Oolite Bulletins

Pleb wrote:

But it would be good to see what people can come up with.

Would "The search for Galaxy 9" make a suitably catchy topic heading?

Pleb wrote:

Wildeblood wrote:

Many hands make light work, so I suggest it's time to re-start this discussion (the search for particular nifty galaxy seeds) in the discussion section of the forum, in the form of a challenge. While trying to avoid therein distracting discussion of the related implementation issues of how many, how to enter, etc. Give instructions how to hack a save-file, and ask people to upload images and state the seed numbers used to create them. Yes? No?

The only problem with hacking save games is that it has a tendency to cause problems with the game. But it would be good to see what people can come up with.

If you don't hack the original sourcecode as well, edited save games CAN cause crashes...especially in OXPs. This happens because lots of scripting features depend on galaxy chart number, which generates errors outside the range of 0-7 (1-8).

It is possible to hack save games to change galaxy seeds and still use galaxy numbers 0-7, but it of course means ALL of the normal galaxy charts are inaccessible.

Switeck wrote:

If you don't hack the original sourcecode as well, edited save games CAN cause crashes...especially in OXPs. This happens because lots of scripting features depend on galaxy chart number, which generates errors outside the range of 0-7 (1-8).

It is possible to hack save games to change galaxy seeds and still use galaxy numbers 0-7, but it of course means ALL of the normal galaxy charts are inaccessible.

This is why I went into the source to find a way to do it so that you could not only safely explore new galaxies without the game crashing but also so that scripting can make use of the new galaxies, and OXPs can be modified to accommodate these new changes. Also new OXPs can be written that reference these new galaxies specifically.

First of all I think this part of this thread should be not be in Testing and Bugs section and should be moved to the Discussions section.

I have how got three candidate seeds values that have all 8 government types in all the 8 galaxies:

Candidate 1:

Seed: 4F7E, 5548, 5CB6 (in the form used by my spreadsheet) or 126 79 72 85 182 92 (form used by the save games)

Maps:
Seed Candidate 1 - Galaxy 1.png
Seed Candidate 1 - Galaxy 2.png
Seed Candidate 1 - Galaxy 3.png
Seed Candidate 1 - Galaxy 4.png
Seed Candidate 1 - Galaxy 5.png
Seed Candidate 1 - Galaxy 6.png
Seed Candidate 1 - Galaxy 7.png
Seed Candidate 1 - Galaxy 8.png

Candidate 2:

Seed: F511, EA00, B277 or 17 245 0 234 119 178

Maps:
Seed Candidate 2 - Galaxy 1.png
Seed Candidate 2 - Galaxy 2.png
Seed Candidate 2 - Galaxy 3.png
Seed Candidate 2 - Galaxy 4.png
Seed Candidate 2 - Galaxy 5.png
Seed Candidate 2 - Galaxy 6.png
Seed Candidate 2 - Galaxy 7.png
Seed Candidate 2 - Galaxy 8.png

Candidate 3:

Seed: 724E, C048, AD67 or 78 114 72 192 103 173

Maps:
Seed Candidate 3 - Galaxy 1.png
Seed Candidate 3 - Galaxy 2.png
Seed Candidate 3 - Galaxy 3.png
Seed Candidate 3 - Galaxy 4.png
Seed Candidate 3 - Galaxy 5.png
Seed Candidate 3 - Galaxy 6.png
Seed Candidate 3 - Galaxy 7.png
Seed Candidate 3 - Galaxy 8.png

I found a lot more seed but these appeared to be of interest and then I rejected some of those because there were inappropriate names.

For the above maps thanks goes to Wyvern.

Edit: Updated Links above.

Wow! Thanks for those PhantorGorth, you've really outdone yourself this time. So we have three sets of galaxies now that have all 8 government types in so the next step would really to be to decide which set to use if we 'were' going to expand to 16 galaxies. I think another important issue which has been skirted a few times is if this 'was' going to be implemented, how would it be implemented? Should travel to new galaxies depend on specific equipment, thereby allowing the player to chose whether to just go from Galaxy 8 to Galaxy 7, or from Galaxy 8 onto Galaxies 9-16?

