Stellar Engineering

[aurreth]

I have almost managed to get a new star system to appear in game.  The game knows it's there, but attempting to reach it results in "unknown error".

When you add the system, the choice always appears at Sol.  Dunno why.  But it's like when you click on Alpha Centauri and get the pop-up choice for either Alpha or Toliman.  Click on Sol, you get a choice between Sol and "Blank".  Click on "Blank" you get "unknown error".  Oh, and it highlights Sirius when you are doing that.  Very strange.

So basically the game acknowledges the system exists, but it has no idea where to place it.  The location data is not getting injected properly.

[aurreth]

And I did it.  I managed to get a new star system to show up in the game.

Not exactly new, I cloned Barnard's Star (because the system is simple, one star, one planet), but I didn't use an override.  Entirely new FormIDs.  The system shows up at the correct coordinates, and you can jump to it.

A few problems though.  First, can't land on the planet lol  My guess is I've got a bad planet/biome match, should be able to sort that out.

Second, and biggest, I had to start a new game to have it show up.  Looks like there is a function that populates the galaxy map at the start of a game, but then never again after that.  I'm not sure how to locate that, maybe someone like @SKK50 would know.

But, tentatively, it is possible to add new/custom star systems.  Yay! 

[aurreth]

The landing problem appears to be caused by a missing .biom file... which I can't make because at the moment those can't be created or edited.  And I can't use a copy of another planet's, because that information, the link between the planet and the .biom file, seems to be hidden in the unknown houdini data.

[aurreth]

Atmos Handle (PNDT - Body - INAM - Atmos Handle)

This record in PlanetData determines what the sky looks like from the planet surface.  In xEdit it shows up as a decimal number.  For example Jemison has an Atmos Handle of 49168.

That actually refers to a FormID for an Atmosphere record.  Decimal 49168 = Hex 0000C010, the FormID for ATMO_Jemison.

ATMO records are all reflection data, can't do much with them, but the game doesn't care which one you assign to which planet, so you can pretty much give any planet whatever sky you like.

[aurreth]

My mod Rogue Stars - Proof of Concept provides a look at how to structure a custom star system.  It is NOT a usable mod for a number of reasons (outlined in the mod description), but first and foremost of those was that the new system wouldn't appear on the star map unless you started a new game/NG+.  The game wasn't refreshing the map except at the very start of a game.

Something has changed.  I enabled the mod today to do a few experiments and the new system was on the map as soon as the game loaded.  Strange.  Now you can't grav jump to a new system, or, well, any system at all.  Add custom system, game crashes when you grav jump, or change systems by fast travel.

But hey, progress!  Of course I now have to start from the beginning, see if moving systems causes the same problem or if it is caused by introducing new systems.