Hi. I haven't posted in a while, though some of you have probably seen plenty of comments by me regardless.
I was away for so long for two major reasons. One was of course school, nothing new on that front. The other was the fact that my new and very powerful laptop actually allows me to play resource-intensive games, so I was finally able to play games that I've always wanted to play after so many years of only being able to see them on youtube videos due to my devices not being good enough. Some of these include:
- BeamNG.drive, a very detailed car sandbox game with very realistic deformation in crashes and loads of customizability in terms of vehicle parts and also due to quite a large modding community. Practically endless fun for me and my monkey brain, and certified absolute peak.
- Automation: The Car Company Tycoon Game. Lets me make my own cars and engines, from the mundane to the insane. And it can export those to BeamNG as well. Once again, absolute peak.
- F-Zero GX, played on emulator. A GameCube sci-fi racing game from 2003, but it held up extremely well despite having some noticable flaws. Banger soundtrack, insane speeds (1800 km/h+), great level design, limited but "good enough" custom vehicle cration ability, and a lot more slams it into the easiest certified absolute peak ever.
But alas, after some time I of course started to get bored of those (and others) as well, so I eventually started returning to good old JNO/SR2 once again. I've started "cooking" a bit, but it's more like preheating the pot or something... I'm not good at metaphors. I've got two things to show you for now.
First, progress is coming along well on the SV95 "Macrocosmos-X", which some of you may have seen sprinkled into other posts. Most of the body is done, just need to work on flight dynamics, a few miscellanous stuff, and then a bunch of testing and fine-tuning. I'll say, one good thing about this game not being updated (since the devs are busy on SP2) is that things stay constant for longer, allowing this version of JNO/SR2 to be a stable "platform" or "benchmark" where everything is easily measurable and readily comparable without fear of a new version breaking something. While I'd love to release many things in this state of the game, I'm ultimately still too busy with stuff to do so. We all know how long it took for the final version of the SV80 to come out, and that was rushed, basically given up on, and, ultimately, flawed.
Anyways, time for some pictures, starting with the exterior.
I've also been given permission to use (someone)'s VTOL hover & level assist system, meaning that after some modifications and adaptations the SV95 will be easier to use in VTOL mode than any VTOL craft I've ever made... which there aren't many of BECAUSE WE STILL DON'T HAVE STABILITY-ASSISTING GYROSCOPES IN THIS GAME!!!
Anyways, interior pictures. It has a mildly "functional" interior, complete with a basic Zenith figurine that's mostly lore-accurate though some simplifications were made to reduce the part count (it's already above 600 by now, but I plan to create multiple lower part count versions of the SV95).
Unfortunately I got to mention this because someone will definitely point it out: a thing that's been bothering me a lot is the joystick. There are bound to be people who will think it looks... sus. It obviously isn't, it's just that the internet is so dirty-minded that not even industrial grade cleaning products and hospital levels of sterilization would have an effect on it. I really don't know how I could improve upon that to reduce the chances of misunderstandings.
Finally, the SV95 also gets some attachments to use similar to the new Comet Head (which is also undergoing a revamp, by the way). Currently, there is a basic cargo unit, passenger carrier, sensor array for science stuff, and a multipurpose pneumatic launcher. The latter two are nonfunctional and decorative only, but I do also plan on adding one or two more attachments to use.
Moving onto the planet building stuff, something that I am generally more well-known for.
Here is Ecanis, a complete from-scratch overhaul of Karma from the Mortan System, which will replace it in version 2.0 — as a result, it is in real scale rather than the game's default 1/5th scale celestial bodies. Its radius is 2442 km, slightly larger than Callisto, but with a much higher density leading to a surface gravity of 2.943 m/s^2.
It looks a lot like Mars, but this is due to it using similar shades of a desaturated reddish-orange color to — and sometimes directly copied over from — the original, which, in this case, ended up being similar to Mars' color.
The surface is rather bland right now, but it does feature some pretty bumpy terrain due to a way I made the smudge noise.
As for the yellow rock thing? It's still been preserved, just in smaller amounts. Those tectonic stretches you see on the surface are where they can be found.
The rocks were previously being mined by some aliens. While they left a long time ago and took home most of their structures, they forgot some of them and left them behind, never to return again.
Ecanis's surface isn't all bumpy plains, though. There are some mountain ranges scattered about, though due to the nature of real scale planets they aren't as impressive as, say, on Droo or Taurus.
Finally, I'll leave you with the map (once the image hosting site decides it wants to connect to the dang network) and the description copy-pasted over.
A fairly large moon with a unique reddish color and a fairly thick atmosphere. Under its surface is a global deposit of a yellow element, a mix of sulfur, copper, and possibly gold, making it very valuable for mining. This was previously mined by extraterrestrials that are thought to have come from the SD 121 system, but after a major infection began they had to leave Ecanis. This was initially thought to have originated on the moon or from the yellow ore, but after discovery of a few canisters containing samples of the now-deceased viruses, it was revealed that the mining operations had been sabotaged.
Most traces of the aliens' mining operations are now gone, but some structures still remain within tectonic stretch marks on the moon which exposed the yellow element. A few were removed and put in museums, but most remained on Ecanis, freely visitable by anyone who has the means to get to them.
Ecanis is also called Karma in the languages of many human-allied aliens, after the English word used for usually near-instantaneous consequences of actions, which alludes to the former assumption of the origin of the outbreak.
@Zenithspeed good luck!