A Solar Systems OXP - @Frame

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Fri Sep 05, 2008 5:44 am

Hey Frame,

how`s it coming along, incidentally?

Just asking.

Don`t feel hastened, or even pressured.

I`d never try that.

Erm ... how`s it coming along?

L

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Fri Sep 05, 2008 11:02 am

Not very well... while suffering from lumonia, i moved my wifes laptop and had a cough attack.. so i dropped it, caught it before it hit the floor, it flexed opened, i yanked it upwards, and the screen swung into the corner of a living room table... with the result that the screen got smashed... so while it is being repaired.. my wife is using my stationary PC a lot.. i´m a bit in the dog house at the moment... because i smashed her laptop...

i expect though, that to get a lot of work done by this weekend..

so far i have scripted the galaxy seed and rotate seed functions.. sort a like the pseudo random generator... since i cant be sure of the build in random numbers will be the same.. and i´m not going to manually calculate 256by8 - famous planets numbers, sort a like in system redux...

instead it is going to rely on the galaxy seed (had to use something, could have used whatever numbers i came up with), that i rotate (moves bits to get new numbers).. so the system is generated each time is exactly alike the next time.. i read something about the pseudo being reset under certain conditions, and i avoid it like this...

i have been plotting planets into a 3d max grid system... with real oolite planets sizes and distances... i´m having some trouble with Orbits.OXP, since it moves the planets according to the ship clock... i´m afraid that this oxp is going to be incompatible with orbits...

i could avoid this of course and just add stations and jump gates to already existing planets, created by system redux and orbits..

however..

1. system redux planets are of wrong oolite size, in fact, some of them are larger than the sun. which means you are going to mass lock very very far away. I could add the station likewise outside this mass lock area... however... that will not bring about the nice scenarios i intend to make... and planets that are sun size, should be gas planets... which they are not in system redux...

2. Orbits planets move... i don't like this uncertainty.. and frankly i don't give a damn about them moving... no offense Ebi... i even looked into Ebi´s code, my initial impression... overly complex... that could have been done a lot smoother i think... anyway... it is not very transparent what goes on, and is not very well documented, therefore i keep my hands off... now i´m not meaning to criticize his code, its superb by all means.. i would just have done it in another way...

3. orbits use an ecliptic plane,, while this is very realistic... it does not leave much room for extra planets, which is why i initially moved planets 30 mil. meters away... when i then of course encountered the precision limits.

4. i´m dead certain, that this oxp and orbits would conflict. in very unexpected ways...

5. Both system redux and orbits do not have a lot of variants, there are 4 types planets and 4 types of moons in system redux.. orbits have 9 variants of planets without textures.

6 while i can ensure full compatibility with system redux, i cannot with orbits...

this was what i can think off off the shelf right now...

If i´m going to do this solar system oxp, i´m going to do it right... .

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Fri Sep 05, 2008 11:28 am

Sounds very cool, looking very much forwards to it ... and rather probably not only me.

I assumed that for such an oxp System Redux would have to be set so as to produce no additional planets or moons, and Orbits would collide, too. But no problem!

For things like Assassins, perhaps specific systems can be left out from the generation?

What I would find VERY cool would be planetary ground stations. If something like that is added, it`s better done at the beginning, which is why I am ~~pestering you about it~~ bringing it up now ...

Good luck!

L

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Sat Sep 06, 2008 2:54 pm

Lestradae wrote:
Sounds very cool, looking very much forwards to it ... and rather probably not only me.

I assumed that for such an oxp System Redux would have to be set so as to produce no additional planets or moons, and Orbits would collide, too. But no problem!

For things like Assassins, perhaps specific systems can be left out from the generation?

What I would find VERY cool would be planetary ground stations. If something like that is added, it`s better done at the beginning, which is why I am ~~pestering you about it~~ bringing it up now ...

Good luck!

L

Thanks..

The First thing i aim at, is to get this auto system pseudo generating going... balancing it just right...

Once i get that done, i will include stations... at which point i´m going to ask the community what kind of stations they want... since they are the ones going to be using them, including myself... this will include ground stations...

i intend to include these station within the OXP, renaming theire roles, so that we avoid conflicts..

I did a station trial run. i was under the impression that it was possible to save at an oxp station, however, on next load commander, you would launch from the main-planet station.. this seems not to be the case... since you cant save anywhere else, than the main station. I had an idea for a save-anywhere OXP... would have been nice if you could save on other stations... i´t would´nt even conflict if the OXP station was not there... the player would simply be hovering where the station was supposed to be... upon next load...

While designing the system generator, i´m going to take into consideration other system changing oxps like assasins, famous planets and so on..
´
Cheers Frame

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Sat Sep 06, 2008 5:21 pm

coincidently i was sitting in the livingroom...

And somehow a method of saving at OXP stations appeared to me...

the method contains a new peice of equipment... The save anywhere equipment...

Some concerns needs to be attended though... like making sure you can´t save in a rock hermit, that is spawned randomly... while OXP stations normaly have fixed posistions...

