Oolite Bulletins

both thargoid hunter and Hauler P30 are finished, and I managed to get a screen shot of both at the same time!!!

but im wondering, should the thargoid hunter be a thargoid ship hunting police, or a police ship hunting thargoids?

Staer9 wrote:

im wondering, should the thargoid hunter be a thargoid ship hunting police, or a police ship hunting thargoids?

It could be a bounty hunter specialising in hunting Thargoids, along the lines of Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer ... Really dangerous pirates, if captured, could be sentenced to become Hunters: sealed permanently into the ships, wired directly into the controls, and under severe neurological compulsions. Maybe there's a chance of a reprieve, if they reach a certain kill score. To date, the Hunter parole board has never met ...

Personally I'm flying an Imperial Courier, which has multiple front lasers in its NPC version. I can't say that I missed them on my ship, though.

It is entirely possible, though, that multiple lasers for player ships may be supported in Oolite 2. As I said, I would have to browse the respective threads first in order to find out what the development team has said about it so far. No doubt, as an optical effect it would be neat.

I am quite certain, though, that it would not be an improvement for the laser as a weapon. So there would be some conflict between form and functionality (which is never good from a design point of view). Personally, I think in the long run I'd prefer functionality over looks.

For laser cooling boosters (or whatever you would call them; I hope I managed to get across that this isn't about words and made-up explanations, but the necessary underlying code functionality) my understanding is that the last word about them has been spoken, at least as far as Oolite 1 is concerned, and it has been spoken clearly and repeatedly. I am merely the bearer of bad news here, and I see no point in re-opening a fruitless debate over and over again.

The debate may be still open for Oolite 2, I don't know. Oolite 2 may see a complete overhaul of the primary weapons of Oolite 1. There could be more choice of different lasers. There could be more influence of scripts over weapons. There could be the introduction of laser classes analogous to Frontier. There could be weapons other than lasers (perhaps not as sucky as the plasma cannons). There could be kinetic primary weapons, like rail-guns. There could be a trade-off for installing more powerful weapons, like losing cargo space, or losing manoeuverability. There could be more equal treatment of player- and NPC-weapons with regards to overheating. There are many possibilities how the system could be different from the current system. So yes, for this debate it matters what each of us thinks, because nothing of it exists yet, and the developers will take our votes into consideration (which is not the same as 'implement anything one of us suggests').

Staer9 wrote:

but im wondering, should the thargoid hunter be a thargoid ship hunting police, or a police ship hunting thargoids?

I was assuming you meant a ship that was hunting Thargoids, not a Thargoid ship hunting others (that's what they do anyway, but we don't yet have a dedicated anti-Thargoid ship).

It doesn't necessarily mean that it's a police ship, though. Like Disembodied I am more imagining some kind of freelance pilots who have dedicated their lives to fighting the Thargoids only. They could be members of some semi-secret society, or some semi-official special branch.

@ Disembodied, I really like that idea, do you think you could develop it enough for this ships wiki page? (that it doesn't even have yet anyway)

@ Commander Mclane, I am pretty sure that in elite the ship had multiple lasers (from front view there was clearly two) so I am wondering why oolite didn't borrow that aspect of the game (although it made no difference to the damage the lasers did)

and how then can I get this ship to only attack thargoids and to only appear when they do?

Staer9 wrote:

@ Commander Mclane, I am pretty sure that in elite the ship had multiple lasers (from front view there was clearly two) so I am wondering why oolite didn't borrow that aspect of the game (although it made no difference to the damage the lasers did)

I can answer that one: Oolite doesn't borrow the aspect because it is not really actual multiple lasers, but multiple beams drawn so that they converge at one center point. It is still one laser, drawn in a different way. Plus, the older versions had it completely wrong, as all NPC ships' lasers were drawn single line, with only the player's lasers drawn in multi, which looks odd at best.

Staer9 wrote:

@ Disembodied, I really like that idea, do you think you could develop it enough for this ships wiki page?

