Uncharted

[Sombs]

With the recent increase of people returning and being interested in system development, notably @Antonio and @Petitioner, I think it may or may not be interesting to share some details about the systems I made for my Uncharted System story series. To put it short, when my main characters left with Battleship Apahanta and a few smaller ships, they left Sirius through Omicron Chi into the unknown systems beyond the Edge Worlds and the Omegas. That way I could do some cool stuff in terms of system development and show it off with the gifs I usually use(d) at the beginning and at the end of story posts.


Freelancer has only so many documentations on system development, and most are either lost to the depth of the internet or kept hidden, the latter I am guilty of myself, since I prefer to teach people who ask nicely instead of providing materials openly to otherwise unthankful people. Could be seen as toxic, but really, this is Discovery. I was given enough reasons.


Nevertheless, let me share some stuff about the systems I made for the Uncharted Systems stories. Maybe it helps or inspires people!

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Uncharted System 18 (US18) was a system that I did about one year after leaving Discovery. Given how much I enjoyed doing systems for stories, I still had the urge to play around with FL Mod Studio and create some cool stuff. It is relaxing, really, and sometimes, it really gets very cool results.

US18 was really just a wide open system with a custom starsphere (New Berlin's starsphere but all textures got turned blue) and a large belt of manually placed asteroids. One of my biggest complaints about system design in Discovery is that we do not get to see sub-biomes, as in, little outstanding regions inside a system. Everything is either empty space, a nebula, an asteroid field or both of the latter. If you have seen one nebula, you have seen them all. If you have seen one asteroid field, you have seen them all. All pretty generic, with barely any place that has some level of recognizable element to it. There were some attempts to change that, as for example, Omega-49, before it got turned into Omega-48, has a little zone in a nebula with big ice spires.

My Laptev Proposal later got a bit more playful with that idea. For those who do not remember the Laptev system, it was a smallcraft-only system connecting Bering with the darkmatter region in Kepler/Galileo. It later got cannibalized by Puerto Rico.

In my proposal, the Bering half of the system was fire-themed, so there environmental storytelling showed big rocks spitting out smoking smaller rocks of molten rock, and the area generally felt dusty and dirty.

The center of the system was composed of giant rocks, showing that some planetary collision had happened in the system, showering the entire system in fragments. I myself am a big fan of the use of big asteroids, even though they do not have a perfectly fitting hitbox. They work well with asteroid fields and nebulae, generally with everything that limits the vision a bit to create a feeling of density.

The darkmatter part of the system was supposed to feel cold, and the asteroids would reflect that by having random ice spires growing out of them. Laptev essentially was a system of fire and ice, despite being really just a giant asteroid field, a nebula with a little planet and a pink dwarf sun.

The little playful biomes, however, set it apart from being just another Tau-23 in a different color.

What was the deal about US18, then, though? Just a loooong, long field of manually placed asteroids, from really big ones that got clumped together, to many smaller ones. What does that tell the player exploring it? Some giant ice rock moved through the system, and bit by bit, fell apart. The two suns of the system heated all the ice up, so the longer a chunk was exposed to the sun, the more brittle it got, generating little ice fields from big rocks.

Interesting for system developers: I increased the visual drawing distance of all rocks massively. The system had about 1500-2000 rocks manually placed, and while old PCs from the Freelancer era would have struggled with that, that is something even my horrible rig had no issues with, even while recording. The average system has 300-400 objects (mostly way less). If carefully used, there is MUCH room for detailing in terms of system development, be it for environment or station design, although the latter is a bit less important since most stations do not follow any kind of design philosophy and feel usually just random and the result of whatever developer was playing around (the notable exception being the Zoner freeports and most Junker stations).

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Uncharted System 32 (US32) was heavily inspired by me modding Subnautica and playing Barotrauma. The level editor for Subnautica is very, very strongly limited, so I felt rather unhappy with my results. That kind of prompted me to just do a system themed after the claustrophobic/thalassophobic depths of the ocean, with big rifts and cliffs all over the place.

US32 was a system-wide nebula with a dark blue nebula, a bit like the old Iota nebulae without the colorful gases. In the center of the system was a huge, huge cluster of arch rocks, aligned to create the feeling of an underwater cavern or chasm.

Because the arch asteroids are extremely low in polygon count, and the nebula limiting the drawing distance to hardcoded 40K radius (that is the bubble that appears around the camera when you are inside a nebula - outside it is the system background with 500K radius) the system did not eat up any performance at all despite the high amount of asteroids in a cluster. The nebula had a frequent thunderstorm lighting up the background in layers, creating extra depth to the scene.

One notable thing about dark nebulae is that you can use local lighting to make things stand out a bit. I did that with ice crystals growing in a ravine.

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Uncharted System 34 (US34) was just a little lazy project that resulted out of me wanting to build a snowman in Discovery. A year or two before I already had created a pirate asteroid base that had the vague shape of a skull, hiddein in Omega-41.