This requires investigation though... black monks station, various convience stores, seedy bar and so on.

i actually think i can make a save-anywhere OXP... it will need some coorperation from the player though.... he has to manually save once.. after he bought the equipment which will have a price of 0.1 or 1 cr.... or even 0 depending on what is possible...

pagroove · Post by **pagroove** » Sat Sep 06, 2008 7:07 pm

Cool that you can buy it as equipment

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Mon Sep 08, 2008 10:22 am

Frame if you can pull this off I will be SOOOO happy! (and so will many, many others!)

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 2:17 am

DaddyHoggy wrote:
Frame if you can pull this off I will be SOOOO happy! (and so will many, many others!)

Nearly there

It appears that a cobra MK III can push stations all be it at very small units, but enough to make a mess of the things and not making it auto dock at an OXP station... i can put the player in the vicinity of the OXP station, but i can´t guarantee an auto dock each time since the station can be pushed in the mean time...

that means i have to indulge myself into vector and quaternions, a field not of my specialty... vectors somewhat rusty.. quaternions nope...

The dock point of a station cannot be obtained normally, what you will get is the position relative to the station, if all dock points where at the center then it would all be just fine... but they are not...

so its something like

station position + (dock point position relative to station + taking into account the stations orientation)

But if that fails, I can at least get the player near the OXP stations location(after a load commander file), i´m using much the same procedure to get the player there, like for the jump gate...

investigating this further...

i got a working save anywhere oxp going, there is a minor bug somewhere that will not let me save a second time, but that is a cosmetic bug i will solve, as i´m more focused on getting this auto dock code to work

Cheers Frame

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 9:08 am

Keep going that man! 2.5 Cheers - hip hip hooray, hi hip horray, hip hip-

(you get the full 3 cheers when the oxp is out) - this really will change the way people play Oolite I think - there'll be no more whistling and looking nonchalant trying to make it to the main station when you're no longer clean (or the quick dash ignoring the viper bites bouncing off your ever diminishing shields )

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 12:32 am

I´m happy to announce that at least for my custom added
station, i´m now able to save at this OXP station, and upon
loading the commander file, i´m transfered to that very station...

this works for all tested systems which is 20+ by now, and should in theory work for non fixed position stations too

intense testing is now required, which means i´m going to install a lot of OXP´s containing stations

Cheers Frame...

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 8:02 am

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 3:14 pm

I just realised that this opens a possibility for special docking stations for very large player ships, too - namely, additional stations with bigger docking ports ... if you can savegame there.

L

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 5:05 pm

Frame wrote:
I´m happy to announce that at least for my custom added
station, i´m now able to save at this OXP station, and upon
loading the commander file, i´m transfered to that very station...

Wow man, that's an epic achievement

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 5:43 pm

Lestradae wrote:
I just realised that this opens a possibility for special docking stations for very large player ships, too - namely, additional stations with bigger docking ports ... if you can savegame there.

L

Well, you can, but it requires you to interact with the savegame.oxp in an unexpected way..

The ship will still need to be able to dock with the main station, since a transfer is taking place between the OXP station and the system Main station..

it will probably fail in transferring you to the main station, as in if any part of the ship is inside the collision box of a station, then you cant dock, after which this OXP will set you about 15 km s away in front of the main station and you have to manually dock with the auto dock feature (ctrl+d)

whereby after you can save your game, and get transfered back to the OXP station..

it would be much better if we could totally replace the docking bay of the main stations which i believe could be done with an OXP where the likelihood of this happening would be set to (1.00).. this would also though make it very easy for a small ship to dock...

i´m afraid there is not any way of setting what model would be used as main station given certain parameters such as player ship size

monstrous ships does however carry their own set of problems, one of them being collision detection..

i once made a model, that suffered from that problem, also there is the gaming aspect of would players really fly around in these monster ships, that steers and feels like an asteroid..

its much effort for little usage... but i´ll leave that decision up to the player...

I have now tested, and fixed some problems that revealed themselves when I tried using the savegame.oxp with the following stations

1 Seedy bars
-------------------------------------------------
works perfectly

2 Buoy repair stations
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Buoy repair stations... thinking about banning this one from being able to save at since it is so close to the main station

furthermore, I could not find a buoy repair station in any system... I had to set it to testing mode in order for it to show up in all systems... wonder if this is a bug in the scripts with the parameters.. I could not find a system that fulfilled the required parameters for a buoy station to spawn, I ran a test that looked for them in 50+ systems I crossed to get to systems where I thought there might be a repair station... gonna pm Erich about it later... I think the culprit being the required tech level is set 1 to high since tech level 1, is equal to 0 in code

3 rock hermits and deep space rock hermits and Carriers, pirate coves., hoopy casino
---------------------------------------------------
Can´t yet be saved at due to their random spawning nature... i´ll look into writing the script code that will spawn these types of stations at the stored location if no station of the required role is found... once I done that you will be able to save at any station you can dock to, and that is not banned from saving at...

4 additional non tested stations
----------------------------------------------------------
more testing required of further stations, such as the globe stations and military stations in various OXP´s, these look like no brainers as they are copies of the main station parameters..

pagroove · Post by **pagroove** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 6:42 pm

Also test the Griff/P.A. Groove stations then. But Frame that is an amazing achievement!

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A Solar Systems OXP - @Frame

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