I thought they could also see atmospheric composition as it passes in front of the star, no? Having that info and the data you’ve just mentioned they postulate if it’s habitable or not. Obviously not seeing any detail at all about land mass shapes, but perhaps composition? I’m not a spaceologist, so I’m only musing.

We can build a telescope to see this by the way. The lens being the gravitational warping of spacetime by the sun. We go waaaay past the orbit of Pluto (I forgot the exact distance) and send probes there. We can have quite nice pictures of planets up to pretty nice distances.

Yeah, figured it was something like that.

Where is that?

They dodged a bullet!

Lazy Aliens.

Its also built in Godot and thus thanks to the power of Godot not really having any decompilation protection, is effectively open source, lol.

https://xkcd.com/2202/ moment

So basically what billionaires are trying to turn the world into? /s

i love the Himalaya doing a cute smile

do you have an algorithm for picking a photogenic angle for your game?

Nah, the planets are just shown as 3D objects in the game.

The little icons as the one I linked were made by a special game mode for development which I call the PlanetPhotoStudio that just lets me manually rotate the planet 3D object and take a snapshot. Since the planet surfaces are pre-generated using an external program ("Grand Designer", highly recommended) and only some results are chosen, it's fine to also make those icons during development time.

It's actually less hassle to create a "photo studio" (especially since most of the work for it is also used in the main game) and do it manually for each planet like that than to try and come up with an algorithm for "how photogenic a 2D view of a planet looks".

looks like a baby elephant

Thanks!

It definitelly looks nice, though the game play is IMHO what makes it fun or not.

It will be over in hours, and they welcome us as liberators.

That show was legit incredible, and cancelling it was a massive fuckup.

high

wasted

Sounds like you enjoyed the show a lot, I'll look it up, thanks.

Yeah, I want it purely for aesthetics. I like generating 100% of the planet, and sending colonies to far-flung places via dev mode instant travel to settle in isolation, so I spend a decent amount of time looking at the world map. It just bothers me when it’s mostly land. It’s ugly, imo, and you get fewer interesting land/climate combos, even with expanded biomes. Also one of my mods adds things washing up on the beach, like organs, so I'm a big fan of ocean-adjacent tiles.

Honestly I haven't gotten the new DLC, and probably wont, so I don’t really know anything about the space stuff. I have way too much time and energy invested in my collection of mods and don't have any interest in doing it again (I manage them manually because I don't use steam, so updating/replacing a thousand mods is a big project)

I’ve been playing whiskerwood on and off, its in early access and runs for shit on my crap windows computer, but it’s all islands and it seems they'll be adding more to water navigation (last patch I installed added ferries and boat docks, and that was a few months ago). I enjoy that sort of thing too, but I don't think rimworld really needs it.

Pretty much, Essos is just Europe as well.

I know you're probably joking but even the best telescopes can only directly image a planet that's like 10 times the mass of Jupiter and even then it's only like two pixels.

The hard part is that the stars create so much glare and planets are so small and faint that it's really REALLY hard to zoom in on them. Even with very powerful telescopes. It's probably straight up impossible actually. Like you can see them and get an idea of what they're made of (light spectrum analysis) but you're not going to be able to make out fine details like what the landmasses look like.