Pilot models for ships

[DaddyHoggy]

If I was going to try to fix the scale issue, I’d start by writing a new game.

here! here!

I like my E(oo)lite just the way it is - it looks and feels right even if it isn't!

[Diziet Sma]

here! here!

I like my E(oo)lite just the way it is - it looks and feels right even if it isn't!

Agreed.. like you said, we just need to stop comparing Oolite objects/weights/measurements to RL objects/weights/measurements..

[ClymAngus]

If I was going to try to fix the scale issue, I’d start by writing a new game.

Ah, the "L.N.B.E? (Let's Not Bother Eh?) Solution" When there is an impasse. It is always worth stepping back and thinking honestly to yourself "does it REALLY matter? Or can we just forget about it?"

Sorry, I get a little O.C.D. at times. My world view doesn't handle curves and blur too well.

[Cmdr James]

The thing is, elite is fundamentally broken, scalewise. If its fixed, then things like flight time need to be changed, and the whole gameplay is different.

So yes, lets not bother. Or start again with a different game. Or maybe branch oolite, if you want, and stop worrying about being like elite, just use the codebase to build a game without the things you dont like.

[Kyle Aaron]

The thing is, elite is fundamentally broken, scalewise. If its fixed, then things like flight time need to be changed, and the whole gameplay is different.

Likewise, the physics are broken, too. Craft in space have a maximum acceleration, not a maximum speed. They may have a maximum safe speed through the upper reaches of an atmosphere, etc - but not a maximum speed generally.

But fixing that would indeed be a real headache, we'd have to get into relative velocities - do you come out stationary with respect to the star, or the destination planet, or the destination station, all of which may mean that someone stationary with respect to the other three could never catch you, and...

[ADCK]

The thing is, elite is fundamentally broken, scalewise. If its fixed, then things like flight time need to be changed, and the whole gameplay is different.

Likewise, the physics are broken, too. Craft in space have a maximum acceleration, not a maximum speed. They may have a maximum safe speed through the upper reaches of an atmosphere, etc - but not a maximum speed generally.

But fixing that would indeed be a real headache, we'd have to get into relative velocities - do you come out stationary with respect to the star, or the destination planet, or the destination station, all of which may mean that someone stationary with respect to the other three could never catch you, and...

I think it's been stated before that Oolite will never use Newtonian Physics.
As it's sticking as close as posible to the original Elite.
(IMO it's not fun anyway, see Frontier/FFE, combat was terrible)

As for the whole "cockpit" thing, until we get the ability to do proper transparencies it's a moot point, it can be faked only to a certain degree (with dithering OR animation OR flip faces) and just won't look right until we do.

[ClymAngus]

I think it's been stated before that Oolite will never use Newtonian Physics.
As it's sticking as close as posible to the original Elite.
(IMO it's not fun anyway, see Frontier/FFE, combat was terrible)

Well speaking realistically, why not just hurl rocks at each other? It's a hell of a lot easier than trying to shoot lasers. If you want to screw up a ship cheaply and easily, blunt force trauma every time.

BTW I'm actually quite glad this thread got rezed. It's got spme pretty picture in it.

[CalebOfIronAssMiner]

(I know the last post here is 12 years old but I wanted to add my view to the discussion as it looks to me nobody ever considered looking at the problem from this angle)

The thing is, elite is fundamentally broken, scalewise. If its fixed, then things like flight time need to be changed, and the whole gameplay is different.

Likewise, the physics are broken, too. Craft in space have a maximum acceleration, not a maximum speed. They may have a maximum safe speed through the upper reaches of an atmosphere, etc - but not a maximum speed generally.

The physics may *look* broken when compared to the physics around Earth where we live but I consider that to be due to the fact that the game happens in a different universe with different physics. Notice there is no "Earth" in the game at all. There are legends about "Old Earth" or "Terra" in the lore

In my particular case I was always thinking that the Ooniverse (or Elite universe for that matter) space has a weird property that your spaceship experiences "friction against the empty space". That is why the engine has to run all the time and if you stop it, your ship stops as well. Also note that planets don't orbit the star and the station doesn't orbit the planet, they all are frozen by this weird "friction".

This looks completely preposterous in our space and time but could be completely normal and natural in a different dimension.

So I think comparing ooniverse to our Earth universe is not valid. We only know what physics our specific universe has. We don't know what physics other universes could have.