I can put something together, sure. It would help if you could let me know a bit about the ship's behaviour, and whether or not it's available to the player (currently, I'd imagine not: unless there was something the player could do to get sentenced to be a Hunter). I could also use some details about its physical appearance, i.e. has it been developed using captured Thargoid technology, perhaps? I've heard rumours about the things people have found inside those so-called Thargon "robot fighters" that would turn your teeth snow-white ... Also, when do they appear, are they limited to specific system types, or to witchspace, how common are they ... etc.

"Many, like you and me don't like the idea of laser coolers because of the appalling effect they would have on game play"

i don't even remotely get that. it's like any other equipment, if you don't want it, don't fit it. beyond that, i can't picture any level of "appalling" at all. i doubt anyone is advocating a cooler that drops the temp to zero in 3 seconds, something that boosts the cooling rate at perhaps the rate an extra energy unit boosts recharge would be fine. it would be a fine piece of kit for all those newbie and not-so-hawkeyed pilots, allowing them to get further into the game insterad of getting overheated then killed every other run and perhaps giving up on the game in frustration. If NPC pirates end up w/ cooling boosters, it'll give all you psychos a good dogfight.
they had cooling boosters in FFE, and it didn't make the game appalling. other things did, however

another_commander wrote:

Staer9 wrote:

@ Commander Mclane, I am pretty sure that in elite the ship had multiple lasers (from front view there was clearly two) so I am wondering why oolite didn't borrow that aspect of the game (although it made no difference to the damage the lasers did)

I can answer that one: Oolite doesn't borrow the aspect because it is not really actual multiple lasers, but multiple beams drawn so that they converge at one center point. It is still one laser, drawn in a different way. Plus, the older versions had it completely wrong, as all NPC ships' lasers were drawn single line, with only the player's lasers drawn in multi, which looks odd at best.

Having recently fired up my C64 and waited for Elite to load, just to make sure it did - I can confirm that this is true and I always thought it was unfair even back in my teens that I had two lasers and everything else - had one (even the Krait which I assumed had a laser on each spike, but never did...)

BTW, can we break out the laser discussion and leave just the show and tell aspect of this thread - there's more off thread than on it at the moment... (and decoyed before the end of the first page!)

Commander McLane wrote:

I was assuming you meant a ship that was hunting Thargoids, not a Thargoid ship hunting others (that's what they do anyway, but we don't yet have a dedicated anti-Thargoid ship).

We do - the Raptor in TCAT.oxp

DaddyHoggy wrote:

BTW, can we break out the laser discussion and leave just the show and tell aspect of this thread - there's more off thread than on it at the moment... (and decoyed before the end of the first page!)

Ah, yes, it has indeed gone a bit off-topic, even for this board's standards. Split.

Staer9 wrote:

and how then can I get this ship to only attack thargoids

by giving it a custom AI that lets it only care about Thargoids

Staer9 wrote:

and to only appear when they do?

I don't think that would be strictly necessary. After all the pilot would be hunting for Thargoids, even if right in that moment there aren't any nearby.

But if you want it to appear only together with Thargoids, one easy and guaranteed way is to have it appear only in interstellar space. Make a small script that adds one or a couple of the ships whenever the player has a misjump.

Sometimes you can also find Thargoids in a system. Your script could check for the presence of Thargoid ships and add one or several of your ships somewhere in the vicinity.

Commander McLane wrote:

But if you want it to appear only together with Thargoids, one easy and guaranteed way is to have it appear only in interstellar space. Make a small script that adds one or a couple of the ships whenever the player has a misjump.

But keep in mind that this may be very unhelpful to other OXPs that might script misjumps and place Thargoids in interstellar space as part of a mission segment.

Commander McLane wrote:

Multiple lasers are not necessarily an advantage. For starters, they all shoot strictly forward, absolutely parallel to each other. Their beams do not merge. Thus, if you have let's say three forward pointing lasers in a wide angle and fire at a relatively small ship, most of the time only one of your three lasers will actually hit. If you're lucky and the ship is broader than the distance between two of your lasers, you have the chance of two lasers simultaneously, but I guess that's a rare luck. In other words: at least the fire of one laser, and in most cases the fire of the majority of your lasers is completely wasted.

