The current configuration file suggests that radius is expressed as a single-precision floating point kilometer value. Technically, that would permit specification of values up to 3.4 * 10^38 km.
Which is larger than the size of the observable universe.
In practice, the number needs to be rather less. In my experiments the prototype star code wigged out at around 2,000,000km (only fragments of the star render). The planet code does interesting things at 50,000km (grids on the surface at a distance, lighting going to solid cyan or solid green when close, etc).
To see the grid, you have to look at the full-size image.
I only changed the radius of the objects, not their locations.
Note: don’t mess with the terrestrial planet radius. Your ship will spawn inside the station, which will be inside the planet, and you’ll just keep blowing up.
The procedural tech can obviously be used to generate new planetary systems (not star systems as the proper term) but then you wouldn’t have a match-based fair competitive game. You have to lock down the “level” for a fair fight between teams.
I can totally see the devs being able to manually generate and populate other planetary systems for use in game as additional maps.
I wonder what would happen if you made a planet in the prototype so large that it clipped another planet. Are you able to change locations in the current prototype? It would be cool to see two planets so close together that their atmospheres touch.
I also experimented a bit with larger planets. When going to the surface, with the atmosphere that is the same, I could feel it was too big, particularly with the flattened ground and the horizon that felt too far.
Just for fun, I tried to make them bigger than 100 000 km - all three of them at once. My idea was to try and make them intersect (I haven’t found how to move them around yet)
But then…
The other one is, as you can see, Mars from the '60 SF and its patches of orange-green. This is the dark side.
If you look at the thrusters and how they are darkened, it gives you an idea of how bright the “dark” side actually is, simply through reflections from other bodies.
The lightning is incredibly creepy, with ambient light and no atmosphere to speak of, with those giant orbs looming on each side.
Two conclusions: there’s something weird with the reflection values of planets when we start to make them stupid big, and the HDR is starting to have a hard time with Czar-Bomba-at-point-blank-range luminosities.
I kinda hope this is never “fixed”