Solar Flares 2.0

[phkb]

I have an OXP in the works to give solar flares more gameplay elements. At the moment, the solar flares mod simply increases the sun's corona flare for a brief period of time, with no gameplay effects at all. My plan is to work it into something that could potentially even be fatal if the flare is bad enough and the player doesn't respond in time.

Here's my current plan on how it will work. Each system is divided into 5 zones, based on the sun->planet distance.
Zone 1: 0.5 x SPdist
Zone 2: 1.1 x SPdist
Zone 3: 1.9 x SPdist
Zone 4: 3.1 x SPdist
Zone 5: > 3.1 x SPdist
Here's a graphical representation


Solar flares have a "severity" level between 1 and 4, with 1 being the weakest, and 4 being the strongest. However, when a flare starts, it will take some time to build to it's maximum strength.

How severe a flare can be is determined by whether the system has solar activity and random factors, although it's now possible to have a solar flare in *any* system.

When a solar flare occurs, the effective severity of the flare on your ship (which dictates what impacts will come into play) will be based on how severe the flare currently is and which zone you are in. For example, after starting, a solar flare will eventually get to a severity of 1. If your ship is in zone 1, you will immediately start getting impacts. Zone 1 has the effective severity of 1. If your ship is in zones 2-5 though, the effective severity will be 0 (zero) - you are too far away for the flare to have an impact.

When the flare increases to severity 2, ships in zone 1 will have an effective severity of 2; ships in zone 2 would have an effective severity of 1; ships in zone 3-5 would be have an effective severity of 0.

This continues as the flare get stronger. When at severity of 3, zone 1 has an effective severity of 3, zone 2 has an effective severity of 2, zone 3 has an effective severity of 1, while zone 4 + 5 are not impacted, and so on.

Let me know if I need to explain the method in more detail.

A brief word on impacts.

Effective Severity 1: Your cabin temperature will increase if your ship is in view of the sun. Get behind a station or a planet, though, and you'll be ok.
Effective Severity 2: You will be unable to detect navigation beacons, rendering your space compass inactive. Also, comms messages could be garbled.
Effective Severity 3: Your torus drive will start malfunctioning, and attempting to jump out of the system could fail outright (with the possible loss of fuel), or lead to a mis-jump.
Effective Severity 4: Your ship could get a fuel leak, and if you don't have heat shielding in place you could start taking internal damage, potentially losing cargo.

The impacts are cumulative. So, if your ship is in a zone with the effective severity of 3, you will have impacts from severity 1, 2 and 3 in play.

Anyway, that's the plan. Let me know what you think. My code does have a visual effect for the flare itself, but given the impacts as outlined, I highly doubt anyone is going to want to get close enough to take a snapshot of one! If the "Sunspots" OXP is installed, the visual effect location will be on one of the spots.

[Lone_Wolf]

Effective Severity 2: You will be unable to detect navigation beacons, rendering your space compass inactive. Also, comms messages could be garbled.

Maybe just disable the ASC functionality but keep the basic compass function that shows sun/planet and station (if close enough) ?

[Cholmondely]

Initial response.

Looks good! Very good!

But.

Something having this much effect on one's ship would in a "real world" have ship-based or system-based monitoring. Or both. And here the complications and endless extra tweaking beckon...


Ship-based monitoring: with either a dial on the HUD, or something in an  MFD.

1) Stranger's World adds in an Advanced System Data MFD (Sun Gear OXP) which appears automatically as "part of" the ASC. When the Sun is targetted by the ASC, it gives a Solar Wind Flux read out but also information on luminosity and solar activity.



2) Useful MFDs gives just a Solar Wind Flux read out.



3) Littlebear's Galactic Almanac MFD gives some solar information when the sun is targeted.



4) And would not one expect the Navigation MFD to mention something?




System-based monitoring: with a broadcast warning of the condition. But. Might one need to be in range of a beacon or a communications satellite?

[Cholmondely]

There might be an impact on the region affecting other things in range: satellites, floating cargo (degrading liquors and some machinery for example), some of the stuff in  Stashes, some poorly equipped rock hermits, pirate ships, Thargoid invaders etc.

This OXP would also naturally give rise to more missions for your GalCop Missions OXP. Replacing/fixing "fried satellites" for example! Or rescuing disabled ships!

[Cholmondely]

Effective Severity 2: You will be unable to detect navigation beacons, rendering your space compass inactive. Also, comms messages could be garbled.

Maybe just disable the ASC functionality but keep the basic compass function that shows sun/planet and station (if close enough) ?

But why? Why would there be these exceptions?

And should it not also clobber Telescope OXP (code for this in HIMSN, I believe)?

And can this be coded through to the NPC ships behaviour too?

[Lone_Wolf]

Effective Severity 2: You will be unable to detect navigation beacons, rendering your space compass inactive. Also, comms messages could be garbled.

Maybe just disable the ASC functionality but keep the basic compass function that shows sun/planet and station (if close enough) ?

But why? Why would there be these exceptions?

https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolit ... _Equipment
The equipment listed there can't be damaged and its functionality is guranteed for all ships .

It could make sense to let solar flares at higher levels interfere with those basic functions.
A few possibilties : decrease scanner range, engine only working at half speed, pitch/roll/yaw only responding once every 2 seconds, decreased laser range/accuracy etc

[phkb]

Something having this much effect on one's ship would in a "real world" have ship-based or system-based monitoring. Or both. And here the complications and endless extra tweaking beckon...

And it also has to work in the event that *none* of those options exist. What I'm working towards is a series of notifications, with sound alerts as well. I might even resort to placing something quite visual on the main display.

The downside of trying to add extra info to those MFD's is, well, having to add extra stuff to the MFD's! Trying to squeeze info into an existing layout is tricky, and you end up having to make decisions like "If it comes down to it, what is the more important info to show - this piece of info the display is already showing, or the new information I want to include?" And yeah, any of the MFD's mentioned makes sense, but I'd like to avoid needing to do it, if possible. I started looking at Useful MFD's, but got frustrated by its inherent bad performance, and then went down a rabbit hole trying to fix said bad performance and then gave up.

Anyway, I've got a system in place, I'll see how it plays in game and tweak as necessary.

The equipment listed there can't be damaged and its functionality is guranteed for all ships .

Until it isn't. With mods, most of that equipment *can* be damaged. Including lasers and the HUD.
However, in my testing, you can't remove the beacon from the main station, main planet or sun (or at least, removing the beacons from those entities has no impact on whether you can select them as a navigation target). So those will always be available. So, rest assured, you'll still have basic navigation.

A few possibilties : decrease scanner range, engine only working at half speed, pitch/roll/yaw only responding once every 2 seconds, decreased laser range/accuracy etc

There's some interesting ideas there. I'll have a think about whether I can implement them in some way that makes it clear to the player the change of effect is being caused by the solar flare (and not some random bug).

[Cholmondely]

...There's some interesting ideas there. I'll have a think about whether I can implement them in some way that makes it clear to the player the change of effect is being caused by the solar flare (and not some random bug).

But surely things do normally go randomly wrong anyways? The rise in cabin temperature should be a perfectly good clue, especially after a warning from the Independent Solar Monitoring Astrogatory Contraption (ISMAC).

[cbr]

[Stormrider]

Solar flares indeed.









I hope others here saw this last night, it was really colorful and bright. Couldn't help but share and this seemed like an appropriate thread to do so.
Old Sol has been quite active lately.

[phkb]

Old Sol has been quite active lately.

Did it make your car heat up, though?