Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
Will it include realistic oribital placement systems, too?
It'll use the CT system, but without the extremely big orbits (which are just silly, I think).
</font>[/QUOTE]How unfortunate. Stuart Ferris, author of Heaven & Earth 2 (and World Builder Deluxe and Heaven & Earth 1 before it), says that the toughest programming feat of the entire project is getting the oribtal placement to work right. In his words, essentially, "The printed rules are broken, and not meant to actually work for anyone not using pencil and paper and fudging as they go (becasue they don't work); they certainly aren't meant to be programmed into a computer." (I'm paraphrasing his words here, not quoting direclty.) Let us also note that Jim V., author of Galactic, didn't bother to use them at all (he probably found the same problem), and invented his own system orbit-generation process.
Originally posted by Malenfant:
I should also note that we don't really know what a "realistic orbital placement" system would
Ahem! I didn't mean realistic in terms of actual cosmic accuracy. I meant realistic as in terms of a set of rules that "worked" realistically, as opposed to not working at all (see above).
Originally posted by Malenfant:
So long as the implementation wasn't buggy, yes it would rock 
??
H&E 2 is *titanically* better than H&E 1. It is a complete ground-up re-write of H&E 1. Stuart himself admits that the gradual add-on coded-as-he-went in bits and pieces method used to create H&E 1 (along with several upgrades that were patched on) contributed to its slowness and bugginess. He also points to the incredible difficulties in programming the orbital generation and placement systems as the main intermittent crash bugs in H&E 1. And to top that off, it was incredibly slow.
H&E 2 does not have these problems.
It is incredibly fast now (generate a whole sector in less than 5 seconds on a 533MHz machine).
The UI is great. You can cut and paste worlds between hexes, cut and paste sectors, regenerate worlds, apply TNE knock-on effects, apply alien module knock-on effects during generation, manually adjust AU distances on orbits, provides places to keep sector, subsector, and world notes. Gaaaah . . . I can't describe it all!
It is not perfect, of course (polity control is weak, very weak; but then, none of the available programs handle this well in my opinion). But it's free!
Once the final is released I think it will absolutely blow you away.
Here, look at this dot-map of the Imperium and a sector map of Corridor, both produced by H&E.
Imperial Dot Map (180kb)
Heaven & Earth 2: Galaxy Module Beta: Imperium Dot-Map
Corridor Sector (210kb)
Heaven & Earth 2: Sector Module Beta: Corridor
Note carefully the "clock" style world colors, part green, part blue, indicating visually the percentage of land vs. water (all blue = water world; all green = desert; empty circle = asteroid belt). Yes, there are no borders (that part of the Sector Module is as yet not implemented).
