Oolite Bulletins

Apologies for the delay folks, been busy with a few other things...

Diziet Sma wrote:

Agreed.. that was most impressive.. and to my mind, pretty realistic. Anyone that close to a star should be totally immersed in the glare. Nice to see that your changes made that happen.

Thank you Dizzy
Who'd have thought it? A desirable side-effect to rescaling

cim wrote:

The position of the glare effect is related to the corona edge position, which is proportional to two factors: the corona_flare value for the system, and the square of the radius of the sun. Perhaps there needs to be a little adjustment in 1.79 to make it less subtle (if you go deeper than necessary for sunskimming, you can try it out, though)

Thanks cim, I'll look into that at some point.

Next up: adjustments to the ship and station scales.

What if stations and freighters (anacondas, pythons & boas) were twice as big?

Maybe the stations could be not so big that a cobra III pilot could completely ignore their rotation when docking. If the freighters were scaled up by the same ammount then they sould still dock.

The relatively bigger appearnace of the planets is not something that I want to lose though (I like the stations being much less obvious), so any stations and freighters will be scaled up by less than 3. I'll try 2 for starters, maybe sometime next week...

Redspear wrote:

Maybe the stations could be not so big that a cobra III pilot could completely ignore their rotation when docking. If the freighters were scaled up by the same ammount then they sould still dock.

You don't have to increase the size of the docking bay: in fact, a ship-sized docking bay (with appropriate signage - i.e. flashers, big honkin' arrows painted on the station) in an enlarged station might help to make the station look even bigger. Of course, if you're bumping up the sizes of the Anacondas and Boas, then they'd need to fit in the dock too ...

Disembodied wrote:

Redspear wrote:

Maybe the stations could be not so big that a cobra III pilot could completely ignore their rotation when docking. If the freighters were scaled up by the same ammount then they sould still dock.

You don't have to increase the size of the docking bay: in fact, a ship-sized docking bay (with appropriate signage - i.e. flashers, big honkin' arrows painted on the station) in an enlarged station might help to make the station look even bigger. Of course, if you're bumping up the sizes of the Anacondas and Boas, then they'd need to fit in the dock too ...

Yeah, increasing some of the bigger ships necessitates increasing the docking bay, but...
I could use two different factors. Say stations 2 times bigger, docking bays and freighters 1.5 times bigger...

Maybe something to tinker with later.
Thanks Disembodied

Well, it's been a while...

I've finally got a bit more free time on my hands and so back to work.
Since I was last here, a significant change has occured to the source:

• Something similar to that glare effect (pictured in earlier posts) now happens regardless of my tinkerings, due to changes mentioned here: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f= ... 25#p216035

Anyway, my rescaling seems to be working at 3.3 x bigger with no major gameplay effects or problems.
I've still got a bit of tinkering to do to make fuel scooping a bit more faithful to the original but that has been improving nicely. It used to be a solitary "scoop" as the torus drive took a ship too close, too quickly; now it's the more familiar "scoop, scoop, scoop..." after responding well to adjustments. More to be done but getting there.

The great fear of a never ending domino effect of changes has so far been avoided.
I'm only playing with 4 lines of code, changing just four numbers and adding only one more.

The game still feels very much like oolite to me but perhaps a little gameplay data will help others to see if it would deviate too much for their own tastes.

Encouner Frequency

One concern was that if space was made 'bigger' then encounters would become more and more unlikely. So I've started recording encounter frequency in my experiments. So how does one go about measuring this? I decided to take the following approach:

• 1. Ignore any encounters with the witchpoint on the scanner. These are likely to occur regardless of distances.
  
  2. Ignore any encounters once the compass has switched to the station nav-buoy. Again, the area approaching the station is likely to be relatively crowded as an area that can spawn ships.
  
  3. Ignore any overlapping encounters of the same colour. E.g. a trader (yellow) is behind you and then some more traders (yellow) appear whilst the former is still on your scanner - that would only be recorded as one encounter. If the second group were police (purple) or asteroids (white) then they would indeed be added to the count.
  
  4. If the 'space-lane' is left for any reason then no attempt is made to return to it. Instead, it's straight back to following the compass.
  
  6. Number of entities is not recorded. So a solitary trader or a pack of five pirates would both count as one encounter.
  
  7. Testing is done in an oxp light environment. No deep space pirates or other encounter spawning oxps.

So, here's the 'encounter rate' for a handful of trips between Diso (med-large) and Leesti (small planet).
Remember that these numbers are not individual ships but rather 'encounters', and they do not include those at the witchpoint or around the area where the compass defaults to the station nav buoy.

• Diso: 5, 3, 2, 4, 2, 3 (average = 3)
  Leesti: 4, 7, 5, 5, 4 (average = 5)

More data needed but it's a start and it certainly feels very playable to me.

I'll try to add some pictures soon to show how much bigger planets look in relation to a coriolis station.

Redspear wrote:

Well, it's been a while...

I've finally got a bit more free time on my hands and so back to work.

Yay!

Looking forward to seeing the pics.

Redspear, I'd love to playtest this - in roughly a month, as I'm leaving for hols in two days. Any chance we could have a testable OXP by then?

Zireael wrote:

Any chance we could have a testable OXP by then?

