Heaven & Earth major glitch

[Frankymole]

A lovely idea - but has anyone noticed the orbit distances for satellites of Gas Giants are totally wrong? (Way too small) - this results in ridiculously short orbital periods and the temperature gains/losses for mainworlds orbiting gas giants being totally wrong

( (they are more common than you'd think).

Is there another Worldbuilder-depth system generator software application out there? Anywhere? I hate the hours/months it takes to handroll a few worlds - I'd rather spend the time fleshing them out culturally and scenario-hookily.

)

PS Is there a later version of Heaven & Earth than 1.0.4 (the last published on its official website)? I know work started again on H&E v2 but that was 18 months ago so I assume the project is dead.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Which version of Heaven & Earth are you running?

All versions of 1.x (1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and the privately released 1.5 Beta, 1.6 Beta, 1.7 Beta, and 1.8 Beta) all have varying degrees of bugs and instabilities.

H&E 1.4 would crash on me during Sector Generation, take 3-5 minutes to "load" the UWP for a single world (because it ran the whole "world generation" process, regardless of whether there was a change or not, as nearly as I could tell), and had other problems, besides.

Book 6's steps 10 and 11 are, apparently, broken. The author of H&E has spent over a year designing H&E2 (in stages), and this area is the toughest of it all, casuing the worst problems. Current thinking is that the "rules as given" may have to be "fudged" in order to get the program to work at all.

However, H&E 2.0 beta is much better than H&E 1.x. The Sector module can generate an entire sector in about 5 seconds on my old 533MHz clunker, and that never crashes.

The Galaxy module is also mostly done.

The System module contains the orbit and placement sections noted above, and it's current version only has limited functionality.

All in all, H&E 2.0 will be a major step up from H&E 1.x.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Frankymole:
A lovely idea - but has anyone noticed the orbit distances for satellites of Gas Giants are totally wrong? (Way too small) - this results in ridiculously short orbital periods and the temperature gains/losses for mainworlds orbiting gas giants being totally wrong

( (they are more common than you'd think).

I believe that's because the actual rules cause those things to happen, rather than any quirk of H&E 1.x. No one said that Traveller's star/world creation systems were perfect.

 

[StuartFerris]

Chris,

Placement of satellite orbits is the one part of System generation that I can say works perfectly. The placement of satellites around gas giants works exactly as dictated in the rule sets. i.e. 2D6 - close on 2-7, far on 8-11 and extreme on 12.

The problem with system generation is during the placement of world orbits and is most likely related to placment of stars. In the latest build (not a Beta) I have has drammatically improved the success rate, but it still fails too often, although the failure now seems limited to Trinary Systems only.

Of course in HE2 you will be able to edit the mainworld orbit which would allow you to move it to a more hospitable orbit.

Stuart

 

[Malenfant]

I kinda wish I still had time and inclination to work on my worldbuilding stuff... I just got totally burned out on it a while back though.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Stuart Ferris:
Chris,

Placement of satellite orbits is the one part of System generation that I can say works perfectly. The placement of satellites around gas giants works exactly as dictated in the rule sets. i.e. 2D6 - close on 2-7, far on 8-11 and extreme on 12.

The problem with system generation is during the placement of world orbits and is most likely related to placment of stars. In the latest build (not a Beta) I have has drammatically improved the success rate, but it still fails too often, although the failure now seems limited to Trinary Systems only.

<snip>

Stuart

Sorry to have been a bit off on my explanation.

 

[BetterThanLife]

1.0.8 seems to work well. THough my 550mhz klunker takes a while to generate a sector. I now have all 4 gateway domain sectors generated.

Not sure where the sector data I got came from, it definitely did not come from Flynn as that set still crashes and burns. Though the set I did find that works appears to have the correct information, from the spot checking I did. Excellent work Stuart. I can't wait for 2.0 to be complete.

(It is after all the worlds themselves that I have always been most interested in, I am not overly concerned with orbital mechanics.

)

 

[The Hinterworlds Rambler]

H&E is awesome. My campaign practically writes itself because of it. It is good to see Technology being used for good.

 

[Frankymole]

But the satellite orbit number is supposed to be the number (multiple) of diameters the satellite is away from the GG. That's the parent's gas giant diameters. This is clearly stated in WBH and Book 6.

I'm using 1.0.4, can anyone check this in the 2.0 beta?

 

[StuartFerris]

I understand what you mean now.

There seems to be an anomally in H&E where the satellite orbit distance calculation isn't correct.

I'm not entirely sure where it goes wrong, but it will be corrected for HE2. However, HE2 isn't at the stage where World Details are calculated.

Well done for spotting this as its gone unnoticed by anyone else for many years.

Stuart

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Frankymole:
But the satellite orbit number is supposed to be the number (multiple) of diameters the satellite is away from the GG.

It's supposed to the number of radii, not diameters.

 

[Frankymole]

Radii? That makes it even worse!!! However my Book 6 says diameters - probably a pre-errata edition. Either way, the distance is not big enough. However, Stuart is on the case! Many thanks, Stuart. It's not earth-shattering as I can fudge around this when I write up the systems for my "pilot's guides" but it's nice to have it in the software files too.