i have finally managed to get enough time to play around with the mars simu project. The tool you made is great and i learned a lot about how Mars settlements could be done.
If i remember, the NASA mentioned they actually found water on Mars, this kind of simulation could become real at some point.
I have a couple of questions regarding the software:
Does the time(this marsian time) is really something agreed by the NASA, something really used?
Does the software works in real marsian time?(real-time)
How can we create a new mission without any previous knowledge of Mars and settlements methods?
Does the software randomly generates disasters, natural effect going on on Mars? I mean how real the simulation is?
thank you very much,
Merry christmas to you all,
cheers
sebastien
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The time system used in the simulation is the "Areosynchronous Calendar", which was written by a friend of mine, Shaun Moss. He basically cobbled it together from a few of the popular Martian timekeeping systems other people wrote, like Tom Gangale's "Darian Calendar" and Bruce Mackenzie's "Metric Time for Mars". There's a whole community of people on the Internet who are working on time systems for other planets.
I liked the logic in the Areosynchronous Calendar and representing the time of day in a metric manner (1 Sol = 1000 millisols) made it much easier to program. Unfortunately I don't think Shaun's website is still functional, so the only description of the calendar is in the MSP user guide:
It should be easy enough to use another Martian timekeeping system internally in the simulation and to create a new/replacement time tool for that calendar, but the simulation uses millisols to represent time internally, so any time system would have to translate that.
Simulation time is compressed compared to real time. The standard compression is set in the simulation.xml config file and is 1000x by default. The user can also adjust the time compression within a range by using the sliding bar at the bottom of the time tool. I don't think there would be any problems with having a 1x or event .1x time compression, just that things would move really slowly in the simulation. Making the time compression too big might cause problems as the settlers would try to do too much per simulation turn.
We don't have natural disasters yet, but we do have a fledgling weather system the I hope we could add giant dust storms to at some point.
Weather systems could affect water and ice deposits as well as create new "dust" resources/hazards/events.
Merry xmas to all the mars simulation users, has anyone else taken up the baton and joined the project. Scud the latest version runs better. WIll submit bugs when i get time ( civ 4 is getting some attention lol)
How is the next version programming coming along
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The simulation's current weather system is very limited (air pressure, temperature, light conditions) and only the light conditions affect things like rover driving, EVA operations and sleep patterns. I would love to add local or global dust storms to the simulation at some point, but I'm not sure what all this would affect in the simulation. Currently light conditions go from 0 (night time with star light) to 1.0 (sunny daylight). Dust storms could subtract a modifier for lighting conditions depending on how bad the storm is, perhaps even producing negative values (blinding conditions) that would slow rover and EVA operations even further and increase the chance of accidents.
I was also thinking of adding a meteorologist job and remote weather stations for predicting storms. Perhaps rover missions could be held off when a storm is at or approaching the mission's path.
Sebastien is a new developer working on the project and I really appreciate his help.
Over holiday vacation, I added a new trade info panel to the mission tool that shows the buy, desired buy, and sell loads when a trade mission is selected. That information really wasn't clearly displayed before so I hope this helps demystify the trading process a bit.
I've started working on the code for adding manufacturing to the simulation. There's on going discussions on the developer mailing list for what manufacturing processes we should have (or at least start with) in the simulation. That is the most difficult part for me as I don't really know what is realistic.
Anyway, things are moving along now that the holidays are over.
Hi. We're almost finished with the coding work for version 2.83 and we're just wrapping up the remaining manufacturing processes.
The settlers are now able to go out on missions to collect Martian regolith and bring it back to the settlement where it can be processed in manufacturing workshops into parts, containers, EVA suits and rovers.
We're hoping to have the new 2.83 release out in the next week or so. For the roadmap after that, we're looking at mining and construction (both adding onto existing settlements and founding new settlements).
Scott Davis
Mars Simulation
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hello all,
i have finally managed to get enough time to play around with the mars simu project. The tool you made is great and i learned a lot about how Mars settlements could be done.
If i remember, the NASA mentioned they actually found water on Mars, this kind of simulation could become real at some point.
