Pimp My Ride

[cim]

It's a bit off-topic, so my apologies, but this might not be obvious to beginning players: they might just find themselves taking 10 minutes to overhaul an NPC - or being unable to get past an Asp courier at all.

I've added a bit more to the tutorial to suggest going around them in this situation.

[mossfoot]

"Give a guy a bit of spaceroom, can't you?"; "You're masslocked, I'm masslocked; take a detour, buddy!"; "Go AROUND, go AROUND!"?

"Eh, I'm flyin' over 'ere!"
"Woulds youze kindly get da hell outta my face?"

I can't help but imagine the fat lazy construction worker from Futurama talking

[SteveKing]

Could there be message prompts from a masslocking NPC, after a certain amount of time, like "Give a guy a bit of spaceroom, can't you?"; "You're masslocked, I'm masslocked; take a detour, buddy!"; "Go AROUND, go AROUND!"?

I've put a little thought into this and in a bit of Oofic I'm trying to progress, I coined a '2&10' manouvre for ships that have about the same cruising speed -
One ship flies at 2o'clock to the inbound vector, the other at 10 o'clock in a similar plane (60deg), the ships then pull apart reasonably quickly without either drifting too far from the main lane or giving up too much inbound time. Once out of scanner range, the inbound vector is corrected with enough of a delay to allow a quick pilot a Torus jump advantage.
To my simplistic understanding, it ought to be a fairly straight forward adjustment to Trader AI together with a simple comms message "Executing a 2&10". Only need be 'clean' traders of similar ship speeds as almost anyone else has a (potential) attitude.

Back on the main topic though: I'm all for a tweak, as long as it's a tweak and not overkill - a max of 15% upgrade would be my 2 cents, with say, if we go for 3 tiers a double up failure rate, 5%, 10% and 20%. That way, even if there comes about a 'SuperTweak' it could increase to 40% failure.

Just my thoughts,

[mossfoot]

In standard Oolite it would work straight forward because there's no reason for traffic to be heading away from the planet, everyone's going to the planet at different speeds, right? But is that the case when you add things like "Your Ad Here" when space stations are located at entry points?

[Cody]

In standard Oolite it would work straight forward because there's no reason for traffic to be heading away from the planet...

There is traffic outbound from the aegis, towards both the witchpoint and the sun - Vipers and/or bounty-hunters on patrol, sunskimmers, etc.

[mossfoot]

Then I guess the 2 and 10 should be mentioned to be relative to inbound traffic or something. objects closer to witchpoint to witchpoint-10. Objects closer to the planet go witchpoint-2 or something like that?

[mossfoot]

Mentally pictures doing this. Then mentally pictures rolling 180 degrees. Wait a minute....

[Disembodied]

Then I guess the 2 and 10 should be mentioned to be relative to inbound traffic or something. objects closer to witchpoint to witchpoint-10. Objects closer to the planet go witchpoint-2 or something like that?

Any friendly make-room behaviour should probably only happen in deep (i.e. not orbital) space. Once a ship is close enough to the planet to switch their heading to the station, there's probably not enough room to manoeuvre out of the way. But a friendly ship with a destination "planet" could perhaps ease itself out of the road. If the player is, for any reason, heading out to the witchpoint, and gets stuck in traffic heading that way too, I think we have to rely on the player having, by that stage, enough experience to make their own manoeuvres.

[SteveKing]

There is traffic outbound from the aegis, towards both the witchpoint and the sun - Vipers and/or bounty-hunters on patrol, sunskimmers, etc.

The idea was for any two (similar speed) ships travelling in the same (relative) direction - inbound from WP, WP to sun, Aegis to sun or reverse, outbound to WP. Ships in different directions is a short delay, no (real) benefit. Vipers on patrol can't deviate (if I encounter one going in the same direction I always drift away from them - unless I want a cup of tea...). Bounty hunters looking for specific targets wouldn't want to and short hoppers to a con-store or a hermit probably don't need to.

Any friendly make-room behaviour should probably only happen in deep (i.e. not orbital) space

This is the general idea - where there is a time advantage. As Cody has said elsewhere "Time = Money"

[mossfoot]

Just bumping this (in part because of the cargo expansion discussion ), wondering if anyone has thought about putting it on their to-do list? Would love to see some minor tweaking options available.

[Zireael]

Wouldn't it be simplest to make (officially) the request for the various ship performance stats to be exposed to JS as read/write

Seconding this so badly.

Mossfoot, I LOVE the idea of upgrading ships. As for the pilots' Elite rating, I've made a small OXP which calculates an NPC's rating based on accuracy: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... XP#p220516

Once we got the stats exposed, you could put out a testing OXP and we could fine-tune the numbers. At first glance, they look fine.

But hey, what would be the prices involved?

[Zireael]

I imagine the latest changes in trunk would make this idea OXP-able?