New exhaust plumes detaching from ship

[Diziet Sma]

That's one helluva lot of missiles..

<note to self: be careful when picking a fight with an Odyssey>

[Commander McLane]

When I'm on full power the exhaust plumes are not attached to the ship. If I run on half power they are at their origin point.

Is this normal behaviour?

This looks perfectly normal, just like it has always been with all ships in Oolite.

[maaarcooose]

Okay. Just wanted to check that it was normal behaviour.

The normal speed of the ship is a little high.
While testing I launched and nearly ran straight into the back of a Viper.

I won't be leaving her as having that many missiles on release, although it is meant to be a rather large ship. Besides I don't expect her to have a pirate role. Wouldn't go with the spirit of the show.

!m!

[cim]

Okay. Just wanted to check that it was normal behaviour.

Well ... it might be normal, but that doesn't necessarily mean correct, and the new plumes may be making it look worse than it would in 1.76. It should be possible to pin them a little more closely to the ports, if the detaching is that serious. (Could you give an idea of how deep the main ship body is, front to back, too? I don't really have a sense of scale from that picture)

The normal speed of the ship is a little high.

Hmm, but how high? Are we talking "fast but not outside the bounds of existing ships" in the 0.4-0.5LM range, or something significantly faster than that?

[maaarcooose]

I had the max ship speed set to 800.

I've put it down to 500 now and took a few screenshots using my conveniently badly places side view.

Minimal power. Exhaust plume origin is just visible embeded in the model. I did this on purpose because I was trying to get it to not go out the back of the ship.


3rd power. Plume orign has moved back some.


2 3rds power, plume origin is about where I would want it to be.


Full power. Detached from back of ship.


Engaging injectors. The plume jumps further back as it flares and then as it dies down to the smaller purple, it drifts back to:


Full injectors. Plume is now back at the origin point inside the model.



!m!

[maaarcooose]

I can now confirm that this is fixed in the latest trunk build.

!m!

[Rorschachhamster]

The clue is in 'if I'm traveling a fairly long distance "in system"'. If you do that, everything around you becomes 'squirrelly looking'. The reason is simple: floating point precision. The bigger the numbers your CPU has to crunch, the less precise they become. What becomes bigger in the outskirts of a system are of course the coordinates. Around the planet your ship and everything else can be placed with a precision of many numbers behind the decimal point. The farther out you are, the less decimals can be used. Thus everything becomes a little shaky, with visible jumps between two neighbouring coordinates. The effect kicks visibly in already at a distance of about 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 meters from the system centre. It gets worse the farther out you get.

Oh man. Wish I'd read this sooner. This explains every problem I have with my Freighttrain.OXP...
Well, at least now I know the loading/unloading process won't work as intented... too much precision needed...

[Griff]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this but i think this same sort of 'position drift' happens with the forward weapon firing point too, except it moves closer towards the ship rather than further away like the exhaust plumes do, again the amount of drift is dependant on the ships speed

[cim]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this but i think this same sort of 'position drift' happens with the forward weapon firing point too, except it moves closer towards the ship rather than further away like the exhaust plumes do, again the amount of drift is dependant on the ships speed

Laser positioning issues should all be fixed as of r5631, at least for the player ship, and the difference shouldn't be large enough to be noticeable for NPCs. (If it is, it can be fixed there too)

[Griff]

Thanks Cim, I just tried the latest Oolite nightly and the new laser position fix is working great!