I have a couple of questions regarding the software:
Does the time(this marsian time) is really something agreed by the NASA, something really used?
Does the software works in real marsian time?(real-time)
How can we create a new mission without any previous knowledge of Mars and settlements methods?
Does the software randomly generates disasters, natural effect going on on Mars? I mean how real the simulation is?
thank you very much,
Merry christmas to you all,
cheers
sebastien
Hi Sebastien,
The time system used in the simulation is the "Areosynchronous Calendar", which was written by a friend of mine, Shaun Moss. He basically cobbled it together from a few of the popular Martian timekeeping systems other people wrote, like Tom Gangale's "Darian Calendar" and Bruce Mackenzie's "Metric Time for Mars". There's a whole community of people on the Internet who are working on time systems for other planets.
I liked the logic in the Areosynchronous Calendar and representing the time of day in a metric manner (1 Sol = 1000 millisols) made it much easier to program. Unfortunately I don't think Shaun's website is still functional, so the only description of the calendar is in the MSP user guide:
http://mars-sim.sourceforge.net/guide/timetool.html
It should be easy enough to use another Martian timekeeping system internally in the simulation and to create a new/replacement time tool for that calendar, but the simulation uses millisols to represent time internally, so any time system would have to translate that.
Simulation time is compressed compared to real time. The standard compression is set in the simulation.xml config file and is 1000x by default. The user can also adjust the time compression within a range by using the sliding bar at the bottom of the time tool. I don't think there would be any problems with having a 1x or event .1x time compression, just that things would move really slowly in the simulation. Making the time compression too big might cause problems as the settlers would try to do too much per simulation turn.
We don't have natural disasters yet, but we do have a fledgling weather system the I hope we could add giant dust storms to at some point.
Merry Christmas!
Scott Davis
Mars Simulation Project
http://mars-sim.sf.net
scud1@users.sourceforge.net
Weather systems could affect water and ice deposits as well as create new "dust" resources/hazards/events.
Merry xmas to all the mars simulation users, has anyone else taken up the baton and joined the project. Scud the latest version runs better. WIll submit bugs when i get time ( civ 4 is getting some attention lol)
How is the next version programming coming along
Thanks for the feedback.
The simulation's current weather system is very limited (air pressure, temperature, light conditions) and only the light conditions affect things like rover driving, EVA operations and sleep patterns. I would love to add local or global dust storms to the simulation at some point, but I'm not sure what all this would affect in the simulation. Currently light conditions go from 0 (night time with star light) to 1.0 (sunny daylight). Dust storms could subtract a modifier for lighting conditions depending on how bad the storm is, perhaps even producing negative values (blinding conditions) that would slow rover and EVA operations even further and increase the chance of accidents.
I was also thinking of adding a meteorologist job and remote weather stations for predicting storms. Perhaps rover missions could be held off when a storm is at or approaching the mission's path.
Sebastien is a new developer working on the project and I really appreciate his help.
Over holiday vacation, I added a new trade info panel to the mission tool that shows the buy, desired buy, and sell loads when a trade mission is selected. That information really wasn't clearly displayed before so I hope this helps demystify the trading process a bit.
I've started working on the code for adding manufacturing to the simulation. There's on going discussions on the developer mailing list for what manufacturing processes we should have (or at least start with) in the simulation. That is the most difficult part for me as I don't really know what is realistic.
Anyway, things are moving along now that the holidays are over.
Take care,
Scott Davis
Mars Simulation Project
http://mars-sim.sf.net
scud1@users.sourceforge.net
so hows the simulation coming along now any new realises on the horizon for us interested peeps
Hi. We're almost finished with the coding work for version 2.83 and we're just wrapping up the remaining manufacturing processes.
The settlers are now able to go out on missions to collect Martian regolith and bring it back to the settlement where it can be processed in manufacturing workshops into parts, containers, EVA suits and rovers.
We're hoping to have the new 2.83 release out in the next week or so. For the roadmap after that, we're looking at mining and construction (both adding onto existing settlements and founding new settlements).
Scott Davis
Mars Simulation