Oolite: misjumpier

[Norby]

There is no star, no planet, no station

No star, but others can be. For example I put a big rock halfway from Lave to Zaonce in [wiki]FarPlanets[/wiki] and I can imagine missions to pirate stations hidden somewhere in a straight line between two systems due to the current scripting allow to hyperjump to any point of these lines. So I think compass should work there also.

[Cody]

The lack of a compass in interstellar space, like the apparent lack of spacedust, enhances the strangeness of it all.

[Smivs]

i do agree that it is silly that stations cannot have a beacon in witchspace, but like Cody I do also like the quirkiness.

[Cody]

A blinking light or suchlike is visible from well beyond scanner range - stuff can be found in interstellar space without a compass beacon.

[ralph_hh]

Maybe I should tune the interstellar space ambient level down a bit. But I like to have the feeling of flying in red and purple nebulae..

[Cody]

Nebulae in interstellar space can make good markers when searching for something.

[Fatleaf]

<Handwavium> The Thargoids are currently transmitting some kind of interference that scrambles all navigation in interstellar space. The Navy boys are currently looking into a workaround </Handwavium>

[Venator Dha]

Just a thought:
Could/Should other wormholes be made to cause interference with the one you generate leading to miss jumps or to your wormhole "following" the other to its destination?

[ffutures]

It does seem like some sort of misjump ought to be a possibility, especially if several are open simultaneously (as often happens during a Thargoid attack on a station in Thargoid wars). Maybe if the openings are VERY close (within say 5km) there should be a small chance, rising with multiple wormholes etc.

The trouble is that if this becomes at all common players simply won't risk using their own drives if another wormhole is open - they'll get out of range or wait until the other wormholes closes, or hitch a ride through the open wormhole if they need a swift getaway. Mostly it just causes a couple of minutes irritation, not a real problem. But it would be VERY annoying if e.g. another ship jumped 2 seconds before you jumped, and you didn't spot it in time to abort.

[Disembodied]

I remember the misjumps in the Traveller RPG... you could go end quite a way of from your intented target. I found this link.
If you translated this to the Oolite Universe, you could even go as far as 49 LY... maybe even an unintentional Galaxy swap? This would probably mess with a lot of missions, of course.

I like this (and the possibility of ending up in the right system, just a long way off-beam) as forms of not-quite-so-bad misjump, although it would probably be better to keep any wrong system destination within the player's existing jump radius (i.e. the player ends up at a random other star within 7LY). This sort of thing could get irksome, though, especially if the player was on a really tight delivery. To avoid too much rage/frustrationquit, there would have to be a clear link between increased chance of misjump (of any kind) and player behaviour. Bad luck is bad luck, but in games it's generally better if it's deserved: certainly, bad luck dropping on a player out of a clear blue sky is usually bad game design (and oops-you're-dead bad luck should always be a no-no).

So I think it might be a good idea to come up with some reasons why a player might lay themselves open to bad luck from their witchdrive. Ideally, this should have pros and cons, e.g. some form of behaviour that's faster or more convenient, but which makes it more likely to go wrong: like, say, a shorter hyperspace countdown, or jumping with a large mass (e.g. the station) on the scanner. That way, when things do go wrong, the player is more likely to accept the situation and not just reload from saved.

[spara]

I don't really like the traditional roll the dice and see if you misjump to witchspace. To my liking that's too binary and you really just can't do anything about it. So to the original question about acquiring skill or different outcomes I really have nothing to say.

But... What I would really like is some sort of witchjump mini game that would require minimal skill when your ship is fully maintained and considerably more skill when the ship is at bad shape. Something like navigating through a tunnel or maybe trying to keep to some needles aligned when they randomly drift out of sync.

[ralph_hh]

It depends on what you think a misjump is caused by.
From Elite times, I recall it as Thargoids interception of your hyperspace jump, so for the player it is randomly and not in any correllation with the ships status. As long as this does not happen too often, that's ok. If you like misjumps, you can always do one intentionally. And, how yould you explain the presence of thargoids EXACTLY at the exit point ALWAYS when you have a misjump? The interestellar space is not that crowded, as you can see once the 3-4 ships have been taken down.

[toto d merchant]

[quote="Wildeblood"]Currently witchspace jumps have no role in game play: every jump is the same as every other; mis-jumps happen rarely and completely randomly.
not true, there's always a fifty percent chance of a misjump between tionisla and isinor, where the thargoids, har har har, lie in wait.

[ffutures]

I really think that anything that increases the misjump probability shouldn't be part of the core game - every change seems to be in the direction of making things more interesting for very experienced players, and while that's fine for most of the users of this board, it isn't exactly ideal for someone coming new to the game and trying to decide if they want to stick with it. The ability to jump out of a horrible situation and probably survive has always been a key part of keeping newbies alive, I'd really hate to see that change.

[Switeck]

Just as the player can ride other ships' wormholes, any misjump from near a busy station should have NPC ships which ride your wormhole...and they have full fuel to jump out giving you a wormhole escape route.

Presumably, these NPCs were wanting to go where you had targeted to begin with...so they likely choose the same destination as before.