2024-03-22 Seasons, Delete Blueprints

[Haxus]

Seasons
There have been requests for seasonal variations of plants.

Planets now determine the current season at the viewer's location. This is shown on the Compass window, where the current weather conditions are shown. 

Season determination is based on the position and movement of the world's sun. Other suns in the solar system do not affect season.

Plants and ground texture change appearance with season. Season changes are not gradual. There is no scene generation time between seasons; the rendering change is instantaneous. Winter to spring is quite abrupt when all the trees and plants suddenly have leaves and flowers and everything turns green.

Non-aquatic plants:

• Spring - Leaves, flowers
  
• Summer - Leaves, no flowers
  
• Autumn - Leaves in fall colors, no flowers
  
• Winter - No leaves or flowers.
  

Aquatic plants:

• Spring - Leaves, no flowers
  
• Summer - Leaves, flowers
  
• Autumn - Leaves, no flowers
  
• Winter - Leaves, no flowers
  

Season affects the outside air temperature calculation.

Work on this revealed that a large number of worlds have very little axial tilt. Axial tilt is needed for seasons to change; Earth's is 23.5 degrees. The axial tilt calculation was changed so habitable worlds have a mean of 24 and a standard deviation of 7. Other worlds have a mean of 45 with a standard deviation of 15. This change will affect all existing worlds.

Depending on axial tilt and orbital configuration, it is possible for a world to have areas that never change season. Seasons can change from autumn to spring with no winter in between if the sun doesn't retreat far enough. Likewise the season can change from spring to autumn if that area never gets sunny enough for summer.

It is always summer on ringworlds but the plants have their flowers. Think of it as early summer.

Potted plants in the environment do not show flowers until they have been planted for ten minutes. This coincides with the first time the potted plant is ready to be harvested for its fruit or seeds.

Potted plants in your hand always show flowers but they will disappear as soon as the flower pot is dropped. The seed planted time is reset at that time. This causes the flowers to appear at the same time the potted plant is ready for harvesting.

Delete Blueprints
It is necessary to enable deletion of any blueprint, so the user can manage the blueprint libraries.

Delete blueprint window in the designer now has a checkbox to show all blueprints, not just your own. Blueprints that are currently distributed with the software are not listed.

It is safe to delete any blueprint. Deleted blueprints are not actually removed until no game object is referencing them anymore.

Celarious' saved game file contains a large number of blueprints that he likely could not access. They show strange inconsistencies including broken architect information. Removing them reduces the size of the saved game file considerably.

[Rockinsince87]

Seasons! Mind = Blown.

That's an oustanding immersive detail.

[Celarious]

Woah, didn't expect to get seasons, very cool! Always like having season systems in games

Also thanks for the blueprint deletion, yeah as you saw my save has a bunch of old inaccessible blueprints from when the architect was the current Avatar, not the steam user, and when the Workshop integration happened I lost the ability to delete those old ones
I actually just finished deleting all of the ones I lost access to and my save only reduced by about 100MB. I assume you were deleting the ones published to Steam Workshop? Those are the "current" ones, whereas the ones published by the avatar Celarious are the old redundant ones

Btw, unpublishing blueprints from the exchange itself works, but it throws an error that it "was published by another architect; you cannot unpublish it.", despite working. Is this intended? Also, is unpublishing the same as deleting them from the library? Or do I also have to delete them from there in order for the game to clean them up?

[Deantwo]

Seasons
Non-aquatic plants:

• Spring - Leaves, flowers
  
• Summer - Leaves, no flowers
  
• Autumn - Leaves in fall colors, no flowers
  
• Winter - No leaves or flowers.
  

Work on this revealed that a large number of worlds have very little axial tilt. Axial tilt is needed for seasons to change; Earth's is 23.5 degrees. The axial tilt calculation was changed so habitable worlds have a mean of 24 and a standard deviation of 7. Other worlds have a mean of 45 with a standard deviation of 15. This change will affect all existing worlds.

No flowers in the summer? Seems weird to me, but I am no expert.

The axial tilt of a world, could we maybe get that added to system map's survey? It could just be fun to know.
Maybe also orbit speed and rotation speed. I am not sure if any of this information would be easy to add though.

[Haxus]

It is a simplistic representation. If flowers appear in summer then there is no change from spring.

I might eventually put the flowering and leaf behavior in the flora dna.

[GaelicVigil]

This new season system sounds awesome. I second the idea of adding this info to survey data. In fact, I'd love to see more "sciency" information displayed in the game similar to when you would scan a planet in Starflight or Star Control.
You could calculate all kinds of things, like average rainfall, temperature per zone, largest predators, sea depth, tallest mountain, and all this new seasonal stuff.
Just more data for the player to think about would make exploration a richer experience overall.

[Celarious]

You could calculate all kinds of things, like average rainfall, temperature per zone, largest predators, sea depth, tallest mountain, and all this new seasonal stuff.
Just more data for the player to think about would make exploration a richer experience overall.

A way to scan the type of creatures would be good, for the veterans who want to try and find something similar to the megabeasts that used to spawn

[GaelicVigil]

I agree. In fact, being able to catalog all of the creatures on a planet would be cool, sorta like how No Man's Sky does it.

[Deantwo]

I agree. In fact, being able to catalog all of the creatures on a planet would be cool, sorta like how No Man's Sky does it.

As far as I remember, Haxus did mention wanting to do something like it once. But I guess he hasn't gotten around to it yet.