Connecting Stars in Galaxy Forge....

You don't need to, they're all connected by default.

If all are connected by default I hope there is an option to remove the lines or add lines to planets far away.

I don't think it's possible to make all stars not intertwined, nor is it possible to make phase lanes between planets in different star systems - but you can do that with wormholes.

What do you mean?

You can jump from any star, to any star. That was a design decision, and has been locked for a while.

That said, the ability to jump from a planet in one star system to a planet in a another does exist -- but you have to add the lines in question "by hand".

how do you do this? I have made a map with several stars, each of them has a wormhole, but when I try and link the wormholes together it wont let me, I am even doing it by hand. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

EOmega

What he means is that you will have to open the GALAXY file in notepad and add the connections yourself.

Further, if you want to remove the feature where once you research interstar jump tech you can jump to any star, just don’t have any phase lanes connecting any of your planets to a star.

In order to specify the connections in notepad, scroll down to the line:

interStarConnectionCount 0

For example, if you wanted to add a phaselane between planet 2 located at star 2 to planet 5 located at star 4, then the following text would work. Make sure you alter the line interStarConnectionCount x, where x = the number of interstar connection points sepcified.

interStarConnectionCount 1
interStarConnection
starIndexA 2
planetIndexA 2
starIndexB 4
planetIndexB 5
spawnProbability 1.0
type "PhaseLane"

In the above example both planets are terran and if you wanted to connect wormholes, just change the line type "PhaseLane" to type "Wormhole", whilst making sure that the planets connected are specified as wormholes.

On a related note, mod tools are to be released soon so it is hopeful that interstar phaselanes 'proper' (as in one of the beta versions), will be possible.

so you cant delete phase lines between planets in a system if the planet has 3 neighbors it has to be connected to all 3? it would be better if you could delete a few of them to have fewer lanes to a planet (but at least 1!)

I am not sure what you are talking about here. You can specify the phase lanes as you see fit, even not have any at all!

I could download it today to test it and you can set the lanes how you want it.
I thought you can't (see first post on top).

Ok i made a very simple test map.

I made 1 terran planet, connected to a wormhole(planet 8) on star0

I made 2 wormholes(planet 5) connected to (planet 9) in star1

I made a terran planet, connect to a wormhole (planet 10) in star2.

none of these connect to the actual star.

I put in

interStarConnection
starIndexA 0
planetIndexA 8
starIndexB 1
planetIndexB 5
spawnProbability 1.0
type "Wormhole"
interStarConnection
starIndexA 1
planetIndexA 9
starIndexB 2
planetIndexB 10
spawnProbability 1.0
type "Wormhole"


I then loaded it up on single player, teched to wormhole research and tried to jump from star 0 to star 1.. and the ship just sits there staring at the wormhole. I tried a frigate , a scout and a capital ship. None would enter the wormhole.

I don't know why this wouldn't work as per your suggestion, but i did notice when i saved it on wordpad it warned about saving as a txt file and removing formatting...?!

Ok I figured it out!!!!

man this thing chapped my ass because NO WHERE is there documentation on what the numbers actually refer to.

....

i'll try to describe it so those who come after can make wormholes work without the headake

Create a map with galaxy forge it names the stars and planets. the thing is when you erase a planet or star that name does not get recycled and just continues on from where it left off. Thats fine and all but its totally decieving.

firstly


star0
planet0
planet1
planet2

star1
planet3
planet5
planet7

star3
planet 9
planet 11
planet 12

when i did it by the names of the starts i was making wormhole references like

star0
planet2
star3
planet11

meaning in star0 there is a wormhole at planet 2 that connects to planet11 in star 3... but it would never work!!


ok.. see now there is a few discrepencies in the list, showing where i have deleted stars.

the first thing to note the names galaxy forge designates the planets/stars are simply tags. They are not the star/planet iden. And no where in the txt file which makes up the map is there a designator for what their iden ACTUALLY is.

it is simple, the program counts from the start to the finish. firstly it will count hte stars seperate from the planets, and then it will count the planets per group per star, starting over at 0 on the next group of planets in the next star.

ie

star0
planet0
planet1
planet2

star1
planet0
planet1
planet2

star2
planet0
planet1
planet2

so when you make a wormhole reference you have to use its ACTUAL input, remember in this demonstration the star/planets are the same as the ones designated by galaxy forge, just without their stupid useless name tags.

so

star0
planet2
star2
planet2

would be the CORRECT wormhole designation to actually connect the two wormholes together.

This would create a two way jump point with instant travel speed between TWO wormhole units.

what I also found out while figuring this out was that if you connect a wormhole to a planet, instead of a second wormhole, is that you create a 1 way wormhole. The units spawn on the edge of the planet, right beside where a colonizer ship would have to be to colonize. and in turn, have no ability to jump back to the originating wormhole.

way way to much time decoding this stupid puzzle, but damn it was a fun accomplishment eitherway.

