TAF and game build configurations

[superbatprime]

I just started using the TAF for screens, I'm gonna have to go with the test build rather than the end user intended build just for that... even though I consider myself a "player's player" (always hated being GM, too much math).

Unless there is perhaps, maybe, possibly some new super awesome facility for screenshots in 1.77... like oh I dunno, cycling custom external views while paused? *whistles nonchalantly*

Truly madly undoable impossibility or no?

[maaarcooose]

Well that's good to know - I used TAF instead of the Torus drive - as I see the Torus drive as cheating - whereas as TAF (not set too high a factor) means that the AI gets chance to hunt me down - and I get to stay in the space lane and see all the pretty stuff I'd populated my Ooniverse with...

So, when I get back on to playing the game - it'll be the testing version for me!

I had to ask. How is the Torus drive cheating?

!m!

[DaddyHoggy]

I consider the Torus drive cheating because it was an invention in original 8-bit version to get the pilot to the space station as quickly as possible while still chucking stuff infront of him to fight with as he went (in 8-bit version ship really was centre of the universe). But now loads of stuff happens without the player being there or intervening - it's still slightly player centric in the sense that Thargoids will target player more often than NPC ships for example.

But in the Ooniverse only the player has the Torus drive (fanfic notwithstanding) - the idea is to leave all the whizzy stuff that the system populator puts in the way by using Torus drive to get away perpendicular to the space lane, then blast along on a parallel course devoid of life (OXPs which repopulate this also notwithstanding). I just find it wrong, to be the only player to have something - so I don't carry an E.Bomb and I don't use the Torus Drive.

On a fast machine and a reasonable TAF I can stick to the space lane and see how wonderful and intricate an ooniverse in the space lane is. (Too high a TAF screws up AI ability to do sensible calculations so I don't use it either).

How's that for an explanation?

That's why single player Oolite is great - I make my Ooniverse my own - my own rules - bounded only by Developers overall intent for the game and the engine that powers it all...

[Wildeblood]

I just started using the TAF for screens, I'm gonna have to go with the test build rather than the end user intended build just for that... even though I consider myself a "player's player" (always hated being GM, too much math).

Unless there is perhaps, maybe, possibly some new super awesome facility for screenshots in 1.77... like oh I dunno, cycling custom external views while paused? *whistles nonchalantly*

Truly madly undoable impossibility or no?

Grab the tweak I uploaded yesterday for automatically hiding the HUD on custom views, so you don't need to pause and press o. Add TAF changes into the script so it automatically goes to slowest (0.0625 IIRC) and resets to normal speed (1.0) at the same points it's hiding and showing the HUD. It's not exactly what you're asking for, but it should be helpful to you. You just need to add three lines of code like this:-

Code: Select all

timeAccelerationFactor = 0.0625;

[Switeck]

The Torus Drive is a seriously overpowered cheat in running battles.
Enemy injecting away? Point your ship at it, wait for it to get off the scanner, turn torus on...and you just caught up with it.
In a fight you just can't win? Inject till you get the enemies off the scanner, turn torus on...and pretty much nothing will catch up. Then again, if you could inject away from them in the first place they probably weren't all that fast.

The original 8-bit Elite didn't have a smooth torus drive, it had a short-range jump you could quickly do over-and-over again so long as you weren't mass-locked.

[Cody]

I think the torus drive, despite all the aforementioned problems with it, is the best solution - of course, that's a personal opinion. Far better the torus than TAF or some variant of Stardreamer (was that what it was called?).

... the idea is to leave all the whizzy stuff that the system populator puts in the way by using Torus drive to get away perpendicular to the space lane, then blast along on a parallel course devoid of life

I wish that wasn't so easy to do in the core game (and it doesn't necessarily require the torus for the tactic to work) - I expect most have done it, especially as a Jameson, but it don't seem right. Apart from in testing, I haven't used that method for yarons (and that includes starting a new, and rapidly successful, Jameson recently).

[Disembodied]

I think the torus drive, despite all the aforementioned problems with it, is the best solution - of course, that's a personal opinion. Far better the torus than TAF or some variant of Stardreamer (was that what it was called?).

The problem for me with the torus drive is that it requires the player to be flying pretty much the fastest ship out there - otherwise you're constantly masslocked and can't get out (unless you opt to leave the spacelane). With a (properly working) TAF, instead, functionally it would feel the same as the torus except that you wouldn't be masslocked: you'd just get automatically bumped back to 1:1 time whenever you encountered a new ship. If you wanted to, you could then manually restore the TAF (say, if the other ship wasn't hostile, and you had no hostile designs on it yourself), and scoot on. So even if you were chuffing along in a Python, getting caught and overhauled by merchant Cobra IIIs would not be any big deal. If you wanted to watch them sail past in 1:1 time, you could: if you wanted to speed things up, you could do that too.

At the moment, if you're in a slow ship, and you're torusing along and you catch up with an inbound Cobra III (which is daft: why doesn't it have a torus drive too?), you're stuck: you can't overtake it (without using injectors), and if you try to go around it you have to leave the spacelane. The TAF would mean that all ships, fast or slow, would be (in this respect) equally playable, which could do a lot to damp down the march of überness where new ships get faster and faster.

The single big problem with the TAF is that it's not game-functional. You can switch it on in the middle of a firefight and there's a good chance that the enemy AIs will never hit you, because they're not designed to work under time acceleration. If it could be made to work in the game, if the game could be made to work properly with the TAF switched on, I'd be strongly in favour of dumping the torus drive and going for the TAF, at least for any sort of (entirely speculative) Oolite 2.0 development. Frontier's "stardreamer" was a rotten piece of handwavium, though: we'd need to come up with something better. But we're bending spacetime all the time: I think we can handle a little time dilation as well.