The only problem I would have is when the ooniverse physics rules contradicted themselves. Truth is there are plotholes in the game that are much harder to explain than the "broken physics". Like when playing the game as a miner, which means spending better part of a day in a single system, I noticed asteroids around the rock hermit I used as my base getting blasted into oblivion by the NPC traders and then magically getting restored when I hyperspace away and then back. Even if the time spent doing that is something like 1 hour or so (there are a few pairs of systems that
are literally on top of each other, even in Galaxy 1).

Or the minerals and alloys I mined staying in the markets for the whole day and then magically disappearing in the less than a hour I spent hyperspacing away and back.

A problem like 750 TC containers not actually fitting into Anaconda can be plausibly explained away by waving the hand and saying that "space is compressed into" the Anaconda so that the containers actually fit even though from the outside they look like they can't. We don't have to worry about the exact details how that handwavium actually works. I can maintain my suspension of disbelief by simply reminding to myself that ooniverse is distinct from my universe and has different physics.

On the other hand having the markets or asteroid fields behave differently when I spend some part of a hour in hyperspace versus when I don't is plain broken and also breaks my suspension of disbelief. Such broken behaviors need to be fixed.

The point here is that when someone makes a game, he is creating an universe and actually defining the physics for it. There is no need for the physics of the game universe to match our real universe. But the physics should be consistent to allow the player to reason about what is happening in the game world and make sensible conclusions (and eventually decisions).

[Cholmondely]

(I know the last post here is 12 years old but I wanted to add my view to the discussion as it looks to me nobody ever considered looking at the problem from this angle)

The thing is, elite is fundamentally broken, scalewise. If its fixed, then things like flight time need to be changed, and the whole gameplay is different.

Likewise, the physics are broken, too. Craft in space have a maximum acceleration, not a maximum speed. They may have a maximum safe speed through the upper reaches of an atmosphere, etc - but not a maximum speed generally.

The physics may *look* broken when compared to the physics around Earth where we live but I consider that to be due to the fact that the game happens in a different universe with different physics. Notice there is no "Earth" in the game at all. There are legends about "Old Earth" or "Terra" in the lore

In my particular case I was always thinking that the Ooniverse (or Elite universe for that matter) space has a weird property that your spaceship experiences "friction against the empty space". That is why the engine has to run all the time and if you stop it, your ship stops as well. Also note that planets don't orbit the star and the station doesn't orbit the planet, they all are frozen by this weird "friction".

This looks completely preposterous in our space and time but could be completely normal and natural in a different dimension.

So I think comparing ooniverse to our Earth universe is not valid. We only know what physics our specific universe has. We don't know what physics other universes could have.

The only problem I would have is when the ooniverse physics rules contradicted themselves. Truth is there are plotholes in the game that are much harder to explain than the "broken physics". Like when playing the game as a miner, which means spending better part of a day in a single system, I noticed asteroids around the rock hermit I used as my base getting blasted into oblivion by the NPC traders and then magically getting restored when I hyperspace away and then back. Even if the time spent doing that is something like 1 hour or so (there are a few pairs of systems that
are literally on top of each other, even in Galaxy 1).

Or the minerals and alloys I mined staying in the markets for the whole day and then magically disappearing in the less than a hour I spent hyperspacing away and back.

A problem like 750 TC containers not actually fitting into Anaconda can be plausibly explained away by waving the hand and saying that "space is compressed into" the Anaconda so that the containers actually fit even though from the outside they look like they can't. We don't have to worry about the exact details how that handwavium actually works. I can maintain my suspension of disbelief by simply reminding to myself that ooniverse is distinct from my universe and has different physics.

On the other hand having the markets or asteroid fields behave differently when I spend some part of a hour in hyperspace versus when I don't is plain broken and also breaks my suspension of disbelief. Such broken behaviors need to be fixed.

The point here is that when someone makes a game, he is creating an universe and actually defining the physics for it. There is no need for the physics of the game universe to match our real universe. But the physics should be consistent to allow the player to reason about what is happening in the game world and make sensible conclusions (and eventually decisions).

This appeared just as I was editing the Realism page on the Wiki!

1) Since Smivs the resuscitated-thread killer is no longer present, attaching new debate makes a lot of sense for me as it keeps everything together - Well done!