I just realized how to fix a problem I was having with getting ships to star jump. The ships would set the path to jump to the next star but would just keep flying around the sun without leaving. This happened with the research to star travel already completed.

I finally realized that if the radius around the stars in Star Forge intersect, the ships won't jump. In other words make sure that your stars are far enough apart that the star radius' (circles that show up around each star) don't intersect.

I didn't know this since I hadn't yet played multiple star maps but ships travel way faster when they go from star to star. You don't need them to be close together. In fact they can be really far apart. I would go for a distance of at LEAST 100. Mine was what looked like about 1000 away since I wanted it to take time to star travel. FYI you can't measure that, I'm just estimating.

Load some of the bigger maps like gateway to get a better idea.

To try to save some confusion I'm going to reexplain the process of making an interstellar worm hole connection. This information is posted here already but I think what is posted here is misleading as the code presented simply doesn't work. It does outline the concept correctly but its syntax is incorrect. Here is a working snippet of code.


To explain this directly, this creates two interstellar wormhole connections. One from star 1 planet 16 to star 2 planet 7, and another from star 1 planet 17 to star 2 planet 4.

To add an interstellar Wormhole connection simply find your interStarConnectionCount line and set its value to how many connections you wish to make. Then you use the following lines to specify the originating planet by star then planet index. Finally you set the destination star and planet via their indexes. Lastly you set your spawn probability, more than likely always going to be 1, and set the type to Wormhole.

Now, this sounds more complicated than it actually is. However, finding the correct index value is a misleading process. This value cannot be found in galaxy forge. I cannot overstate this enough. The only way to find the correct value is to count how many stars you have from the top of the file down, using a text editor on the galaxy file. Then once you have your star index, within your star entity you will have all your planet entities. These must be counted from the top of the star entity down starting with 0.

For example, if you have 2 stars your indexes for those stars will be 0 and 1. If each star has 4 planets each of these would have indexes from 0 to 3. Wormholes are simply planets as far as the engine is concerned.

So if you have a wormhole that is located in the first star on the third planet its index would be star 0, planet 2.

To create an in system worm hole you simply find the connectionCount for the appropriate star and increment that value by how many connections you want to add. Galaxyforge will have created a number of connections for you, one for each phase lane. You only have to create the wormhole connections manually. So if you wanted to create an in system set of wormholes you would be adding 1 connection between the 2 planets (wormholes). These connections are star specific so make sure you stick them under the correct star entity.



This code would create a wormhole connection between planet 1 and 5. Now, one of these planets must actually be a wormhole for this to work. If you make one side of your wormhole another planet type you have just created a one way wormhole. This one way concept works on the interstellar holes as well.

Both the interstellar and local connections can be made to work like normal phase lanes if you set the type to "Phaselane". Galaxyforge is good enough to make your local phase lanes for you so I don't think you'll want to be doing this by hand. However, you can create an interstellar phase lane just like the interstellar jump holes. Just change the type and your ships can happily fly from one star to the other via a normal phase lane.

I want to thank those that came before me in this thread. Without their input I wouldn't have gotten this to work at all. Happy mapping everyone!

psa21 thank you for figuring out that problem with ships not jumping. I was getting wicked frustrated with that. My stars were definately too close.

and thanks all for the interstellar phaselanes. i is gonna make a FreeSpace inspired map.

Now if only they would introduce these methods into the next release of galaxy forge!

Silly question, but is there any way to disable travel between stars and so that only Wormholes can be used? I'd like to make a maps with strategically placed central star which players must control to access other stars.

Yes, just dont add connections from your planets to your stars, and add wormholes to connect them instead.
I use this method because imo ships getting that close to a star seems a bit retarded and wormholes are instant, which can be nice for distant stars.

LOL! Why didn't I think of that!

Thanks ....

Please, Add more functionality to GF for the notepad impaired.   

Wormhole to Wormhole connections built-in are a must.

I think it's a little bit sad that Notepad has more functionality then the forge editor. =(

You can already do in-system wormhole to wormhole. It's inter-system wormholes that are the problem.

But yes, I agree that GalaxyForge needs this capability added post haste.

After nasty minidump errors i got the things working. The LocalBubble map should be viewable in the download section in a few days.

Facts:

4 stars, 71 planets, 3 wormholes lead to a single non-wormhole magnetic cloud

You know I'm just happy that sins uses a human readable format for its maps. Editors are great but they tend to be inefficient in terms of actual file crafting. The ability to notepad tweak a map has benefits beyond imagination.

Please Ironclad improve the editor, but thanks for having a great design that doesn't demand one.

Hmmm after spending ages tryin to get this to work I'm at the minidump error stage,
what did you do in the end to get it working??

Please Help I'm gettin so damn frustrated with this!

What exactly are you trying to do?