Oolite Bulletins

Micha wrote:

OTOH, do we really need to get this precise? At the moment other things in the Ooniverse aren't all that 'correct' either - for example the RandomHits - essentially the target ship hangs around in the target system until the player gets there.

Random Hits is an OXP and what it does cannot be considered "correct" or "incorrect". It is just what its creator intended it to be. If we are to make a new official equipment piece, though, I believe we should do it properly and cover all cases.

Just seems to me that the game will have to do a fair bit of extra processing every frame to check for incoming ships for a situation which will hardly every arise. And I doubt there'd be many situations when a shortcutting player will end up in the target system even close to the ETA of the wormhole-ships.

I guess we will know only after benchmarking the implementation whether it affects performance to a noticeable level or not. As for how easy it is to arrive at the same time, I already have found a couple of cases (e.g. the Xevera-Ladigeso-Edrebi triangle in G5) where arriving by shortcut is about one hour earlier than arriving directly. This one hour can easily be game time spent on the first stopover system. Or a player can simply sit and wait. I recall seeing in another thread that some people like using the J-drive a lot, while others prefer cruising in space. You just need to cover all cases because you cannot know how a player will choose to play the game.

another_commander wrote:

If we are to make a new official equipment piece, though, I believe we should do it properly and cover all cases.

Point.

another_commander wrote:

[...]where arriving by shortcut is about one hour earlier than arriving directly. This one hour can easily be game time spent on the first stopover system. Or a player can simply sit and wait. I recall seeing in another thread that some people like using the J-drive a lot, while others prefer cruising in space. You just need to cover all cases because you cannot know how a player will choose to play the game.

*g* Now I wonder who likes coasting in space...

Nevertheless, an hour real-time is a fair chunk. Anyways, I'll see about adding the wormhole-list to my implementation and see how it pans out.

I think all wormholes should keep track of everyone who has entered them, and then when a user scans a wormhole, a ref to the wormhole is added to their saved game, so that they know of everyone before and after scanning who has entered the hole.

If we track only ships entering a wormhole after it was scanned, then I thik we might get some seriously odd missing ships.

Wormholes already keep track of what's inside them - otherwise if you enter a wormhole it wouldn't know what to spit out at the other end.

Of course they do I should have thought about that a little before posting.

I can see an instance where players would want this to mesh with an OXP like Random Hits. Let's say you're chasing a mark, who flees into witchspace. You analyse his cloud and find out where he's going, but his wormhole closes before you can follow him through it. But you've got fuel enough to jump after him, so you set your destination and make your own wormhole. You'd expect to be able to find him within the vicinity of the witchpoint buoy, maybe with a 30 seconds' head start, if you're quick. Would he be there?

@Disembodied - in Frontier - you needed a faster ship - you got ahead of him - and its witchspace exit (plus the time the ship was due to exit) was waiting for you to analyse when you emerged from your own witchspace tunnel.

Yes (even in the game as currently designed). ATM the game tracks where the mark (or any other ship has gone). Even if you miss chasing a mark when his wormhole closes, provided you jumped to the system where he has gone he would be there. 'Course ATM you'd have no way of knowing whivh system he's jumped to. But if the WSA gave you the information, then you's be able to without resorting to pot luck!

LittleBear wrote:

Yes (even in the game as currently designed). ATM the game tracks where the mark (or any other ship has gone). Even if you miss chasing a mark when his wormhole closes, provided you jumped to the system where he has gone he would be there. 'Course ATM you'd have no way of knowing whivh system he's jumped to. But if the WSA gave you the information, then you's be able to without resorting to pot luck!

Cool! More proof of your perspicacity! Looks like the cloud analyser will be a vital piece of kit for the serious assassin...

I think the issue raised by a_c is not properly discussed yet.

Please be all aware that wormhole travel time goes with the square of distance to your destination system. Therefore two short jumps take less time than one big jump. Three, four, or five very short jumps take even less time than the big jump straight from the first to the last systems. There are lots and lots of routes in the 8 galaxies where you can exploit this. And we are speaking not only about hours, but in a worst- (or best-)case-scenario about days.

This means, that, if the guy you want to follow happens to jump to a destination system at maximum range (6.8 LY, travel time for direct jump: 46.2(!) hours), you would not follow him into his wormhole, but go to the short range map and perform a couple of short jumps on yor own fuel, briefly passing through one, two, or three systems in the same direction (let's say just two jumps of 3.6 LY, travel time 13.0 hours each for a total of 26.0 hours, with a stay in the intermediate system of anything between 15 seconds and a couple of hours), and arrive in the guy's target system six, 18, or even 30 hours before he is going to jump in (in the example with the above numbers it would be about 20 hours and 12 minutes).

So what we would need is not so much to keep track of who has entered in a specific wormhole, but who in all the systems you passed recently had targetted the system you're arriving in, and at which game-time. Then we would have to compare your current game-time in order to start a timer that would add anybody you have overtaken over the course of the next day. Of course, chances are that in 99.9 per cent of the cases you never would stay long enough in a system to see Mr. Overtaken finally materialize.

It is a rare occasion for a player to enter a system before the other ship with a time difference that is small enough for players to wait for the other ship. And this "bug" is already present in the current version.

Visualise a system at the edge of the galaxy with only two possible system to jump to. The player sees a ship entering a wormhole. He himself creates an wormhole of its own to the closest system. When he does not find the other ship there, he knows the other ship took the longer jump. When the player also jumps to that other system he will be there before the other ship. But that ship will never arrive.

@CmdrMcLane: No, you don't have to keep track of everybody - you only have to keep track of the people you've actively scanned since effectively you don't even know about the others. It's a cheat to keep save-games and in-game memory usage to a sane(ish) level. Otherwise you could just go the whole hog and simulate the entire galaxy(ies) every frame...

@Eric: I already pointed out it would be fairly rare for a player to be close enough time-wise to a potential target after short-cutting, however I got overruled on that. Hence I've almost completed (but not tested) saving of wormholes.

An idea I had to circumvent the time problem is an option that, when docked, the player can advance the time, either a specific amount or to a specific game-time. This way you could jump into a system 20 hours before a target, go to the station, wait 19.75 hours, then fly back to the witchpoint beacon and only have a wait of x minutes.

Like the idea of waiting at a Station option (it could be called "Go to the bar for XX hours") - nice one Micha

Alternatively you could buy some new equipment, which needs time to install (I am not sure, but I think it depends on the price of the item--the more expensive, the longer it takes to install; which doesn't make a lot of sense for any expensive equipment that isn't meant to be installed physically on your ship). Of course that way you could also easily miss the entry-time of the ship you're waiting for...

Just as it happens, F4/4 isn't mapped to anything when docked so we could probably add a "Space Bar" quite easily into the game.

Thinking further, this would be a reat place for missions. We'd probably still need the current mission popups as it would break too much if we got rid of them, but for new missions it would probably be the more logical place to start them.

Hrmnpf! This wormhole analyzer sure got a bit out of hand - my initial implementation to show the destination only took a couple of hours, if that.