Also would people want more galaxies, or are the majority of players content with the current 8 galaxies? I know for a long time I was kind of on the fence about this, despite going out of my way to prove that the source code could be modified to make the game accomodate more galaxies and make them scripting compatible, but now that it's been proven possible and that PhantorGorth has managed to find new sets of galaxies that have all the government types in them this idea is looking a lot more feasible and practical than ever before. Perhaps it should be put to the public vote to see what people really think?

Pleb wrote:

[...] despite going out of my way to prove that the source code could be modified to make the game accomodate more galaxies and make them scripting compatible, but now that it's been proven possible [...]

I am glad that you did this effort pleb and that you had a good result, but there was nothing to prove, really. The source code can be modified to do anything anyone wants - even make the game MMORPG if one feels like it; it's just finding people with the will to spend the time to do it and test their results that is difficult. Some modifications are simple and can be done within a few lines of code and some are complex and may require complete re-writes of a large part of the source files, but the truth that does not require proof is that once the source is available there is nothing stopping one doing what one wants, apart from one's own skill and time limitations.

We already have a documented way of what changes are needed for galaxies to be added and there is some testing background that seems to indicate that things still work. That's good. You also had a good chance to dig in the source and produce something new, which is also good - the more people hacking the code, the brighter the future . Please continue hacking.

another_commander wrote:

I am glad that you did this effort pleb and that you had a good result, but there was nothing to prove, really. The source code can be modified to do anything anyone wants - even make the game MMORPG if one feels like it; it's just finding people with the will to spend the time to do it and test their results that is difficult. Some modifications are simple and can be done within a few lines of code and some are complex and may require complete re-writes of a large part of the source files, but the truth that does not require proof is that once \the source is available there is nothing stopping one doing what one wants, apart from one's own skill and time limitations.

Good point A_C.

another_commander wrote:

I am glad that you did this effort pleb and that you had a good result, but there was nothing to prove, really. The source code can be modified to do anything anyone wants - even make the game MMORPG if one feels like it; it's just finding people with the will to spend the time to do it and test their results that is difficult. Some modifications are simple and can be done within a few lines of code and some are complex and may require complete re-writes of a large part of the source files, but the truth that does not require proof is that once \the source is available there is nothing stopping one doing what one wants, apart from one's own skill and time limitations.

We already have a documented way of what changes are needed for galaxies to be added and there is some testing background that seems to indicate that things still work. That's good. You also had a good chance to dig in the source and produce something new, which is also good - the more people hacking the code, the brighter the future . Please continue hacking.

Thank you another_commander, there a few more things I have been testing around in the source code but nothing concrete enough to publish yet. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm currently trying to develop a way to load alternate starting positions/settings from save game files at the beginning - a bit like in Frontier, where you could have different starting settings. This way you could have the original start at Lave with 100 credits and a Cobra 3, the harder setting of starting in a worse ship with less money and a Fugitive wanted status in an Anarchy system, and the easier setting of starting in a better ship with more money in a corporate system. The main feature of this though, which doesn't yet work in my test version, is the the fact it reads these save games from a list in a new file called player-starting-locations.plist in the Config folder, meaning OXPs could add new starting positions to the game. This means you could have a list at the start of the game, populated with all the entries from the player-starting-locations.plist file and select different starting games. I would also like to make one for the Ironman type game that I've heard people talk about before.

Other things I have managed to produce in the code are ways of circumventing the limit restrictions on travelling more than 7 light years in the game (which I don't agree with, but I managed to make it equipment dependable so that it wouldn't break the game), but I had to change the amount of fuel a player ship could hold to do this. Still, was funny to travel from one end of a galaxy to the other in one jump - the clock took ages to catch up with itself! But as I've said before this is CHEATING and I only did it more for a laugh. I also removed the code for removing the Galactic Hyperdrive in one test version so I could jump between galaxies 9-16 quicker to take screenshots of the maps without having to get a new Galactic Hyperdrive every time! Again, this is CHEATING!!! But if anyone has any ideas for small features that wouldn't necessarilly break the game I'd be happy to experiment with to see if its possible. I'm starting to get to grips with the code and producing results that I never thought were possible!

Pleb wrote:

if anyone has any ideas for small features that wouldn't necessarily break the game I'd be happy to experiment with to see if it's possible. I'm starting to get to grips with the code and producing results that I never thought were possible!

The first two obvious ones to me are increasing the scanner range, and a long range sniper laser.

