fly away? I guess I'll try that though.

EDIT: When I said turning off gravity sim, I meant so that the planets are locked to their usual mathematically calculated orbits, not free flying objects to the depths of space. Sorry for the confusion, I'm bad at explaining stuff sometimes.

[unl0cker]

I have found your Gliese 581 system, and also have found the mistake in it.

The problem with this particular simulation is that you have a milky way there. Not that is not possible, but take a look at the diameter of it. It simply encompasses all the other stars, and because of this all those bodies are strongly influenced by the mass of the whole galaxy. You also locked the stars, but left the planets unlocked, so the stars won't move, but the planets were under the strong milky influence, and drifting away.

To fix this particular scenario I see two ways. The first one, a dirty trick would be to make a static nulled milky way. So first lock the milky way, set the diameter to one sun, and press O to force the disk of dust to spin around the now static milky way, you need to do this to fix the speed of the dust so it wont fly away once you lock the galaxy. After doing that, you can set it's mass to 1 gram, and you can then lock the stars and follow your original idea.

Or you can again set it's diameter to one sun, leave the mass alone on 1 milky way, so it will still influence those stars and they will orbit the galaxy as they are supposed to. Preferably lock the milky way, or hit O to make the other inner bodies including the dust disk to follow it's path. Now go to the stars, fix their orbits around the galaxy, then go to the planets and fix theirs in relation to the stars. This way is cooler but the downside is that the projected paths of the planets will now be drawn in relation to the biggest mass around (the galaxy) and not to the stars they are orbiting.


In short, your milky way, let's say "ball", was too huge and all the other pieces were inside of it. It's gravity was destroying things. Set the center mass where the center is and make it "small", and things should work ok.


Bellow is the same system "fixed". Orbits are all incorrect and stuff, but the systems are stable, with planets orbiting their stars and the stars around the galaxy.

EDIT:

We are influenced directly by only a very small part of the galaxy's content. What happens is that everything in the galaxy is tugging everything close by, and so on, and that makes the whole disk spin around the center, like a huge fabric. Since we can't simulate all the bodies of the milky way so that these 3 systems move the way they should inside the galaxy, we need to sum up all that tugging into one center mass, a gravity blur "tool" if you will, and that will somehow emulate the impossibly complicated gravitational forces that go from the inner part out. Of course it will be 6 billion light years from precision, but at least the stars will orbit the center of the galaxy and mimic the real scenario. The solution then for a "gravity blur tool" is to put the whole mass of the galaxy centered into a small body.

[Dan Dixon]

Which DirectX will US3 use? Will there be a setting for this?

It will require DirectX9c for all the cool new graphics features (some Intel video cards say they are DirectX 9c, but don't work). I'm skeptical if it will work with an emulator, but this might not be known without testing.

We hope to add a fall back feature for older cards, but these cards won't be able to do all the new stuff.

1. Is there going to be some sort of journal feature where you can write something about a specific planet you visit?

This is not currently planned, but could be added in the future.

2. Is the map system fixed so that we spend hours making a system and then save the map, it won't crush the planet into its parent star? I stopped using US2 because of this.

US3 is a full rewrite (so the save code from US2 is not use) and we'll be updating and fixing bugs indefinitely, so save in US3 should work as expected and without errors.

3. Will their be an option to turn off the gravity sim if we just want a map for scifi/creative purposes?

As pointed out above... you can do this in US2 by setting G (gravity) to 0.

4. This one's a long shot but, will their be planetary surface generations like in SpaceEngine?

Maybe not in the initial release, but this is on the long term plan.