Well, it's been a while...
I've finally got a bit more free time on my hands and so back to work.
Since I was last here, a significant change has occured to the source:
Anyway, my rescaling seems to be working at 3.3 x bigger with no major gameplay effects or problems.
I've still got a bit of tinkering to do to make fuel scooping a bit more faithful to the original but that has been improving nicely. It used to be a solitary "scoop" as the torus drive took a ship too close, too quickly; now it's the more familiar "scoop, scoop, scoop..." after responding well to adjustments. More to be done but getting there.
The great fear of a never ending domino effect of changes has so far been avoided.
I'm only playing with 4 lines of code, changing just four numbers and adding only one more.
The game still feels very much like oolite to me but perhaps a little gameplay data will help others to see if it would deviate too much for their own tastes.
Encouner Frequency
One concern was that if space was made 'bigger' then encounters would become more and more unlikely. So I've started recording encounter frequency in my experiments. So how does one go about measuring this? I decided to take the following approach:
- 1. Ignore any encounters with the witchpoint on the scanner. These are likely to occur regardless of distances.
2. Ignore any encounters once the compass has switched to the station nav-buoy. Again, the area approaching the station is likely to be relatively crowded as an area that can spawn ships.
3. Ignore any overlapping encounters of the same colour. E.g. a trader (yellow) is behind you and then some more traders (yellow) appear whilst the former is still on your scanner - that would only be recorded as one encounter. If the second group were police (purple) or asteroids (white) then they would indeed be added to the count.
4. If the 'space-lane' is left for any reason then no attempt is made to return to it. Instead, it's straight back to following the compass.
6. Number of entities is not recorded. So a solitary trader or a pack of five pirates would both count as one encounter.
7. Testing is done in an oxp light environment. No deep space pirates or other encounter spawning oxps.
So, here's the 'encounter rate' for a handful of trips between Diso (med-large) and Leesti (small planet).
Remember that these numbers are not individual ships but rather 'encounters', and they do not include those at the witchpoint or around the area where the compass defaults to the station nav buoy.
- Diso: 5, 3, 2, 4, 2, 3 (average = 3)
Leesti: 4, 7, 5, 5, 4 (average = 5)
More data needed but it's a start and it certainly feels very playable to me.
I'll try to add some pictures soon to show how much bigger planets look in relation to a coriolis station.
![[EliteWiki]](/images/elitewikismall.png){kind=small}
Alien Systems
