Welcome to Astropolis!
It's been in the works for a while, but today I'm opening up the development process. Help me build a Kardashev Type II civilization!
Off-Earth mining & manufacturing, interplanetary economies, O’Neill cylinders, AGIs, virtual and other kinds of humans, terraforming, planet harvesting, star lifting, ...and a realistic Dyson swarm!
Homepage: t2civ.com
Twitter: @t2civ
Facebook: /t2civ
I started a dev blog!
This is a walkthrough of the current dev build.
Please drop by if you are interested in space economics, Kardashev civs, and that sort of thing...
oh i thought its a game about becoming Kardashian... my bad
trizZzle I think gray is good, less distraction, especially if there is a lot of data to see
It isn't. It's extremely bland and carries that Windows 95 vibe. Unsaturated is good, but plain gray where all rgb components are the same never looks good in games. Check any decent game that displays a lot of tabular data. They always tint it in one way or another, or employ subtle color coding for at least some basic differentiation and visual variety.
Sorry for butchering your visuals @CharlieW
btw, is the use of satellite data such as pictures of earth, legal? Arent they owned by shutterstock/alamy or something?
kuligs2 with the policy saying "freely available ... except for where copyright is indicated", I would assume "indicated" means the word "Copyright" or 
would be somewhere on the page, but you could always email them for a clarification.
(I kinda doubt that government orgs would sue random indie devs instead of simply asking for the image to be removed, but I'm not from the U.S. so...)
@xyz That looks great!
Boy, I'm going to regret taking that screenshot. It's over the top to show off the GUI capability.
Ah, Kardashian... that's unfortunate.
Commercial use of NASA images is covered here. These images are all part of the I, Voyager core plugin which includes that link and image attribution. TL;DR: Watch out for images of the NASA logo, images of recognizable people, or images that didn't originate from NASA.
Edit for completeness: Many of the world maps in I, Voyager were created by individuals using public NASA images, so the copyright for the derived images belongs to these individuals. Two of these individuals give permission for commercial use (with certain conditions such as attribution) on their websites here and here. There are other world maps derived from Voyager I & II images that were uploaded by god-knows-who in the early '90s and have been at NOAA and NASA since before websites existed. (You can kind of tell if you spend as much time as I have browsing their FTP server files.)
Here's a sneak peek at something coming in July...
This is not an "art" rendering. It's a dynamically evolving object that involves about 100,000 independently moving parts. (Conceptually, it's really >1,000,000,000,000 moving parts, but you can only get so far with shaders and MultiMeshes.)
I hope you all find this more visually pleasing than my last post!
Yes, they are orbiting, and with correct orbital mechanics! It is quite evident when running the program.
Unfortunately, when I try to make a video or gif the compression totally wipes out the effect. I've had this problem also in I, Voyager's Planetarium when visualizing 70,000 asteroids. Looks great on screen but I'm absolutely unable to make a video or gif that doesn't look like dog poo.
CharlieW Looks great on screen but I'm absolutely unable to make a video or gif that doesn't look like dog poo.
You'd have to capture without compression or at a fairly low compression with very good codec at 4 or even 8K and then remaster/sample down to FHD in a video editor I suspect.
It is a game after all.
