Planet and space stations
Thu, 10/22/2009 - 15:47
There seems to be a lot of ringed gas gaints in the pic we seen so far, will we see any disturbance to the rings when the ships flys through them?.there also apperas to be a moon
crashing into a planet or is it an eruption from the surface?.
How about a vid of the asteroids?. and some pics of the stations :)
Fri, 11/27/2009 - 19:54
#2
Docking
How do you dock with the space stations,is there a procedure or do you just fly up to them.
Sat, 11/28/2009 - 21:40
#3
Docking : Options.
No, certainly not just flying up.. That would be boring! Why would we do that when we have an accelerometer and a touch screen on the iPhone / iPod. ;)
"Snap On" docking was what I was personally most disappointed about in the more recent X Series games. In previous versions you could choose to handle the docking yourself, and also the flying inside the station. It seemed a little cynical to me that in later versions they removed the insides first, and then went to the next step of having you almost snap into the docking position as you approached the station. Getting rid of the inside of space stations was one thing, but not even having an option to go through the delicious pain of trying to dock to an outside pod was a real shame IMO.
In ArcNebula you can start in various ships, with various capabilities, but learning to dock, and also flying inside stations / carriers is part of the game, so expect to do it at some point. If it's not your cup of tea you can always save up some credits and buy a docking computer.. Isn't that how it should be done?
Oh, and EVA is done with jet-packs, newtonian physics (of sorts), and a little dash of inertia and friction! ;-)
The next week will be a bit quiet also as we have some other commitments which are delaying updates to news and stuff on the site.. But more vids and more info will be coming. I am working through a very long list of jobs right now having been out of the office for a few days..
The video and pictures we have done so far come from "sandbox" systems used primarily for testing, and just in case you were worried we won't just have billions of systems with Gas Giants of different colours in them. :)
Disturbance to rings is a really nice idea. Not something that is likely to happen on the iPhone / iPod though. Most ring systems have dust, and asteroids by the 10s of thousands in them. These can be scanned / mined, and also knocked out of orbit etc. So our hope is that we convey the scale of these beautiful planets in the final game as you "peel back the layers" so to speak as you descend into the rings.... If you look very closely in the first teaser video as we fade out of the ring section you may notice a "Navia" space-station also based in the ring system on the right of the screen... and some ships in holding patterns waiting to dock. This should give you some more sense of scale.
The moon you spotted on the daily pics is indeed impacting on a planet, and this has some relevance to some of the different story arcs / different kind of planet systems that you'll discover in ArcNebula. Around that kind of impact there are a lot of asteroids (caused by the collision) and often less reputable (more daring) pilots trying to get rich from the abundance of rare minerals / materials / energies... ;)