Tionisla Orbital Graveyard

[Eric Walch]

Out of curiosity, have you managed to stop players getting kills for destroying gravemarkers? Or does this need changes in trunk? Might it be worth seeding the graveyard with Q-bomb dampers in any case?

I have not really looked at it, but Selezen already gave some objects such a high energy that they can't be killed by laser. However, that is now less of a problem because you now get all defense ships after you when you fire a laser. When you just ram an object I gave it a 10% chance of seeing it as hostile action. In 90% of the cases you'll just get a warning.
I did notice that the headstones could be smashed resulting in wreckage. That felt wrong, so I gave all stone objects now a ROCK scan-class instead of CARGO. That should give splinters instead of wreckage.

Awards for a quirium bomb is more for trunk. I didn't test that though.

[Kaks]

We could have custom death actions for all the graveyard objects:

Code: Select all

player.score--;

should keep the player's score exactly as it was before the 'kill'.

Even 'better':

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player.score-=2;

would remove 1 kill for each graveyard item 'killed' as a penalty for destroying a priceless monument!

[Commander McLane]

What determines the kill anyway? I thought it would be scan_class, so that objects with CLASS_ROCK would never give a kill. But it seems I'm wrong.

[Eric Walch]

We could have custom death actions for all the graveyard objects:

Code: Select all

player.score--;

should keep the player's score exactly as it was before the 'kill'.

Not the way I already changed it. Player is only awarded for blowing up cargo without content, not for rocks. I had made the monuments a mix from cargo and rock. I changed the script now as follow:

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this.shipDied = function (killer)
{
    // compensate for the auto score-award for blowing up things
    if (killer && killer.isPlayer && this.ship.scanClass == "CLASS_CARGO") player.score--;
}

Alternatively I could give all monuments a rock scanclass. As I changed it now, I only got 16 kills awarded after using an Q-bomb. (I assume 6 for the beacons, 4 for the patrols and 1 for the station. The remaining 5 probably for a few other nearby ships.) The monuments themselves no longer award kills.

I also added in the dead actions of the station :

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this.shipDied = function (killer, why)
{
     if (why && why == "cascade weapon")
     {
        killer.bounty += 10E3; // takes the player quite a while to become clean again. Might give valuable npc ships!
     }
}

That will give the player a hard time to find a station that will accept him.

[Kaks]

All that should be more than enough deterrent to stop your average trigger happy Q-bomb maniac!

[Selezen]

The appearance of the ships can easy be changed by changing the role weight. (I'll drop the adders and increase the headstone and mausoleum weight) ) In my feeling there is no need to use only simple structures for faster rendering. Complex structures are just nicer for the eye. And the rendering only starts when you are close to the field. With me I now have a FPS count of about 50 on launch in Tionisla (100 in Lave). That is mainly an effect of the number of objects. When I enter the field the FPS rate drops to 25. That number can be changed by using more primitive models. However, the flight experience does not change between a FPS of 100 and 25. So, in my opinion it is better to go for a nicer view. (I tested FPS count on both my 2GHz and 3GHz i-mac)

One of the main things about the TGY development was a way to make it accessible for the low end computers too, which is why I went with the option of a low poly count object as a standard stone (as a programmer, my mandate has always been to cater to the lowest spec PC in the customer base).The logic of a graveyard fits well with it, in that a simple headstone or tomb and plot in the yard would be cheaper and more affordable to the "common people". The rich families or estates would be able to afford a custom mausoleum to their specification. This is what led to the idea of "generic" headstones:

Cheapest: beacon marker (flasher)
Cheaper: headstone marker
Average: box mausoleum
Expensive: religion-specific marker
Most Expensive: interred in own ship (with added security)

With some stuff in between.

The re-usable model would also mean less memory being used up by textures, since the stock ones would only have to be used once.

The other reason for the simple models was to simply provide a basis for a customisable graveyard (which ties in nicely with Kaks' question). This would allow users/OXPers to create their own tomb or set of tombs which could be more complex. That was the main appeal of working on the TGY...

Rusty ships as monuments DID look cool when I was working on it - it was eerie to fly through a forest of rusting adders. The problem is that without some extreme texturing options and model variety, the TGY would have a lot of similar monuments with the same pattern of degredation which would spoil the "suspension of disbelief". it also makes it more of an event when the player finds a custom monument... I reiterate that the user base would be better placed to create their own ship monuments and have them included... Maybe include one or two of the rusties (but only one or two) scattered around...

One pipe dream I had was that the player would be able to dock at the station and "rent" a shuttle for a tour of the yard. The problem was that there's no functionality to leave the ship and pick it up later without selling it, buying a shuttle then re-purchasing the original ship again. So that's not likely, which is a shame.

Eric, the other comments you made sound great - change definitely for the better, and you're implementing concepts I had trouble getting my tiny mind around way back when. I'm more of an ideas man with Oolite (with the occasional ship design thrown in)! Again, many thanks for picking this up and making some magic.

