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I'm interested, if you can share more - what does a typical system look like before and after? How does it impact your play style? Or is it strictly for performance?

I will upload it this evening. I came back from vacation and have the mod on my laptop.
Right now I write on my pc.
No, it is not performance wise oriented, only a more realistic approach where a moon looks like a moon and not like a planet besides a planet.
The ratio is better.
I will also post a before/after picture.

THIS is the Version with bases inside Objects (please report if you know why that happens):

Before: After:

More after Pics

Last one

This looks super cool!

How does it play, balance-wise? user-experience-wise?

i.e. is it a pain to navigate systems? or does it flow fairly well?

Pleae try it out. I mean, check it for yourself. I can not say more than that all of it works very good.
And the newest Version 1.0.9.0 is running so nice, there is no better version.
It makes fun. I can not believe there will be an Aurora Update.
I guess the beta goes public.
And for sure it is worth going to an official version!

Regarding your questions, I am making two videos. One with my orbit, one with standard orbit.
Now it does not make any difference performance wise. The newest patch is, as i said, awesome.
I can show you the performance in a short vid.

Meanwhile, I am installing a new GPU Driver and try to figure out how to use the mod folders. As you said, there is this mega mod. But that is a different topic.
I ran again a new game just to find out, that my orbit.xml was used that i did not want to use.
Somehow the game is taking it, even if i rename it. Maybe that is intended, I have to find out.

Video Snapshot:

What were you using to monitor your cpu & gpu usage in that video?

Online Broadcast Studio. OBS in sbort.
It is free and aesome!
I made an overlay of two instances of Process Explorer, showing the gpu and cpu stats.

I have seen two problems while playing with this mod:

- I had a station built inside a small moon.
- I have seen a constructor attempting to start the construction of a station around a small moon, but without success, and repeating the process endlessly.

Franky007 wrote: Sat Mar 04, 2023 1:25 am I have seen two problems while playing with this mod:

- I had a station built inside a small moon.
- I have seen a constructor attempting to start the construction of a station around a small moon, but without success, and repeating the process endlessly.

Yes, you are right, the first point I know very well from versions before 1.1.1.1 (1.0.9.0 also worked very good).
In previous releases that problem (stations inside Objects) was so often, I abandoned the modding of orbits.
When I tried it with 1.0.9.0, it looked much better, and the game is playable and starts to make fun.
Now, I started many games with the orbit mod, and did not have one station or hangar built inside a planet/moon.
It should really happen very rarely.

Also, the constructor and other ships, when trying to do something with objects very small (or whatever, when a misbhavior/problem happens), this trying over and over was also a misbehaving that led me to the conclusion that this mod is not possible.

If you can observe some behavior that shows WHY they do it, please tell me and we can resolve this problem.

So lets say you observe that this building of stations/hangars inside a stellar object happens ONLKY to a given size (diameter is smaller or greater than normal. i.e. <800 or >1800), then this would be interesting.

Concerning the construction or colonizing issue: I had the problems with colonizing planets, they tried it over and over.
So, if the diameter is the reason this happens, I have to increase the minimum diameter for the moons up to a point where this is NOT happening, if thats the case/reason.

Also, the game has to mind not to start a race onto a planet smaller than, lets say a diameter smaller than 1500, otherwise this race is doomed....

ALSO, maybe the game overrides the Oribt.xml with a starting condition that doesn't care for the orbital values.
Also, if the game cares about the orbital values or takes them, and you start a game with a very bad starting condition and therefore the home planet is a moon andhas a diameter of 500, then maybe there is a problem that I do not know how to fix.

So please try with this mod some other starting conditions and look if there is something of all those misplacements and misbehavings having a reason (planet/moon diameter?) that can be changed.

ALSO, if something odd happens, zip your original Orbit XML.
DO NOT LEAVE A SECOND ORBTYPES.XML IN YOUR FOLDER!
Whatever you call the other one(s), they may interfere with the one you want to use!

So:
NOT:
OrbTypes.xml
OrbTypes_.xml
OrbTypes_orig.xml
OrbTypesB.xml

YES:
OrbTypes.xml
OrbTypesOrig.7zip
OrbTypesOrig.zip

Yep, got it. I will try to find out why that happens.

MEANWHILE:

Who can tell me if this happens ONLY
– in the home system;
– or the pre-built system at game start;
– if there are later bad-built-mining stations (inside a planet/moon) built by constructors later on while playing;
– and what objects refuse to get a station/base because the constructor is not able to built one.

Have fun while playing!

Franky007 wrote: Sat Mar 04, 2023 1:25 am I have seen two problems while playing with this mod:

- I had a station built inside a small moon.
- I have seen a constructor attempting to start the construction of a station around a small moon, but without success, and repeating the process endlessly.

Please check this out, regarding the constructor issue:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 9#p5080919

But i think it is not the same problem.
Your constructor is starting stopping sarting stopping i guess..
He can not reach the place where he wants to go to.
And that might be the middle of the obejct he is rejected to fly to..
That also can happen then to the colonizers.

We have to look into that.

Meanwhile, if you are interested, you could play with the diameter of the moons and planets
This has nothing to do with the orbital values (thats what controls the distance to planets and suns), only with the diameters of the objects.