And a mega-laser.

And longer-range turrets.

SandJ wrote:

The first two obvious ones to me are increasing the scanner range, and a long range sniper laser.

Increasing the scanner range wouldn't be hard, but perhaps making it too far would create an unfair advantage. If the increase was equipment dependable, which again wouldn't be hard, that would perhaps be more acceptable. A long range sniper laser would be a bit different, you'd have to specify an increased laser range for a specific laser, as well as creating a zoomed view so that you could see your tagret. I will have a look at the source tonight and see what's possible. EDIT - I just thought though that if the scanner was increased the Torus Drive would Mass Lock more often, which would be annoying. I did remove the mass lock in a test version, but it just allowed the player to smash into things with greater speeds and accidently destroying the ship increased ten fold!

SandJ wrote:

And a mega-laser.

This wouldn't be hard at all, I've already done something similar. I made a player version of the Thargoid Laser in the code and found that although this gave the player an increased advantage it made things far too easy...

SandJ wrote:

And longer-range turrets.

Again this wouldn't be hard, but perhaps defining specific turrets with longer ranges would require more code. I will also check this out when I get home but I don't see why this shouldn't be possible.

Pleb wrote:

SandJ wrote:

The first two obvious ones to me are increasing the scanner range, and a long range sniper laser.

Increasing the scanner range wouldn't be hard, but perhaps making it too far would create an unfair advantage.

Eh, the decrease in frame rate would compensate for that . The scanner routine for the player is currently a bit of a bottleneck already, and the volume of space to consider of course goes up as the cube of the scanner range, so you'd have to be careful with this... Of course, if you can come up with some good optimisations, everyone will be happy.

Of course, remember that it doesn't have to be the player's scanner range that increases. Thargoids have a scanner range of 60km according to shipdata.plist, but it gets capped to 25.6km by the game engine. That would make them a little scarier, and able to react better to the rather cheap tactic of sniping at them from 27km with a military laser... It would be far less potentially unbalancing as an NPC-only feature, since the player can see ships, except the tiny ones, at beyond scanner range anyway.

Most NPCs only check their scanner every few seconds at most, and often much less often than that, but on the other hand there are a lot of NPCs in the average system, so if you double scanner range, each check takes eight times as long, so bottlenecks could still be an issue.

Pleb wrote:

SandJ wrote:

And longer-range turrets.

Again this wouldn't be hard, but perhaps defining specific turrets with longer ranges would require more code. I will also check this out when I get home but I don't see why this shouldn't be possible.

Oh, it's just a matter of removing the current cap. I haven't looked, but it's probably a one-line change.

The problem is that plasma bolts are slow, so that against any target that's not either absolutely massive or has no relative motion, they'll not actually hit anything at longer ranges anyway. That's more a problem of physics than of the game code.

Watch a Frigate from the GalNavy OXP - since it has a lot of turrets but no other weapons, it makes a good test ship for this - trying to fend off Thargons. Even at a range of a few kilometres, and with 20 turrets, it will usually miss. Thargons are small targets, but in terms of angular size a Cobra III at 10-12km is similarly difficult to hit and has more time to see the shots coming and get out of the way.

So it's not just a matter of increasing the ranges, but also of giving them proper target prediction AI so that they fire at where the ship will be when the bolt gets to it. (Remember that this prediction AI will run once per frame per turret, so as well as being really good it also has to involve very little calculation)

Pleb wrote:

I also removed the code for removing the Galactic Hyperdrive in one test version

Probably easier than modifying the source code is to use the playerEnteredNewGalaxy event to award a new hyperdrive for these sorts of tests. Quite a lot of cheating is already possible with OXPs, after all!

cim wrote:

Of course, remember that it doesn't have to be the player's scanner range that increases. Thargoids have a scanner range of 60km according to shipdata.plist, but it gets capped to 25.6km by the game engine. That would make them a little scarier, and able to react better to the rather cheap tactic of sniping at them from 27km with a military laser... It would be far less potentially unbalancing as an NPC-only feature, since the player can see ships, except the tiny ones, at beyond scanner range anyway.