This is not an OXP project.. it requires changes to the game core.. you'd need to download and compile the modified source code.

I know I'm late to this conversation but I'm having trouble understanding the issue with the modelling scale.

Say I wanted to put a model of a Boeing 747-400 into the game and I wanted it to appear at it's "real world" size which is a few meters longer than the Oolite version of the Cobra Mk III. (length: 231 ft 10 in - 70.6 m) Does that mean I would have to make the model in units of feet (so 231.83 units long) in order to get it the right size in game?

(Not that I'm likely to, 3d modelling isn't really my thing, I'm just trying to understand the situation)

- Neelix

Neelix wrote:

I know I'm late to this conversation but I'm having trouble understanding the issue with the modelling scale.

Say I wanted to put a model of a Boeing 747-400 into the game and I wanted it to appear at it's "real world" size which is a few meters longer than the Oolite version of the Cobra Mk III. (length: 231 ft 10 in - 70.6 m) Does that mean I would have to make the model in units of feet (so 231.83 units long) in order to get it the right size in game?

(Not that I'm likely to, 3d modelling isn't really my thing, I'm just trying to understand the situation)

- Neelix

its about 3 to 1 scale to get ships to look right...... for my ship the space 1999 egle is 100 foot long so i modeled it at 100M long....

Diziet Sma wrote:

Zireael wrote:

Any chance we could have a testable OXP by then?

This is not an OXP project.. it requires changes to the game core.. you'd need to download and compile the modified source code.

I've compiled Oolite once and forgot how to do it, and anyways, I see no download for the modified source.

Neelix wrote:

...but I'm having trouble understanding the issue with the modelling scale.

Ha, you're not the only one!
The problem is that for all sorts of reasons Oolite scale is crazy. Ships are big, planets are small, suns are not at RL distances. It more or less has to be this way for the game to work. In other words so that you can actually see things and you can travel certain distances (planet to sun for example) in a reasonable time.
The problem comes when somebody tries to add say a TV or Movie ship. The dimensions of the ship are known so the modeller makes the model to the ship's RL dimensions, then finds it looks tiny in-game.
The origin of this issue is generally thought to be that Bell and Braben did the original Elite models in feet, but Oolite is based on meters, so it could be argued that the ships are three times bigger. But of course as everything Oolite is based on meters this isn't a problem in the game, until somebody uses a different scale (real-life metres not Oolite metres) for their new ship.
If modelling a TV/Movie ship, the simple solution is to expand all the dimensions by three, and that will Oolite-ify it so it looks right. Some people though aren't happy with this, hence this attempt to rescale Oolite.

Zireael wrote:

anyways, I see no download for the modified source.

That would be because Redspear hasn't made it available.. so far, it only exists on his computer.

Smivs wrote:

If modelling a TV/Movie ship, the simple solution is to expand all the dimensions by three, and that will Oolite-ify it so it looks right.

That really depends on the ship and setting. I don't think there's a hard rule for it.

A Star Trek ship would probably look right at 1 unit = 1 metre scale, as would the Star Wars warships (though you might want to use 1 unit = 2-3 metres for the warships if you were doing super star destroyers). An X-Wing, on the other hand, would look implausibly small even modelled at 1 unit = 1 foot - it'd be about the size of a Thargon drone. The Boeing 747 at 1 unit = 1 metre would probably look about right: at 1 unit = 1 foot it would be a fair bit longer than an Anaconda and might have trouble docking. Babylon5 ships ... 1 unit = 1 foot would probably work for the fighters, but would make the capital ships and stations a significant proportion of the size of the planet - 1 unit = 1 metre might work better there. A modern day space shuttle is about the same size as 1 unit = 1 metre Sidewinder ... if you did it at 1 unit = 2 metres it would be about the same size as an Oolite shuttle (and at 1 unit = 6 metres it'd match a FE2 shuttle fairly well, I think). Warhammer 40K ships you'd probably want to scale down to 1 unit = 5 metres or so, if you wanted them to be player-flyable, or maybe 1 unit = 2 metres if you wanted them to match the Behemoth/Galnavy OXPs. Honorverse ships look about right for 1 unit = 1 metre. BSG you'd probably want to use 1 unit = 2-3 metres to match the battlestars to a Behemoth, but that would make the fighters invisibly small...

Which is to say, that Oolite is far from the only scifi setting with fairly arbitrary and occasionally inconsistent scales for ships, and moving ships between them is going to be a matter of modelling it and then expanding or shrinking it until it looks right alongside everything else.

(Scaling up the size of the systems is a different matter... the planets are modelled at 1 unit = 100m in game, at the moment, so you can mess with the planet/system scale virtually independently of the ship scale)

ok.. that kind of makes sense... but leads me back to my original question.

So setting the issue of comparative sizes of ships from other universes aside for a moment, and going back to clarify my example, If I wanted to make my B747 to be 70.6 metres long in game (as compared to the Cobby III being 65m long) I should make it 70.6 unit's long?
ie 1 unit = in the modelling software *does* in fact equal 1 metre in game ship scale?

- Neelix

Neelix wrote:

ie 1 unit = in the modelling software *does* in fact equal 1 metre in game ship scale?

Correct.