Oolite Bulletins

I guess what we're possibly looking at as an alternative is a Frontier-style "speed up time" button... Which wouldn't worry me as long as it wasn't taken too far.

Roberto wrote:

The scooping station sounds kinda cool - I'm envisaging something like a small Cloud City - but I really wouldn't want to have to wait ten times as long to reach the sun by jump drive. I think for that kind of distance, a jump-drive boost would have to kick in (not so quickly that it would happen between the witchspace marker and the planet) to get you there before you left the room out of boredom Basically, a higher level of jump drive that is *very* susceptible to mass-lock, so it's only viable when you're deep in the black...

I think the solution to this is to add a witchpoint at a reasonable distance from the sun (comparable to the distance the classic witchpoint has to the planet), allowing 'interplanetary jumps' between witchpoints, and then usual approach procedure.
In this way you can jump between witchpoints (the planet witchpoint and the sun one), speeding up the game and improving playability. Of course this kind of 'interplanetary jump' has to be blocked by mass-locking to avoid to fool easily pirate ships.

Why not just adopt the same technique as flying directly to a planet by just moving outside of the corridor? Much more straightforward..

jonnycuba wrote:

Why not just adopt the same technique as flying directly to a planet by just moving outside of the corridor? Much more straightforward..

Well, it will still be possible to do that. 'Interplanetary jump' between sun and planet are just useful to reduce the time needed to reach the sun in case it'll be decided to move it away.

You know, if you have to reach such a far destination, moving outside the corridors doesn't speed up much the process...

lucabu wrote:

:idea: I think the solution to this is to add a witchpoint at a reasonable distance from the sun (comparable to the distance the classic witchpoint has to the planet), allowing 'interplanetary jumps' between witchpoints, and then usual approach procedure.
In this way you can jump between witchpoints (the planet witchpoint and the sun one), speeding up the game and improving playability. Of course this kind of 'interplanetary jump' has to be blocked by mass-locking to avoid to fool easily pirate ships. :idea:

I'm not keen on this... I think the whole witchpoint beacon idea and being stuck with the original Elite galaxy generator (where you can't set the hyperspace coords manually if you know where you're going) is a bit limiting.

Fuel-scooping stations have always been assumed to exist in the OOniverse.
Murgh and I just kept them around massive giant stars not included the civilian-Coop-navigation matrix (due to having no habitable planets and security). (Techno-babble for we want to model them, but not right now)
I also envisioned a sort of cloud city, or maybe a borg-like grid of connected platforms.

It would be nice to have misty nebula effects around these stations to simulate hydrogen discharge (smoke falling towards star). Or maybe borealis effects etc.


This intersystem jumping stuff sounds interesting.
Although a bit Freelanceroid.
I'd add jumpgates that stabilise for gravity interference.
Pass through a gate and you are infraspaced (as opposed to hyperspaced) to another linked gate.
These gates would have to be manuallly added but so do their destination planets/asteroidbelts/sun/specialstations/ etc.
In effect for programming purposes these locations could be separate systems, however I'd like to be able to fly manually from one part of a system to another. (Because these gates would only be likely in rich, stable systems and therefor probably fugatives would be denied service)


Perhaps pirate encounters could be added player-centrally, as in Frontier, just so you almost always encounter pirates regardless whether you leave the space lanes or not.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

Perhaps pirate encounters could be added player-centrally, as in Frontier, just so you almost always encounter pirates regardless whether you leave the space lanes or not.

I think one way to achieve this would be to add another level of scanner to every ship: a system scanner that would show you most of the other ships in the system (except those that may be stealthed from long distance scanning, like police or navy craft). Pirates could then use these system scans to go after targets that try to avoid the main space lanes...

dajt wrote:

The system size in Elite/Oolite has been starting to bug me a bit so I changed the code last night to put the sun 10x further away than normal (don't panic - didn't check it in!)

It was probably still too close, but it did look much better. If we had some blurring or lens-flares it might look better too, but I'm no GFX programmer.

The planet was almost invisible when I got to the sun.

It took 10 minutes to get to the sun from the witchpoint using jumpdrive so this reduces playability a bit, just taking time for no good reason.

BTW i remember sun was quite far in the original Elite..

dajt wrote:

The witchspace marker is always in the same place - 0,0,0. The planet gets put some distance 'x' directly down the Z axis at 0,0,x, and then the sun is placed something like 15 - 25 times the planet radius away, and at some system-specific angular displacement on all 3 axes.

BTW, is there any change to make the star the centre of the system? In a bigger system, that would make it so much easier to place the planets etc. on their respective "orbits" if we ever go that far...

In Elite TNK, on which Oolite's code is based (I believe), it took 25 minutes to fly from planet to sun at full speed (no Torus jump) in a Cobra. This is actually scientifically accurate - it takes 25 minutes to fly from Earth to the Sun at a third of the speed of light. There ought to be some variance in this figure, given that the other worlds shouldn't be exactly the same as Earth, but that's another story.

With this in mind, I think the sun is fine where it is, and this is further supported by the fact that it's at a good distance to make travelling there to skim the corona a decent length trip, but not too long.

OOlite's scales are all to pot in many ways, but I don't think that moving the sun further away is going to improve gameplay much, and will make sunskimming a long, laborious process.

One shortcut option for that could be a sort of hyperspace jumpgate that could be in place near the planet and could come out at another gate near the sun, which does have a station there too, to add a bit of trading opportunity.

Going to the sun was lengthy because the high pirate+hunter density, I think.

Giles/Dajt: could a method be devised to deplace a shipentity?

Wolfwood wrote:

BTW, is there any change to make the star the centre of the system? In a bigger system, that would make it so much easier to place the planets etc. on their respective "orbits" if we ever go that far...

I was going to ask Giles the same question, but am still wondering if multiple planets are a good idea. My take on it was a heliocentric system with multiple planets in proper orbits, with witchpoint beacons either in some sort of stable interplanetary orbit, or trailing each populated planet by about 500,000kms (which is about how far on average they seem to be from the planets at present).

But I'm beginning to think that is a different game and perhaps not necessary here.

Selezen wrote:

One shortcut option for that could be a sort of hyperspace jumpgate that could be in place near the planet and could come out at another gate near the sun, which does have a station there too, to add a bit of trading opportunity.

Please, no jumpgates! How I hate that idea.

Sorry I spoke!

Well then, how about a hyperspace 'hop'? Use 0.2LY worth of fuel to initiate a small jump towards the sun (or another programmable point)?

Only usable when no other ships are nearby, of course, because of some 'initiation instability' for such a short jump.

Selezen wrote:

Well then, how about a hyperspace 'hop'? Use 0.2LY worth of fuel to initiate a small jump towards the sun (or another programmable point)?

Only usable when no other ships are nearby, of course, because of some 'initiation instability' for such a short jump.

thats a cool idea. a witchjerk to make short erratic local witchjumps. I'd buy one.