phkb wrote: ↑Sun Jan 28, 2024 11:58 pm
Well, I was thinking that an easy way to make it look like the large ship docking ports are in use would be to add some subentities to the station model, positioned in exactly the right spot as if they had docked. Then a script could randomly turn off some of them, leaving you with the appearance that some large ships have docked. Obviously, it's a bit of handwavium "Yes these big ships docked here, totally, 100% for realz", but it would look OK. And avoid the whole collision detection thing.
Quite bluntly, anything is far, far better than the nothing which we have at the moment.
(Might this also involve a tweak to BigShips?)
But I'm hopeful about a number of things.
More possible activities for the player:
eg. a more realistic Ooniverse. Or the ability to dock with a
much more modest rock hermit than our Griffian Rolls Royce models. Or for players flying large ships (Andromedae/Behemoths/Hiranic
Imperial Star Destroyers etc.) to actually dock rather than take a shuttle. Not to mention docking with Nuit and whatever else might hopefully be created.
If we can provide the tools, then others can come along and make use of them, enriching the Oolite experience for each and every one of us. It does not of course mean that it will happen. Butterflies, SOTL, Scenario.plists, Multiple Docking... all have yet to be embraced and developed. But on the other hand,
many other things have been. Telescope, Bulletin Boards, MFDs, shaders and gloss/specular maps
etc.
When I look around the miserable world we live in, Oolite is possibly the only area in which I've seen progress.