I gave the system a subtle custom background, placed a few nice suns and a HUGE ring planet with big rocks in the ring. The RP thread of the system was all about my character Sombra secretly using one of the Apahanta's fighters to push asteroids into each other to create a giant snowman, because her boyfriend was sad about never having gotten to build a snowman before they left Sirius. What Sombra did inRP, Sombs did OORP, too.

So, yeah. In roleplay, if you want to acknowledge it, just 34 systems away from Sirius is a giant asteroid snowman.

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Uncharted System 37 (US37), also nicknamed as "The Aquarium", was born out of the desire to test the limits of nebulae. Instead of having a system-wide nebula, I wanted a system surrounded by nebula, as if the sun created a bubble inside a big blue nebula. I created a custom background for that one, too, to blend in with the nebulae. The general idea was to create a bubble of around 20 nebulae that would enclose the system with some huge nebulae in the outer layer and some smaller, similar nebulae in an inner layer, creating the feeling of three-dimensional depth. The outer nebulae were darker, showing that the light of the sun was not reaching them, while the nebulae close to the sun would be bright and blue.

The system itself was super empty - really just a sun, the nebulae and a few planets to show how huge the system actually was.

Despite the big amount of poofs (2D nebula billboards) from both the nebulae and the wisps (nebula-ish clouds without an actual nebula) inside the system, my old potato PC handled it well - mostly because the system rather used big poofs than many poofs. If you look at the video, you will notice that there are at any point only around 50-80 poofs visible, which is easily handled.

So instead of just one big nebula, we can easily create a cluster of nebulae to give it a lot more density and atmospheric value.

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Full Video

Uncharted System 38 (US38) is the latest system I created. For this one, I wanted to really crank up the limits of the FL engine and see when things would start to actually lag. For that, I created a visually very cool nebula effect without an actual nebula by having high-transparency wisps in high numbers and multiple layers, essentially creating the feeling of a thick dust cloud - but you can see stuff in the distance.

The system uses the background I made for Thuringia, which never made it into the game.

The system itself contains a soft red giant, three planets and, well, 4000 rocks, of which the majority are the flat ones we know from Omicron Theta. They are ideal for creating platforms, little asteroid balconies.

The rock formations I created here are something I did many years ago already for a different system.



Essentially, you get the feeling that these rock formations are not natural, possibly related to the people that created the nomads?

... No, they are natural. Freelancer told us about organic bacteria that lives in nebulae and builds colonies on asteroids, causing them to get formed into flat platforms. The environmental storytelling here would hint at the same thing happening here, of bacteria having eaten away at those rocks for a time frame even longer than... the next patch release.

The result are rock spires with these platforms all around them, and some platforms not even having any spires left. Some huge rocks even contained caverns with platforms inside them.

The dust cloud effect was created with five layers of wisps in one file. I also increased the drawing distance of the rocks, so you could see them from anywhere, which eventually hit the point where I got little lags. For the sake of taking gifs, that was okay, but that is nothing we can do to the mod, at least not without optimizing things. Three layers of dust wisps suffice, the drawing distance is reduced in general and all that alone already reduces the lag heavily.

One thing to note when it comes to wisps is that they vanish very early at the edge of the screen. Wisps are client-side 2D billboards that are, like dust particles/effects, locally and only in front of the camera. If you move the camera, they will vanish when close to the edge of the screen, meaning the edge of the screen will always have a rather nasty, wispless area. You can avoid that with tiny wisps in high numbers but that can cause lag. Generally, it works well in dark systems or inside of nebulae, but not when there is a higher contrast.

I used this method for the recreation of the green 2016 Omicron Delta.

You can notice subtle green wisps all over the system, moving with the camera. Another layer of wisps appears when entering the ring around the sun, to give that muddy, dusty molten rock vibe.

One thing notable is that 2D billboards and any generated rocks are a bit glitchy when it comes to wisps. The shader of FL can't handle that really well, so if you look at the lava rocks in the distance, you will notice that the wisps in front of them are just ignored, not causing them to blend in. For that, it is just better not to use glowing textures and generated rocks unless they can blend in that way.

Well, that is all about it for now. I got super rusty in terms of system development. I noticed that yesterday when I streamed stuff to Antonio. We did a little race track and a minefield maze. Despite not playing on the server, I still love system development. Creating things is just so much fun, really. I hope Antonio will provide you with fun stuff in the future.





He better does.

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Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

Templates: Character | Transmissions

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[jammi]

These all look amazing! Really interesting to get an insight into the design process as well, where the composition of a system is more than just deciding where solar objects go, but also considering how they'll interact with light sources, effects and shaders to convey the correct atmosphere and context.

I'm extremely out of the loop on Discovery, are any of these in the mod presently?

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News article library, feedback and content requests.

[Sombs]

Apart from some OSC infocards, the Hackert Station wreck in Alaska and a few smaller environmental additions, none of my stuff is in the mod. The majority of things I did I never submitted, they were really just for toying around in my dev builds.

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Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

Templates: Character | Transmissions

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