big boom bug...

[nijineko]

this one is interesting! well. i had just stopped into a pi-con store to buy some cascade missles. replentishing the stock and all. well, just after i left i was hunting a pack of fugitives, and tossed a cascade missle after the pack. i made sure it was going to hit, and then flipped and made to get out of the blast radius. i was a bit too close and was almost riding the shock wave. to my surprise, i somehow managed to pop right back down the pi-con's loading bay, despite it's spin. well, now i'm trapped. expanding cascade field outside, and i dare not launch. the split second hesitation as i tried to figure out what to do was too much.

suddenly the pi-con store was destroyed. with me in it. i suddenly find myself looking at the pixie dust of destruction that floats on the screen... but there is no "press space, commander". i realize that i'm still in my ship. all around me is glitter. i'm looking down a long corridor that glows and jitters. at the end is a circle of pure white. the bounty messages are just fading from my hud. at least i nailed the rest of them.

(i took a couple of screenshots. the 'corridor' is actually the distorted exhaust of my ship, which oddly enough, points towards the circle of white, no matter how i turn. i can even face towards it, and still i see the exahust come around my ship and go forward. i cycle through all of the radar options and discover that they are all lined up on top of each other. the white circle i'm seeing is apparently the sun. no matter what direction i face i steadily proceed away from the sun. i'm guessing that what i'm seeing is that i've been blasted away from the system at super high velocity. ^^;



apparently, oolite does not handle getting blown up while inside a dockable entity well. seeing for myself what it looks like getting blown off the map at high speed, was awesome! now, we need an item which can bring you to a dead halt relative to the frame of reference. a drag chute or something. or perhaps an in-game check which will notice if any objects are travelling above a certain speed and drop the velocity down by a set amount until it drops to a certain maximum. hopefully that would allow me to return after a while.

hmmm. i should have tried to witchspace jump and see if that fixed my issue. but i keep getting a harddrive out of memory error when i play oolite more than a half-hour or so. i guess it eats up the last gig of space on my drive pretty quickly.

[Disembodied]

Are you sure it's a bug? What with the long glowing corridor and all, I think you've just died and got lost on your way to the PRESS SPACE, COMMANDER afterlife. Have you tried moving into the light?

[nijineko]

that was my first thought, actually. yes i have tried to move in all directions. however, my overall speed is so great that it seems to render any attempt to move on my part moot. i was even able to use the in-space jump drive, and i still did not slow down noticably. i left it running for about 30-45 minutes, and i still hadn't slowed enough to make a difference. however, i wish that i had thought to try a witchspace jump.

[Commander McLane]

Awesome experience!

I wouldn't call it a bug as such. On the boards we have discussed several times the "disappearing station issue", when after a huge explosion very close to the main station (e.g. when an Ixian Battleship tries to launch, which inevitably leads to an explosion in the docking bay, as the ship is far bigger than the bay) the station was nowhere to be found again. It does not explode itself, as it is hard-coded that main stations are indestructible. But it can be driven away by the explosion with the kind of velocity you are describing here.

So the whole thing is a common issue. You are just the first to experience it from within a station (or at least the first to post the experience here). And to be precise: from within a non-indestructible station, which was both propelled and destroyed, setting you free at its current speed. And as you have tried to slow down for a good amount of time without a visible effect, we now can start to imagine what kind of speed that must have been.

The physics of the Ooniverse is in a couple of points radically different from the physics in our known universe. Velocities and speeds are some of these points. In our known universe you would not expect to be slowed down at all after any reasonable amount of time. Moving objects stay in motion. Until, of course, the same force is applied to them to stop them, that was needed to move them in the first place. If that force was huge, then you wouldn't see the slowing-down force of your ordinary engine for a loooooooong time.

But the Ooniverse is different. All ships are inertia-less. They have to be constantly propelled in order to move at all (that's part of the non-newtonian physics of the Ooniverse). Therefore they have an exhaust plume constantly. If the propulsion fails, they come to a halt. And it makes very little sense to me that, while there is no inertia for propelled objects, inertia strikes again for wreckage (which is basically what you were in this incident).

