[2023] Will you fix the sun?

The sun previously followed a Geocentric model. In other words, the planet was the center of the universe, with the sun following a predefined path around that with only an angle against the horizon being changed.

This became considerably harder to maintain, at the same time as providing additional functionality. For example, the location of skybox objects such as Jupiter when on Europa, or Earth when on the Moon - were completely wrong and totally in contrast to what would make even a modicum of sense in real life.

So we have moved to a simulated Heliocentric model, where the sun is the center, and bodies in the orbit around that following Kepler's Laws of Planetary motion.

Not only does this allow us to do a lot of cool things, it also solves a *massive* amount of bugs and problems with our existing skybox objects. This somewhat parallels real life, where it became increasingly hard to justify the geocentric model - with very elaborate and complex explanations for the apparent movement of orbital bodies. Kepler's Laws of Planetary motion are actually very simple to express.

If you would like to play on the old version, change your beta branch to "prerocket" and you can continue.
Additionally, we have no DRM in the game. So you could copy the files anywhere and continue playing forever, even if steam and our studio goes away.

Originally posted by MrBigras: @Rocket, you should have said, that in effect, by being Heliocentric, it's the first time in the game that the sun is actually "fixed". 😂

yes actually, that would probably have been a helpful way to describe it.

As you noted, there was no simulation before - just a light strapped to the ceiling. Now there is a simulation.

The simulation speed is scaled so that a day is 20 minutes for each world. So on venus the celestial simulation is sped up. You can see these values, such as the sidereal year, on the new world info screen.

For Venus the sidereal year (which is the same as a Venusian year as it orbits the sun) is slightly less than 20 minutes.

The day length is supposed to be 20 minutes. Any deviation of that is a bug.

Additionally, we plan to allow you modify the length of day at some point in future as well

Note for me the day length on Venus is 20 minutes. But a bug makes this not so for you.

So we have already solved it, and I explained how above. However due to a bug somewhere, it is not working for you.

In game (and software development in general really), there are often bugs that only appear for some users. This is the source of a common programmer meme “it works on my machine”.

Such bugs are often harder to solve because the first step of solving a bug is getting a “repro” I.e being able to reproduce it. Then you can test the fix to ensure it is fixed.