If this problem persists, I will try again a different approach:
Finetuning the orbital distances and the ratio of the diameter of the objects.
Problem is: if the Oribt of the planets around the sun are greater than 1, outer bodys are not drawn, but exist..
If we could go above 1, orbital bodies could be greater than the now small moons.
But the size of planets has to stay as they are, because otherwise the whole gane mechanic is broken because the output, population and all of it, is calculated with the orbital diameter.

Here it a different version that appears to work for me: To check if this Mod works for you, please start a new game (old games have the orbits just as they were created with that version that was active at generation of course)
AND start you empire as OLD, and the rest you do just as you wish.
Then you can look at your many mining bases/stations and look if one is built inside a planet/moon.

Now I just write down what my findings are:

A stellar obect in diameter smaller than about 500 (whatever unit in game, lets say for sanity km), is treated in game as an asteroid, and that is, when zooming in, divided in more than one part.
This results in the logic that a base/mine is build in the center of that objects location. This means, a constructor wants to fly to the center - but he is not allowed to.. therefore he tries it over and over...
knowing this, there shall be no object other than asteroids that are smller than about 500 km in diameter.

But if we want to get an astronomic relation for this game, some scale has to be altered..
What i found out is, that there can not be a orbit for stellar objects greater than 1.
Otherwise they will be rendered invisible.

Now to the stellar objects, their sizes and astronomical distances in astronomical units.
I just made an approximation, because all of this is an approximation.
If you consider that the closest system/sun to our sun is about 1 parsec away, and a parsec means more than 200 000 AU (Astronomical Units = Disatance from earth to sun) away.. you can not picture this for this game. It would be possible, but is not intended and the engine is not programmed for it.
Think about that scale: take the ring around a system (the colored ring encircling your system of your race) in the game is in Astronomical Units AU 10 AUs diameter (and the diameter of the sun is correct more or less) then you would have to line up that system circle 20 000 times to get to the CLOSEST next solar system (i.e. proxima centauri).
Nice distance. Even for those space-engines in game a pretty long run...

back to the objects:
REAL Measures:

Sun in diameter: ~1 000 000km
Jupiter in diameter: ~100 000km
Earth in diameter: ~10 000km
Mercury in diameter: ~5 000km

Distances to Sun:
Mercury 0,39 AU (Astronomical Units)
Venus 0,72 AU
Earth 1AU
Mars 1,52
Jupiter 5,2
Saturn 9,53

Now to project those objects into the game, I decided to divide them all by ten.
The ratio then would be correct.

Problems:
The sun is bigger than before. The sun is a small sun. Other suns are much bigger.
You do this in game, and when you zoom out, you see the sun - it is huge...
You make a moon with that relation and it is very tiny. You make the correct distance, and it is ten times bigger (for i.e. neptun) than the colored system ring.

So we have to make a decision...

What can not be overcome:
Orbit aroudn the sun: Maxmimal Size: ONE (1)
Minimum Diameters of any Stellar Object that gets a Mining Base -> Moon: 500km in Diameter. In reality, this woule be about 50...
So..

If Sun can not be as big as she really is, earth can not have a diameter of 10.000km to give then moons a size of about 500-1000km, there is nothing that really can be done here right now..

For a sun in game is about 32 000 in diameter and planets are 2500 and moons about 1000.
Hmmm....

I've sort of skimmed over the thread so I may have missed details, but is it not possible to make the galaxy in general larger? That way you could support larger star systems with larger stars and larger planets and let you get moons above that 500km threshold.

It might mean that hyperspace travel is a little slower as the absolute distance between systems is higher but I think that would be cool regardless.

Droll12 wrote: Sun Mar 05, 2023 12:53 am I've sort of skimmed over the thread so I may have missed details, but is it not possible to make the galaxy in general larger? That way you could support larger star systems with larger stars and larger planets and let you get moons above that 500km threshold.

It might mean that hyperspace travel is a little slower as the absolute distance between systems is higher but I think that would be cool regardless.

I think this would require code modding, not just XML edits.

To make it short, so to speak TLDR:
The orbiting Planets around the sun are locked somehow to the Max Value ~1.
So, inner Planets have an orbit of 0.05, Jupiter and Saturn and Ice Planets go from 0.7 to 1.
Neptun, Uranus, Pluto, hahaha.., would have a place, where right now other suns are..
SO, there is unfortunately no way to compensate that with a bigger Orbit.

And so, yes, that is hardcoded.

What would help is:
Enable us to increase the Orbit-Value around a sun to, lets say 5 or 10,
AND give us the ability to increase the distance between the suns.

AKicebear wrote: Sun Mar 05, 2023 11:32 am

Droll12 wrote: Sun Mar 05, 2023 12:53 am I've sort of skimmed over the thread so I may have missed details, but is it not possible to make the galaxy in general larger? That way you could support larger star systems with larger stars and larger planets and let you get moons above that 500km threshold.

It might mean that hyperspace travel is a little slower as the absolute distance between systems is higher but I think that would be cool regardless.

I think this would require code modding, not just XML edits.

Sounds like something that would only become possible once they de-obfuscate the code like they are eventually planning to. Unfortunate that it's currently not possible though.

Thank you both.