2) Asteroid issues can be partially "fixed" with Asteroid Remover - or am I wrong? Market fluctuations are introduced by Dr Tripsa's "In System Trader" (not Spara's "In-system traders") and by the sadly wonky "Real-Life Economics" (prices eventually tend to zero, and quantities seem to be unaffected).

3) Realism in the Vanilla (strict) Game
In my humble opinion, worrying about implementation of realism in the Vanilla game is a waste of time, and attempts to handwave it away are amusing but mostly pointless. Bell and Braben created Classic Elite for an 8-bit computer and squeezed everything into a ridiculously small amount of space. What is incredible is that it is so much fun!

Our vanilla Oolite game is indeed much more sophisticated than the 8-bit classic Elite. But due to arguments about where to go from the vanilla game (eg the incredibly lengthy Oolite 2.0 or II debate and its earlier incarnations), our developers have ended up either improving the graphics, augmenting less visible elements of the game (eg AI, or the development of a reputation, or the incidence of piracy), adding in occasional pieces of equipment, and allowed more and more of the game code to be oxp-able. And realism was not introduced by them other than the replacement of the Energy Bomb with the Quirium Cascade Mine (however the tendency of the ships to drift slightly was removed). I hope this is an accurate summary!

4) Realism in OXP'ed Oolite.
Now one is talking! Various OXP's have fixed unreal elements of the game. But not to the extent of copying Braben's Frontier (Elite II) which features Newtonian movement (and which is much less fun as a game).

Various OXP's introduce various elements of reality. One chooses one's cocktail and creates one's own version of handwavium for the more jarring aspects of it. But! Since my selection of 1,100-odd ingredients (ignoring the issues of my tendency to personally tweak some of them, which increases the total number of possibilities yet further) will inevitably be different from yours, the handwavium I need will be different from that you need!

But what is relevant here is the continual addition of new OXP's working away at different elements of making the game more realistic. Since I joined in July 2000, the addition of "Realistic" OXP's from my perspective has included

Redspear adding Jane's Galactic Shipset (the first installment of his Rescaling Experiment, and publishing his Galactic Hyperdrive Reimagined (this type of travel now takes time),
Stranger published his SW Economy, a more realistic take on trade & economics
Phkb has augmented CommsLog to allow more of a conversation with another ship
Cbr and Tsoj did the hard work to finally put out HIMSN (a much more believeable and realistic space navy)

There are many, many others which are older and still being updated.

Reference:
Realism

[Redspear]

The point here is that when someone makes a game, he is creating an universe and actually defining the physics for it. There is no need for the physics of the game universe to match our real universe

I both essentially agree and would go further.
All fiction is fantasy, or at least truth masquerading as such (discuss ). I think many players conflate their perception of reality with reality itself (again: discuss ).

But the physics should be consistent to allow the player to reason about what is happening in the game world and make sensible conclusions (and eventually decisions)

This is true at least in terms of logical consistency; not in the sense of tidy agreement but rather in the sense of 'feeling' real. Avoiding contradictions where possible so that the player can 'feel' what isn't there. Paradoxes in real life are somewhat more navigable as our experiecnces of them are so much more visceral - not it couldn't happen, but rather it actually has happened, we're forced to deal with that on some fundamental level : reality says we were wrong (...well I never...)

Redspear adding Jane's Galactic Shipset (the first installment of his Rescaling Experiment

I've read this before and it isn't quite true.

Firstly, the rescaling experiment has already been successfully completed over several iterations.

The chief 'problem' was not of replicating core game experience (as some feared) but rather of retaining broad oxp compatability (when those oxps were intended for a non-rescaled game). Thus earlier versions of the rescaled code did have starter oxp packages made available for them so that the player could experince the 'new' game.

The latest version of the experiment being worked upon (delayed since the summer but essentially complete) was designed to both address that issue as well as to improve upon cosmetics and general implementation.

Rescaling the ships (relative to each other) was always an optional addition but does change the gameplay. So, I eventually came up with a method to do this that had an apparent logic and also didn't require core code changes. The result was JGS and means that BOTH the new version of the rescaling experiment will not require ship changes AND that ship rescaling will be possible without the core changes of the rescaling experiment itself.

If I could have explained myself better, I wonder if that rescaling thread might not have had such a tempestuos start...