It’s been a while since I’ve done any work on the project, but it now has planets. Star System SS-2, better known as “Star System #2” has five jump gates and two planets, Kayox and Prick…apparently.

Planet generation was fairly easy, at least in this prototype stage. Major hub systems all get a “terrestrial” planet at orbit ring 3 to coincide with the idea of our own system having a terrestrial planet in the third orbit. Hub systems are the most traveled systems because humanity has found habitable planets in those systems. After that, each system has a chance of having 0 to 8 total planets. As we loop through this number, we add a planet record to the database — currently in order with no native gaps, which is something I need to change.

Each orbit, then, determines the type of planet that we get. Orbits 1-4 are terrestrial, which are either rocks or if we’re talking about orbits 3 or 4, temperate. Orbits 5 and 6 are gas planets, and orbits 7 and 8 are ice planets. Once again, this is for convenience and prototyping; eventually, I want to shake things up a bit so that maybe orbits 4 and 8 can have an asteroid belt instead of an orbital path, and I will change the nature of the number of planets and the orbital types — maybe — based on the type of star in that system. Right now both planets are represented as “terrestrial” green, but KAOX is actually a gas planet.

Next step is to get the planet details over to the detail panel when clicked, like what happens to the jump gates when clicked. This will be a bit of a chore as the details in a planet record are different from those in a star system record, so the layout will have to change.