Leaving the Ship

[ffutures]

A topic that comes up occasionally is the idea of being able to leave the ship to do things aboard space stations, on planets, etc.

So far the main response to this has been the Life on the Frontier OXP, but that's not really incredibly interactive, it's more of an extended menu system / choose your own path adventure than anything else.

It just occurred to me that doing this with the existing Oolite engine is probably a mistake - maybe it would be better to start off with code that's actually designed for this sort of thing, such as one of the open source First Person Shooter games, and have this part of the game as a separate program that exchanges data with Ooolite. For example, you leave your ship on a given station and it sends the station name, date, your bank balance, kill number, legal status and other details to the FPS engine, which uses them to come up with a few interesting encounters - e.g. you get attacked in a bar because you've killed someone's uncle. And anything you do in the FPS feeds back into Oolite, so that (for example) if you shoot someone in a bar you may suddenly find that you're a fugitive for that...

Needless to say I have no idea whatever how to make it work, I just want to suggest it as a possibility.

[Wildeblood]

Actually, since the ability for javascript to change the player's ship was added, several years ago now, this is technically fairly easy to do in a basic form. Technical difficulty is not the reason it hasn't been done. There's a lack of genuine interest, I would suggest. Its one of several possible areas for development that is fun to speculate about, but not interesting enough to actually do.

[Svengali]

Actually, since the ability for javascript to change the player's ship was added, several years ago now, this is technically fairly easy to do in a basic form. Technical difficulty is not the reason it hasn't been done. There's a lack of genuine interest, I would suggest. Its one of several possible areas for development that is fun to speculate about, but not interesting enough to actually do.

No. It is pretty difficult and a lot of work and you'd need additional stuff in Oolite to create good looking scenes. And on missionscreens the situation is even worse. I really think the amount of work to get even some basic things up and running is the main reason why only a few (cut-)scenes do exist in AddOns.

[cbr]

First time i saw frontier elite i thought wow you can land on the planet.

Question is what kind of game engine has oolite...

Idea

1] The player has landed on the planet ( planetfall )
2] The view changes, the player sees the planet surface ( the planet surface is an entity, a height field, a 3d model )
3] The Sun /stars are shown as background, the planet surface is coloured as per current sunlight
4] The player rides/walks on this entity, should be some interaction between gravity and player movement
5] On the surface entity there should be some buildings/mines, something to do
6] The explorable space is limited by the size of the planet surface boxmodel


Landed cobra just for size

[Cmdr James]

First time i saw frontier elite i thought wow you can land on the planet.

Question is what kind of game engine has oolite...

Basicly it doesnt have an engine. It just is.

It would, I guess, be possible to use javascript to swap the player from their ship to a special ship that somehow is bound to the surface of the planet, but all kind of weird things are going to happen including:

* the planets are far too smal to make sense
* there is no surface, just an image (ie mountains, water etc dont exist)
* there is no real "surface only" mechanism, someone would have to write that
* what are we going to do on the surface? Ideally Id like to see something like Tau Ceti but again thats a massive rewrite.