Some of that just doesn't seem to wash, IMO. Firstly, since the current single laser actually only fires to the center of the screen (otherwise we couldn't have a targeting reticle?) there's no reason why two lasers couldn't do the same, much like in Elite. A hit would still be determined by "was the target correctly positioned in the reticle". So far as a multiple laser resulting in at least one of the beams being wasted, do we currently see that being applied to NPC ships with multiple lasers? Not that I've noticed. They seem to manage pretty well most days. LOL To be honest, I don't know why NPC ships are allowed multiple lasers either. It's one of the things about the game that just doesn't make sense to me.

But in any case, since the range to the targeted ship is known, there is no reason to assume the multiple beams couldn't converge accurately.

And this is where the second disadvantage kicks in: overheating. All lasers pointing in one direction would be connected to the same, unaltered cooling system. So again, if you have three forward pointing lasers, the laser heat would increase at triple the usual amount, and the lasers would overheat three times as fast.

I have to disagree there as well, not because I disagree with the logic regarding the physics of cooling in space, but because I think that the overheating effect could be great for gameplay! Even if we assume that 2 or 3 or however many lasers actually are allowed to do multiple damage (which is assuming it's not purely an eye-candy effect), they would overheat so fast that it would require the player to use very careful controlled bursts if they elected to use them. Also, if we're being logical and using a bit of physics here, it's not actually possible to cool things even 1/3 as efficiently if you have three heat sources. Not in real application, anyway. The heat has to be taken away to keep it from wrecking the laser. That's going to be a big burst of heat and whatever "critical temp" is, logically it might be reached a bit *sooner* than half as long or one third as long or whatever.

So it could still be an advantage if the player had sufficient skill. But it wouldn't necessarily make fights easier. Wasted shots, or "spray and pray" tactics where the player might lay a burst and hope the opponent actually does cut across the reticle could cost the player a lot in actual fights.

If the AI responded quicker with evasive tactics and aggressively counterattack when sniped from long distance, that wouldn't be an advantageous tactic either, unless the player was actually good enough (or lucky enough, once in a while) to get a real solid hit. The "extra" damage might allow the player to take out one ship at sniping range, *if* their marksmanship was actually that good, but then they'd better be ready to do a lot of dodge and weave as that ship's buddies all retaliate while the player's lasers cooled.

Take all that into account, and I doubt most beginner or average players would actually want more than one laser. It could be a reason for players to work towards being a really ace shot, though.

But the big reason, from what I understand (and it is a very good reason) against multiple lasers on player ships is it would take a major rewrite of game code, and be a real headache to iron out. It wouldn't be just a matter of "allowing" it, the developers and coders would have to go through a major pain in the neck just to start at making it even possible.

Laser coolers.. Bah humbug. LOL The only practical way it could be actually done that I can think of would be to have lasers that use a coolant that is jettisoned as it heats up so it actually *could* take heat away from the lasers. Some lasers used by current Earth military technology do just that. But the coolant would likely be expensive, it would need refilled all the time, and logically, lasers designed to work that way probably couldn't work at all after you ran out of coolant. So the player would be a sitting duck when the coolant ran out and have no option other than to try and run. Probably wouldn't be popular after everyone had tried it once.

But more importantly, the lasers overheating serve a gameplay purpose. Quite simply, you have to make your shots count. You can't just run the lasers continuously in a furball and hope they cut something. So it adds to tension/excitement. Fun.

Now, new weapons. Especially kinetic weapons like railguns.. That's a really tantalizing notion. I'd love to see it, but I doubt it will ever happen in Oolite. With lasers, the game engine doesn't need to plot trajectory. If you're on the mark, they hit. Trajectory of a projectile would take additional math and graphics and etc for the engine (and people's computers) to cope with. Add maybe up to hundreds or even thousands (remember that the NPCs would likely be using those weapons as well, so there could be an awful lot of projectiles flying around) of small items for the game to track in a big furball, and then think of what it would do to frame-rates. It could take a lot of coding, and it could have very undesirable effects on actual game performance.

There are games that have things like that, but they have entirely different game engines. They aren't Oolite.