[superbatprime]

Grab the tweak I uploaded yesterday... Add TAF changes into the script

Wildeblood I thank you very very much.

I actually installed your HUD Vanisher before I went to out today and was looking forward to trying it tonight, now I come home and find this bonus.

Much respect dude, tyvm.

[Diziet Sma]

... the idea is to leave all the whizzy stuff that the system populator puts in the way by using Torus drive to get away perpendicular to the space lane, then blast along on a parallel course devoid of life

I wish that wasn't so easy to do in the core game (and it doesn't necessarily require the torus for the tactic to work) - I expect most have done it, especially as a Jameson, but it don't seem right. Apart from in testing, I haven't used that method for yarons (and that includes starting a new, and rapidly successful, Jameson recently).

Don't seem right, how exactly? When you need to drive somewhere, do you deliberately take the most congested route, or do you take minor/back-roads if they'll save you time and aggravation?

[Cody]

... or do you take minor/back-roads if they'll save you time and aggravation?

Not if they had a few bandits loitering along the way too - you may be safer in the main spacelane, if that was the case.
Besides, why would you want to miss out on all those crazy shipnames that you see along the 'lanes?

[Diziet Sma]

Yes, but leaving things as they stand, (ref your comment that you "wish that wasn't so easy to do in the core game") leaves it as a choice the player must make for themselves. And there's always Deep Space Pirates if they want to keep things more realistic.

Incidentally, this is something I've been playing about with recently.. I find if I torus away from the lane for about 8 seconds before heading parallel to the lane, 8 times out of 10 I can dodge both the lane and the DS pirates..


Re shipnames: Good point!

[Cody]

I find if I torus away from the lane for about 8 seconds before heading parallel to the lane, 8 times out of 10 I can dodge both the lane and the DS pirates..

Yep!

[Commander McLane]

The problem for me with the torus drive is that it requires the player to be flying pretty much the fastest ship out there - otherwise you're constantly masslocked and can't get out (unless you opt to leave the spacelane). … At the moment, if you're in a slow ship, and you're torusing along and you catch up with an inbound Cobra III (which is daft: why doesn't it have a torus drive too?), you're stuck: you can't overtake it (without using injectors), and if you try to go around it you have to leave the spacelane.

This is an aspect I have never thought about, but now you mention it, it seems so darn obvious.

And it's of course the answer to the frequently popping-up question "why is the player Cobbie III faster than the NPC Cobbie III's?"

[DaddyHoggy]

I think the torus drive, despite all the aforementioned problems with it, is the best solution - of course, that's a personal opinion. Far better the torus than TAF or some variant of Stardreamer (was that what it was called?).

The problem for me with the torus drive is that it requires the player to be flying pretty much the fastest ship out there - otherwise you're constantly masslocked and can't get out (unless you opt to leave the spacelane). With a (properly working) TAF, instead, functionally it would feel the same as the torus except that you wouldn't be masslocked: you'd just get automatically bumped back to 1:1 time whenever you encountered a new ship. If you wanted to, you could then manually restore the TAF (say, if the other ship wasn't hostile, and you had no hostile designs on it yourself), and scoot on. So even if you were chuffing along in a Python, getting caught and overhauled by merchant Cobra IIIs would not be any big deal. If you wanted to watch them sail past in 1:1 time, you could: if you wanted to speed things up, you could do that too.

At the moment, if you're in a slow ship, and you're torusing along and you catch up with an inbound Cobra III (which is daft: why doesn't it have a torus drive too?), you're stuck: you can't overtake it (without using injectors), and if you try to go around it you have to leave the spacelane. The TAF would mean that all ships, fast or slow, would be (in this respect) equally playable, which could do a lot to damp down the march of überness where new ships get faster and faster.

The single big problem with the TAF is that it's not game-functional. You can switch it on in the middle of a firefight and there's a good chance that the enemy AIs will never hit you, because they're not designed to work under time acceleration. If it could be made to work in the game, if the game could be made to work properly with the TAF switched on, I'd be strongly in favour of dumping the torus drive and going for the TAF, at least for any sort of (entirely speculative) Oolite 2.0 development. Frontier's "stardreamer" was a rotten piece of handwavium, though: we'd need to come up with something better. But we're bending spacetime all the time: I think we can handle a little time dilation as well.

thank-you, I thought I was the only one who thought like this!

[Disembodied]

thank-you, I thought I was the only one who thought like this!

It was flying a Cobra I which really made it stick, for me: it was great fun, and made for really exciting combats, and made me feel like I was really earning the small amounts of money I was making with a 10-ton cargo bay ... but the one single biggest flaw was the speed. I had to try to keep enough fuel after every jump to allow for injecting past masslocking ships. If I didn't, then I had to fly off the lane, torus past any obstruction, and try to rejoin the lane again later (the alternative - fly in to the station in real time - wasn't an option: I'm looking for a game, here, not a simulator!).

The central feature of the torus drive is the masslock: without a masslock, obviously, the torus would just allow players to zoom off away from any trouble, whenever they wanted to: if you have the torus, you have to have the masslock too. But masslocking means that - for all but the most dedicated and determined - the Cobra III is the slowest playable ship out there. Not a problem for the original game, of course, but it does put a cramp on things when players can fly any ship they want.