RockPaperShotgun on Elite:Dangerous Alpha play test

[impaktor]

The Braben interview-link from the newsletter yesterday was wrong. Here's the correct one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6tahRbkaq8

Around 15:00 he starts talking about having an accurate night sky. Pretty cool. Also some stuff about future ships and space stations, etc.

[FluffyFreak]

Night sky stars: I've talked about it before, and started work on it, but it's not going in until way after the turrets and gas giant rendering stuff.
There's this post over on the SSC forum which detail converting Sector co-ords to Polar which might prove handy for projecting things onto the HUD / screen and night sky.

Does anyone know of any public databases of stars?
Does anyone want to try downloading them and describing the format that they are in? I just mean in plain English not with code.
It would be handy because it should be ... relatively easy, to parse them if they are in an amenable format and convert them into Sector information that the game can use via the CustomSystems interface.

[impaktor]

Does anyone know of any public databases of stars?

I though we already used hipparchus star catalogue for the galaxy map, or is that just for the 424 stars in the local_stars.lua, I guess.

Anyway, finding and parsing star catalogue isn't too difficult.

[FluffyFreak]

I think that our biggest issue is that we only need it to give us the star but that CustomSystem were mostly built by hand. I don't think we supported adding just the star and then generating the system randomly.

[impaktor]

in scripts/parse_* there are scripts that do magic on catalogue info, and polar coordinates, etc.

I could see if I can dig up some useful data, but I suppose this is in the far future.

[impaktor]

This video from the #20 E:D Newsletter shows some very fun gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvl7uaR1sfI

[impaktor]

I didn't know Frontier was a listed company. Not doing very well at the moment, it seems:

frontier-developments-red-revenues-fall

http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/FDEV:LN

[DraQ]

in scripts/parse_* there are scripts that do magic on catalogue info, and polar coordinates, etc.

I could see if I can dig up some useful data, but I suppose this is in the far future.

It is also important to not have bright stars where there should be none.