[Ganelon]

Maybe do the renting of "tour craft" by including a savegame? The player logically doesn't need weapons, jump capability or injectors to cruise around the monuments. Some small custom/customised fairly slow ships with maybe TGY "livery" would do for sightseeing. One could still take screenshots, move in close to get a good look at something, etc. All the good touristy sort of stuff.

Admittedly, a crude sort of solution that would break immersion for a couple moments..but it could be justifiable thinking of those breaks while one saves the current game and loads the special tour savegame (and ship) as moving to the little tour crafts?

If there was any sort of an attack, obviously getting the tour craft back into dock and jumping into your real ship would be the A prio.

[Eric Walch]

One of the main things about the TGY development was a way to make it accessible for the low end computers too, which is why I went with the option of a low poly count object as a standard stone (as a programmer, my mandate has always been to cater to the lowest spec PC in the customer base).The logic of a graveyard fits well with it, in that a simple headstone or tomb and plot in the yard would be cheaper and more affordable to the "common people". The rich families or estates would be able to afford a custom mausoleum to their specification.
.....

The other reason for the simple models was to simply provide a basis for a customisable graveyard (which ties in nicely with Kaks' question). This would allow users/OXPers to create their own tomb or set of tombs which could be more complex. That was the main appeal of working on the TGY...

Understood. I will split the oxp in two packages. One with the core program and only the simple models, the other with the more complex models. A player can than decide for themselves if he wants to add both, based on his computer.

But Oolite has changed since you wrote the TGY. You wrote it at the time of Oolite 1.52. When you look back at the start of page 3 of this threat, you see Giles giving an advice to give the monuments a spacing of at least 6 monument radii. I didn't understand that remark knowing how oolite handles collisions now, but looking back in the oolite archives, Oolite 1,52 did collision pre-warning checks for all objects within 6 collision radii of each other. And Oolite didn't do any object filtering, but compared the distance of each system object to each other object in space. That leads to enormous amounts of comparisons when the number of objects increase.

Its only in Oolite 1.65 that a pre-filtering was introduced. All objects are now grouped into smaller groups of objects close to each other, and distance comparison of each object with each other object, now only takes place within such groups. This pre-filtering and object grouping enabled Oolite to deal better with a great amount of objects in the system. So even with the old computer, the same TGY would run faster with 1.65 than with 1.52 were you developed it with.

And this filtering was the reason I used TGY. It hadn't changed since 1.65 but the way it was filtered it filtered out to much ships. It was just enough for the real collision detection, but to much for a good pre-warning. (It could even be that the kamikaze pilots started with 1.65) I wanted to change that filtering a bit and used your oxp to see if my changes would have negative side effects. Such side effects were most likely to surface with using your oxp. But I didn't notice any to my relief.

[Greyth]

For 28 years I've wanted to visit this place... thanks

[SandJ]

a) The file TOGY 1.1.zip needs a tiny bit of tidying up.

There are two different files called "credits.txt"
- TOGY 1.1\TOGY 1.1\credits.txt
- TOGY 1.1\TOGY 1.1\TOGY_Main 1.1.oxp\credits.txt

The former has fixed typos but suggests it is a test version.
The latter refers to the TOGY_Shipwreck pack as a separate version
Both are version 1.1

(Now there's a good example of why version numbers should always be changed when a file is uploaded.)

b) There is also a ReadMe.txt trying to do the same job as the credits.txt files.

c) Could / should TOGY_Shipwreck pack.zip add ships, rather than replace them? (The Wiki says it adds, the ReadMe.txt says it replaces.)

[Selezen]

The first-mentioned credits.txt file is my original version and should be deleted or any relevant content merged into the latter-mentioned file.

Yeah, I agree the version should be updated. Eric?

[Eric Walch]

c) Could / should TOGY_Shipwreck pack.zip add ships, rather than replace them? (The Wiki says it adds, the ReadMe.txt says it replaces.)

That is a matter of how you interpret 'replace'. Apparently the interpretation is not consistent though.

1- it does not replace them in the sense that some of the original ships are overwritten, as some replacement oxp do.
2- it does replace them in the sense that the new ships are not added in addition of the originals but replace part of the originals in-game.

I'll have a look over it. I wanted to add the 'memorial stones' for Steve Jobs to the expansions anyway, so time to do an update on it.

[SandJ]

I wanted to add the 'memorial stones' for Steve Jobs to the expansions anyway, so time to do an update on it.

How do you fancy including that Commodore 64 geezer? And Alan Turing too, while you're at it (centenary year and all).

[Cody]

the 'memorial stones' for Steve Jobs

One wonders if Bill Gates will be afforded the same 'honour' when his time comes?

[SandJ]

One wonders if Bill Gates will be afforded the same 'honour' when his time comes?

Make him immortal for the life of the universe. Fire his corpse into the Sun.

In fact, let's do it now.