It would make sense for the Thargoids to have a larger scanner range and they are supposed to be more advanced. Perhaps if this was increased slightly it would give them more of an advantage on the player, as I've observed before in the past that I can create a massive Thargoid fleet and sit just out of scanner range, almost taunting them but yet they do not see me!

cim wrote:

The problem is that plasma bolts are slow, so that against any target that's not either absolutely massive or has no relative motion, they'll not actually hit anything at longer ranges anyway. That's more a problem of physics than of the game code.

What about increasing the speed that the plasma bolts move at? If the bolts moved faster they would probably have a greater chance of hitting a tarhet surely?

cim wrote:

Probably easier than modifying the source code is to use the playerEnteredNewGalaxy event to award a new hyperdrive for these sorts of tests. Quite a lot of cheating is already possible with OXPs, after all!

True, but its more fun to mess around with the code sometimes!

I would like to see a feature return that was removed. That was being able to track something beyond scanner range, but not with missiles. It makes Okti's Long Range Scanner much better to use as you can actually see how far it is to your target.

For me it seems daft that we can jump to another system by creating wormholes but can't follow something beyond 25 kilometres? Not even a rock!

Pleb wrote:

cim wrote:

The problem is that plasma bolts are slow, so that against any target that's not either absolutely massive or has no relative motion, they'll not actually hit anything at longer ranges anyway. That's more a problem of physics than of the game code.

What about increasing the speed that the plasma bolts move at? If the bolts moved faster they would probably have a greater chance of hitting a tarhet surely?

Yes, but if you think about how hard it is to hit a moving target with a laser at 15km the bolts are going to need to go incredibly fast to reliably hit at that range (if they move too fast, on the other hand, at low frame rates there's a fair chance they'll go straight through their target and out the other side without actually causing any damage...)

Pleb wrote:

Also would people want more galaxies, or are the majority of players content with the current 8 galaxies?

Takes off dev hat, puts on player/OXP writer hat
Well, with 2048 systems in the original 8, it's not as if the average player - or even a committed member of the Explorer's Club - is going to visit them all in a hurry. So an extra 2048 which are more of the same (but with fewer content or mission OXPs available) doesn't immediately sound appealing. What they need is interesting stories that couldn't be told in the original 8.

There really isn't a lot of difference in direct gameplay terms between Ensoreus (Gal 1, Rich Ind Corporate, TL 12) and Edxebere (Gal 5, Rich Ind Corporate, TL 12). But while Ensoreus is the technological and industrial anchor of a small cluster of mostly-agricultural stars, Edxebere is a gateway system - along with its sister world of Gediesqu - between the dense mostly-stable cluster of Galcentre G5, and the dangerous and bottleneck-filled trail that leads from the Siege Worlds down to the trader's graveyard of Bizaar.

Ensoreus is a local trading hub of some importance, well positioned to fend off competition from Zaonce and Tionisla on the edges of its cluster - and it exploits this to keep the nearby Agricultural worlds mostly pretty poor and dependent on it.

Edxebere - with Inbior, Bisoaton, and a range of other high tech worlds just two jumps to its north - is mainly a place people go through on their way to somewhere more interesting, or for emergency repairs after a nasty experience in Anisat when traversing the trail eastward.

The stories that get told about each place are very different, despite their apparent similarity. There are three types of stories to tell ... not without overlap, of course:
1) The unfolding personal narrative as you play the game
2) Stories told through the medium of fiction
3) Stories told through a mission OXP.

There are entire regions of the Eight - in some cases getting on for entire galaxies - which don't yet have their stories told to a wide audience (indeed, once you get out of Chart 1, the stories get much sparser). If you start with the topology, and work out of the story, there are hundreds of interesting OXPs and/or novellas yet to be written, just from the existing eight charts.

Of course, sometimes you want to start with the story, and then find a place in the charts to set it. The charts are very diverse already, so there's usually space for it. So - a 9th chart is only useful in my opinion if it lets a story be told that someone wants to tell but can't in the original 8 because there's nowhere it makes sense to set it. Find that story - and a chart that allows it - and there's your justification.

Incidentally, this is why the 7LY jump limit is for me the key thing that makes Oolite what it is. With the jump limit increased by a mere 0.2LY, for instance, a jump from Bexe to Zaenza becomes possible, and the Steel Halo in Gal 5 goes from being an extremely interesting branch with one story already set there - and at least one other very obvious story no-one's yet published - to being a relatively dull cluster of industrial and semi-industrial worlds.