Question to the programmers: How is the velocity of wreckage calculated and what could be changed about it, in order to let it come to a halt eventually?

[Captain Hesperus]

I've had this before. When I've 'accidently' nudged another ship I've been fighting, there are occasions when I end up getting thrown away at peculiar velocities and angles. I've found that turning into the direction I'm travelling then making slow pitches while reducing speed often works. On the other hand, it's good for strafing other ships since you are moving at a speed and direction that they can't swiftly respond in.....

Captain Hesperus

[JensAyton]

Question to the programmers: How is the velocity of wreckage calculated and what could be changed about it, in order to let it come to a halt eventually?

Dunno.

I hope you feel enlightened now. :-)

[Commander McLane]

Question to the programmers: How is the velocity of wreckage calculated and what could be changed about it, in order to let it come to a halt eventually?

Dunno.

I hope you feel enlightened now.

I do. Somehow...

[nijineko]

i took some screen shots, just so you can see it, i'll have to post them sometime.

(i think i want a "reset velocity to zero" feature added please!)

[nijineko]

btw. you can duplicate this effect by docking with a store out by the witchpoint. buy a cascade mine. exit. stop. flip so that you are facing the store again. launch the mine. reenter the shop after a few seconds pause. wait. this should duplicate the effect for you. check it out!

[nijineko]

has there been any consideration given to doing something about this? even ejecting from the ship does not end the game as the escape pod cannot return to base. i realize that it might not have been in any version of elite before, but perhaps since no one works more than a short distance beyond the witchpoint in a solar system, maybe once your ship reaches a certain distance from the sun of a system it's velocity falls to 0 automatically (danger will robinson, your ship is about to enter the oort cloud of this system, are you sure you wish to do this?) then you could continue in any direction you please as normal. perhpas a distance of 2x the witchpoint distance?

[Lestradae]

perhaps since no one works more than a short distance beyond the witchpoint in a solar system, maybe once your ship reaches a certain distance from the sun of a system it's velocity falls to 0 automatically (danger will robinson, your ship is about to enter the oort cloud of this system, are you sure you wish to do this?) then you could continue in any direction you please as normal. perhpas a distance of 2x the witchpoint distance?

Erm ... no, please don`t. Some people & myself are working on a solar systems expansion for Oolite, and there are already diverse OXPs (Tianve, and, I think, Assassins springs to mind) that operate far outside the sphere you are talking about.

Making some kind of general "the ship comes to a stop" - thing if far away from the main planet breaks all of this.

Perhaps some kind of "super breaking" could be built-in for such a case? But this last solution I think is not a very good idea.

[Commander McLane]

Isn't the whole "infinite velocities"-thing fixed anyhow?

I seem to remember something like this, either for any of the 1.71s or for 1.72.

[Cmdr James]

There are some things that are fixed, like shooting the station off into the distance at super high speed.

I think there is also some damping, so that you will eventually come to a stop whatever sped you are going.

[Eric Walch]

Isn't the whole "infinite velocities"-thing fixed anyhow?

I seem to remember something like this, either for any of the 1.71s or for 1.72.

I can definitely tell that speed-damping is installed. 1.70 and also 1.71.1 have a bug that they sometimes select the wrong ships. e.g. when the system asks for an "cargopod" it sometimes ended up with selecting an asteroid instead. Looks stange when killing a ship but deadly when ejecting cargo. When you had "asteroidStorm" installed this could be one of the heavy ones resulting in giving you an extremely reaction-speed in the other direction on ejecting that large one.

In 1.70 there was no recovery from this but to quit Oolite. In 1.71 I witnessed that my speed slowly reduced to normal values in about one minute.

[JensAyton]

Release notes for 1.71:

• Implemented power braking for ridiculous speeds.