Hi Everyone, it's ESS blog time!
Since the 3.0 announcement, its been a busy time for both pedro and me. Exam revision has left little time for solar system development, but progress is still happening.
Today we unveil the first new moon for ESS 3.0: Miros!
This icy world is scarred by huge cracks, or grabens, and its cratered surface is smoothed by countless years of ring dust. Organic-rich ices have decayed into red tholin deposits in several places on Miros, these provide a smoother surface ideal for landings.
We have both been exploring new terrain-generation techniques on this object, so the surface is unique amongst both ESS and stock moons. Adding grabens to the game has been a personal goal of mine since I started development for 1.0, so to have this terrain type lined up for release in a few months is really exciting! We spent a lot of time choosing the exact colours for the tholin deposits, testing new combinations of RGB values over and over until we found the perfect shade. Pedro did some magic on the larger craters too, so they are far more realistic for a moon with an ice/rock makeup.
In 3.0 Urados Dusk, this moon will occupy a large-radius orbit outside the rings of its main planet, so it will be one of the easier satellites to reach.
I'm also excited to show you the new Patch Poster, this image shows sunset behind Urados against an unidentified moon.
Stay tuned for more updates, once exam period is over we will be putting the hours into 3.0, so expect the best version ever!
Yay oh so much yay <3