Getting close/mid binaries to work well as Orbiter solar systems would remain a problem. Even using a planet as a stand-in for one star, IIRC there are bugs in how Orbiter handles a planet orbiting the pair (it ends up orbiting as if it were just orbiting one star).
I wouldn't call it a bug, Orbiter just wasn't made with the possibility to simulate binaries in mind. So, the center of gravity of a system remains fixed at its center. The only possibility around that I could see is defining the epicenter of the two stars as the "sun" without a texture, and making the stars as well as the planets orbit that epicenter. That's a very poor excuse for a binary system though.
Otherwise, if one would only want to make ONE system (or maybe two) he could write a dll for the planets. That's not an option for my project, of course.
Looking at this project, one thing that concerns me (and indeed is also a problem in something I have ambitions to do myself), is the problem of getting a good blend between real and generated regions. The brightest stars you can detect at intergalactic distances, but the dimmer ones are barely visible when you're a few light-decades away from them. So we can be certain we have all the information on bright stars for quite a great distance, but as you go to dimmer and dimmer stars the radius in which we can be sure we have them all shrinks. In fact, there's a fair number of dim stars which we know of only by their gravitational effects on stars they're in a binary system with. The problem is with joining a generated map with real stars in such a way that the distribution looks natural, smooth, and realistic.
Well, Once there is a beta (still a far way of), everyone can evaluate the results, and we'll see if it's a big issue and if yes how to correct it.
Anyways, I'm still bothering with the moons currently. I knew this would be a challenge, since the only way stargen produces moons is to check weather two planets collide, which is not the case very often. Another problem is that moons form not on the basis of a single model, but have several means of creation.
Gas Giants manage to hold their own accretion discs, and many moons condense out of that disc. I am currently playing with re-using the accrete algorithm to simulate the accretion of moons around gas giants. Considering that, I have two questions:
Is the planets SOI a viable outer limit for a moon being formed, or is it impossible for a moon to form at the SOI's edge?
What would be a sensible inner limit? Obviously no moon will form within the radius of the planet, but the dust in too close an orbit usually get's condensed to rings, not to moons. Got something to do with gravity and tidal disruption I hear, but what would be a sensible inner limit for a moon being formed?
Then there's the other two models by which moons get usually formed, impact and capture. While impact with other planets is simulated by stargen, capture is not. I'd love to create a few randomly generated objects and see if they get captured, but it's a bit above my head. Instead, I guess I'l just calculate how probable it is for a planet to capture an object and then assign a few moons based on those probabilities (that is for anything not being a gas giant, of course). However, I'm not quite sure what properties deserve consideration in this. Obviously, the planets mass and that of nearby planets (i.e. the radius of a planets sphere of influence and the strength of the influence). Are there other things that should be taken into account for such a calculation?
Also, I'm still running after a few "bugs" in accrete (seems not quite fair to call them bugs, since everything works fine in the scope accrete was created for), one of them being that the density of a planet seems to be calculated only by it's mass. leaves my with some very small "rocky" planets whose rocks seem to be less dense than air... :blink: Oh well, I'll be getting there.