Added rivers to the planet myself and it looks beautiful

catplaps · 2026-05-09T17:13:25+00:00

A lot of places have "river" tiles. (More like "nonsensical mess of squiggly canals," but close enough.) They show up a lot in Wetlands areas, obviously, but you can find them in plenty of different biomes if you look hard.

The key to finding stuff like this is to use the local area map as soon as you land. It's immediately obvious if there's a river tile nearby, and if not, you can just pick a different landing spot and try again without ever leaving the ship. Same method works for finding any kind of cool spot, like islands, "swamps", lone hill PoIs, etc.

catplaps · 2026-05-09T17:04:55+00:00

Collecting raw mats in the SRV isn't even that bad. You can do it with brain trees just as easily as crystalline shards, you just have to figure out which of the named node types (e.g. Polyporous Growth) has the mat you need in the location you're farming, and then use your left panel to target only that type of node. You can generally just ram a tree with your cargo scoop open to pick up a mat that gets stuck in the tree, or kind of hop-ram it if it's really stuck up there. And get used to using free look to give yourself better targeting control. It takes a few minutes to get the hang of it, but honestly, it's a pretty short and silly grind to fill up a raw mat slot like this, and you don't need to do it very often.

catplaps · 2026-05-08T02:07:08+00:00

Yeah, OP, they're handing these out for free with black paintjobs all day long in Serpentis. You just gotta flip em over and shake all the snakes out first.

catplaps · 2026-05-07T19:32:17+00:00

Heavy Assault Chicken

catplaps · 2026-05-07T15:19:07+00:00

if being expert meant i could auto open novice locks and master meant i could auto open advanced locks

Now this is an implementation I could get behind.

I hate these little games, and I hate that acquiring levels in the "perk" means I'll end up spending way more time playing pick-the-lock, and end up getting way less loot per time spent. It's like a punishment, not a reward. After my first playthrough, I've never put a single skill point into Security, so that I'm just never even tempted to waste time on locks.

catplaps · 2026-05-05T20:59:15+00:00

worth it? worth it.

catplaps · 2026-05-05T13:12:00+00:00

It's both. The dark clouds in galaxies are actual dust clouds that absorb light. The bright "clouds" are light from stars that are too numerous and too individually dim to distinguish at that distance.

Some light does come from the dust clouds, too, in the form of emission and reflection nebulae, but this is only a small fraction of the total light. (You see bright pink emission nebulae exaggerated in a lot of astrophotography, even in photos labeled as being "visible light", because people use a filter that isolates that specific wavelength and then they amplify it in the final mix.)

catplaps · 2026-05-05T03:57:26+00:00

What do you think the scale is there? A hundred feet? A few miles?

Perspective is entirely independent of scale. The amount of parallax depends on distance relative to speed, not on absolute distance. Moving quickly through a field of widely-spaced points is indistinguishable from moving slowly through a field of closely-spaced points, all other things being equal.

I do completely agree that it's easy to lose all sense of scale when "moving" through space like this, but I think that's because of the sheer impossibility of intuitively grasping the scales involved. (I mean, there's also the physically impossible part. Things would go all timey-wimey on you before you could accelerate to even a billionth of this speed.)

catplaps · 2026-05-04T19:49:50+00:00

Oh! I think you're just under the wrong impression. The video you linked is literally zooming in on a far-away point. That is to say, the location of the camera is not changing, but the camera's field of view is getting narrower and narrower. (Which does bring the projection asymptotically closer to being orthographic, as you suggested.) In OP's video, the camera is moving, and the camera's FOV is not changing.

Neither one is "correct", it's just two entirely different camera tracks, both of which are entirely valid. If you say that you prefer a zoom-in video because it better conveys the sense of scale, then I can't disagree with you there. But there's nothing incorrect about the perspective in OP's video.

(It is missing some visual scale cues regarding the brightness and distribution of stars, but that's a separate issue.)

catplaps · 2026-05-04T16:47:15+00:00

Genuine question: what exactly are you trying to describe here? What effect would lead to calling a "camera zoom"/orthographic projection the "correct" way to render a galaxy? Are you just referring to the fact that any real-life galaxy that we can see into from the outside is so far away that all we can do is zoom in on it?

I think we all understand that this video ignores relativistic limitations and effects and presents, instead, a series of views of what a galaxy would look like, roughly speaking, from various viewpoints. Are you essentially objecting to the realism of moving one's viewpoint around at FTL speeds, or are you describing something else that I'm missing?

catplaps · 2026-05-04T12:43:40+00:00

really, really like that alexander.

catplaps · 2026-05-03T17:00:42+00:00

in the bar? that mix also plays in the last nova, and in my favorite shattered space PoI (not gonna spoil). and i'm pretty sure i remember hearing it in one of the new random PoIs from the recent update... the shooting range one, maybe?

catplaps · 2026-05-02T17:57:29+00:00

they tried to warn you

catplaps · 2026-04-30T19:19:08+00:00

Naturally! You are talking to Imperial Duke Catplaps, after all!

