"Need" is a loaded term. We're not trying to create a realistic simulation of the universe. Everything we do still has to work in the context of a game. That said, it is worth trying if you have the inclination. Plenty of stuff in the game came from experiments and crazy ideas.Ittiz wrote:Most of the code I've been looking at changing is the planet generation code itself. One thing I think this game needs, and should be easy to add, is rogue planets. Sure there are brown dwarfs, but there are ten times the number of planets free floating around in space. Not sure how easy they would be to add without messing everything else up though, but this game hasn't been released yet so I don't know how big of a deal that really is.
I think the main difficulty will come from the fairly strong distinction we have between "star" and "planet" right now. Its much less of an issue than it was since stars became terrain bodies. Probably the major problem will come from lighting - without a star, where is the light coming from? There's a protection in place that will trip right now (if no lights, add one) but that's currently only used for hyperspace. Not hard to overcome, I think.
The game will never be "released", though we're definitely working towards stability. What you're proposing will change the universe and so will invalidate old save files. We try not to do that unless we have to, but that's never a reason not to implement something, particularly as an experiment. I'm working on a new savefile format and supporting code to allow upgrading old savefiles, though I'm still not entirely sure a universe change is something it could survive. But yeah, for now just do whatever, we'll worry about that later.