Oolite Bulletins

Thargoid wrote:

Something big, with a significantly smaller port_radius than it's radius, and a pipeway down into the structure to get within that port_radius.

And I thought I was supposed to be the evil one round here?

Of course, this still runs into a problem. To construct a maze, I will need to be able to construct a non-trivial pipe, with forks. I'd value other people's opinions on this - is the engine going to be able to handle this ok, or will I be better off with having a host of ships inside a shell that makes it look like a single ship with maze?

imipak wrote:

Of course, this still runs into a problem. To construct a maze, I will need to be able to construct a non-trivial pipe, with forks.

The engine doesn’t care about topology, but it has limited spacial resolution for collision detection.

Using the debug console, you can visualise this with the command console.debugFlags = console.DEBUG_OCTREE_DRAW (use console.debugFlags = 0 to turn it off).

Ahruman wrote:

imipak wrote:

Of course, this still runs into a problem. To construct a maze, I will need to be able to construct a non-trivial pipe, with forks.

The engine doesn’t care about topology, but it has limited spacial resolution for collision detection.

Using the debug console, you can visualise this with the command console.debugFlags = console.DEBUG_OCTREE_DRAW (use console.debugFlags = 0 to turn it off).

Can't you also do this by pausing and hitting a certain key (I forget which one) I seem to remember accidentally activating visible collisions boxes with a hot-key.

ADCK wrote:

Can't you also do this by pausing and hitting a certain key (I forget which one) I seem to remember accidentally activating visible collisions boxes with a hot-key.

Debug keys courtesy of the wiki.

imipak wrote:

Since the slot will be at the dead centre of the maze, the NPCs outside of the scenario will suicide against the outside of the maze-ship. Might be kind of cool-looking. Is there a maximum distance over which they will not attempt to dock? If so, I simply set the radius of the maze-ship greater than that, so the NPCs never see the docking port.

It depends on how different-sized ships are handled. I'd like a Worm or other mini-ship to handle any corner, a very lightweight racing ship could handle =most= corners, and a path exists for a Cobra Mk III to reach the center, but it is neither the quickest or the easiest. Larger ships should explode somewhere.

I want this to be absolutely hairy, which means that I don't want ships that can muscle their way through. I want sweat. I want tears. I want to hear the screams of anguished players as they take a corner too fast.

If this were Frontier then it'd be tricky, but don't forget in Oolite the ships can dead-stop and rotate. Hence such navigations get somewhat easier as you can always stop and re-align where needed. So corners are simply fly to the apex, stop, rotate, continue.

And I wouldn't even want to think of the AI that could make NPCs handle such a docking

"the AI will need to be souped-up to handle the peculiarities of a maze,"
yeah, good luck w/ that...!

ADCK wrote:

Ahruman wrote:

Using the debug console, you can visualise this with the command console.debugFlags = console.DEBUG_OCTREE_DRAW (use console.debugFlags = 0 to turn it off).

Can't you also do this by pausing and hitting a certain key (I forget which one) I seem to remember accidentally activating visible collisions boxes with a hot-key.

I’m not referring to bounding boxes (“X”), which would be useless for this. “D” enables octree rendering, but also lots of other unhelpful stuff, and slows everything down quite a bit.

I don't want to spoil your idea, but let me just re-iterate what Ahruman said a couple of posts above: Oolite's collision detection sucks!

I had this idea of a maze ever since I had the first look at Killer Wolf's models for the Hacker Outpost and the Salvage Gang, and it is a beautiful and very tempting idea.

LittleBear was well into it in Assassins.oxp, which contains one mission which was originally meant to re-create the destruction of the death star from Return Of The Yedis. The model was well into making, but in the end it didn't work, because you couldn't enter the structure without blowing up.

Cataclysm contains Thargoid Hives, which are positively huge, and have huge entrances to fly in. But if you're only a couple of meters off the dead center (and I am talking about having hundreds of meters of free space around you before there is a wall), you will explode, because the collision detection thinks that you've already collided.

As you want to model a dockable entity, you will have it a little easier. Collision detection is better around docking bays. But still, you may find that the whole thing is simply too fiddly to be worthwhile.

Cdr M wrote:

Return Of The Yedis

Did this have a cinematic release?

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Cdr M wrote:

Return Of The Yedis

Did this have a cinematic release?

Yes. In multiple cinemas.

Commander McLane wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Cdr M wrote:

Return Of The Yedis

Did this have a cinematic release?

Yes. In multiple cinemas.

I believe it's the Aramaic version, as there's no J. (See: Last Crusade)