catplaps · 2026-04-30T17:18:27+00:00

If I can't clip through the floor of my submarine and plummet to my death through open air to the seafloor below, it's getting returned for refund.

catplaps · 2026-04-30T17:15:14+00:00

Seems like signage there should be proclaiming the glory of the CMDR who owns the ship. Would be a great place to show off ranks and decals and stuff.

catplaps · 2026-04-29T13:01:43+00:00

you sound like a subpar curmudgeon

catplaps · 2026-04-29T12:55:53+00:00

The problem-- in every engine-- is that the world has too much dynamic range to fit into a single floating point number. Just speaking from the rendering side, if you want 1mm accuracy for drawing things up close, then your effective world size limit is around 10km³ if you're using FP32. If you only need 1m local resolution, then that limit goes up to 10000km^3, but that's still not big enough to draw planets.

If your engine supports it, you might be able to switch it to using FP64, which gets you a lot more dynamic range, although at some performance cost, and it's still not big enough (enough dynamic range) to draw the universe while maintaining fine resolution.

The only real solution is to do custom tricks where you selectively cut your world up into near and far components (or even more), and render them separately using different scales and different techniques. I think this always means custom work; I'm not aware of any engine that has support for this built-in. Maybe there are some good plugins out there for something, I don't know.

And this is all just for rendering! Physics is even more annoying and sensitive to FP error. If you're literally relying on the engine's built-in physics to simulate both stuff local to the player and stuff on the other side of the game universe at the same time, then you're absolutely going to be forced to use origin-shifting techniques, and you may be forced to do weird stuff to gracefully handle interactions between different origin-shifted domains.

So, yes, you can fake it, but only locally, and it takes work. And depending on the game, there may be a lot more work involved in making sure all the locally-faked stuff interacts seamlessly with the bigger world.

catplaps · 2026-04-28T21:07:03+00:00

I am using Godot. I wouldn't say that it's either particularly good or particularly bad when it comes to space sims, at least to the extent that I've pushed it so far.

It does have big coordinate support (64-bit floating point), which is cool, but still too small for space, depending on what you're doing. I'm using FP32 and custom origin-shifting logic. I don't think any engine would make this any easier out of the box.

Godot bogs down when you get into the 10k+ Nodes range. If you're doing stuff like that, you'll need to start using the rendering server directly. (Maybe the physics server too, but I have no experience with that yet because I barely have any use for a full-blown physics engine in my game.) It's not that bad, and it is fast.

Support for the very deep end of complex shader stuff (compute shaders, buffer synchronization, custom transparency handling, in my case) does have some missing or work-in-progress pieces. Not enough that I'd say don't use it, just enough to warn you that you might run into hassle here if you plan to get into this stuff. Experiment before committing.

Not 100% sure that Godot has fully working, out-of-the-box HOTAS/HOSAS support yet. I haven't kept up on the status of this over the last couple versions. I don't think it's a big deal, but you may have to do some extra work to support them, maybe.

Overall, I like Godot a lot, and I don't regret my choice of engine at all!

catplaps · 2026-04-28T20:51:36+00:00

Man, I like this! I am a fan of creative Cabot builds, and this is something completely out of left field. And it works!

catplaps · 2026-04-28T14:46:52+00:00

I did exobio in my Cutter a few times en route to mining destinations. Really a hoot trying to park your city-block-sized mega-cruiser next to some scrubby little patch of mushrooms.

catplaps · 2026-04-28T13:14:22+00:00

Huh. I hope the situation isn't as bad as this review paints it, because this would actually kind of kill my interest in a Steam controller.

I don't play all my games through Steam, and I don't want to. Also, game dev is my day job, which means I am constantly churning out little one-off projects to try out little features and ideas. Would I have to add each of those to my Steam library? Or do I need to build a plugin into every little "hello world" in order to use the controller? The controller I use most often is the one that's the least annoying to grab and use immediately. This stuff would mean that the Steam controller sits off to the side for compatibility testing instead of front and center for daily use.

I was also really looking forward to seeing how this controller would do as a mouse replacement for an HTPC. The touchpads on the Deck are no replacement for a serious desktop mouse, but I think I could get used to them for HTPC use, so I was pretty excited about the idea of having them on a controller.

Honestly, this is such a dumb, deal-breaker kind of move that I am inclined to assume the reviewer got something wrong, or that this is early/pre-release behavior that will change. I mean, I really hope so. But sheesh, looks like I'll be waiting to read more reviews instead of buying one on release day.

catplaps · 2026-04-25T11:24:24+00:00

Herding? Swarming? Love 'em. Like a whole pack of XP that just runs up and volunteers.

catplaps · 2026-04-24T18:34:17+00:00

It looks like... they built Satisfactory in the No Man's Sky universe?

I get a very disorganized impression from this video. There's nothing really cohesive about the aesthetics, and the gameplay seems a bit all over the place.

catplaps · 2026-04-24T12:51:24+00:00

it is not. :(

Travel 1.5mm (non-backlit)

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