Oolite Bulletins

Well... if the torus was to be replaced by some form of time-acceleration, then I'd be spending even more time cruising the 'lanes, 'cos I couldn't use it.

El Viejo wrote:

Well... if the torus was to be replaced by some form of time-acceleration, then I'd be spending even more time cruising the 'lanes, 'cos I couldn't use it.

This is all totally hypothetical, of course! As far as I know the devs have no intention of replacing the torus with a TAF.

Can I ask why you wouldn't use it, though, EV? After all, if there's nothing on the scanner, turning on a TAF would be functionally the same as using the torus: you'd press a key and (appear to) zoom forward at high speed, until another ship appears on the scanner and bump! you're back to moving at normal speed. Then you can engage with that ship, or not. The only difference would be that, if you choose not to engage, you can elect to hit the TAF again and you – and the NPC – would zoom off again, torus-like: you'd overtake him if he was slower, or he'd overtake you if you were slower.

Actually, there's another feature of the TAF: you could elect to join a convoy. Of course, this single feature - whilst adding greater immersion and sense of interaction - would also have a potentially very large effect on gameplay ... probably why this is all going to remain hypothetical for the foreseeable future!

El Viejo wrote:

Well... if the torus was to be replaced by some form of time-acceleration, then I'd be spending even more time cruising the 'lanes, 'cos I couldn't use it.

Because...?

Disembodied wrote:

This is all totally hypothetical, of course! As far as I know the devs have no intention of replacing the torus with a TAF.

Indeed... but the discussion pops-up regularly. In reality (ha), it'd make little difference to me, I suppose, as I tend to cruise the 'lanes at normal speed a fair bit anyway.

Disembodied wrote:

Can I ask why you wouldn't use it, though, EV?

Simply put, watching my ship-clock start wizzing around (by whatever factor became the norm) would be an immersion-breaker for me.

I have to admit that I never thought that the Torus drive was unavailable to an NPC. I assumed it was.

For example, if my memory of this is accurate, if I'm in a fight with another ship and then manage to get it off the scanner, then I can torus away. Once mass-locked again, there is nothing to stop the ship catching up with me on it's torus. I'm sure I've experienced this before.

I also remember how the BBC version worked. I seem to remember it being referred to as a 'Space Skip' drive instead of Torus.
The Torus drive feels like a kind of hyper-speed where as the BBC one 'skipped' you forward a certain amount of space for each press of the button. There was an old player myth amongst my group of mates that played that if the tapped the key and didn't hold it down, you were much less likely to encounter any additional ships. Probably not true though.

I would say that the Torus drive should be available to all NPC's as well. I always kind of assumed that the reason most pirates can't chase you on Torus is because there are more than one of them thus mass-locking each other.
If there is one on it's own, no reason for them not to have a Torus too.

I can understand why it's not liked now as I was unaware that the Torus was a player only device.

!m!

maaarcooose wrote:

I can understand why it's not liked now as I was unaware that the Torus was a player only device.

As is the energy bomb (which I dislike), of course - and that has gone from the default game (or will be soon).
I suppose there is an argument for removing the cloak too - heh.

El Viejo wrote:

I suppose there is an argument for removing the cloak too - heh.

The cloak is different – it’s available and supported for NPCs, and in fact you have to loot it from an NPC to get it. It just isn’t very common, so to speak, in the vanilla game. Jump drive and the energy bomb are player-specific game mechanics.

maaarcooose wrote:

I would say that the Torus drive should be available to all NPC's as well. I always kind of assumed that the reason most pirates can't chase you on Torus is because there are more than one of them thus mass-locking each other.
If there is one on it's own, no reason for them not to have a Torus too.

I can understand why it's not liked now as I was unaware that the Torus was a player only device.

!m!

Giving the torus - with its masslocking properties intact - to NPCs would be disastrous: it would produce a huge masslocked logjam in every system. You would arrive at the witchpoint, and torus off towards the planet. Bump! you encounter a pirate. As you are fighting, a newly arrived merchant ship gets masslocked behind you - and then another new arrival gets masslocked behind it, and so on.

The torus drive, and its associated masslock, can only work for player ships. It's a wangle to allow players to skip the boring bits of an inward cruise.

Edit: I should say it's not that I "don't like" the torus: it's fine. It's just that I think a properly functioning TAF would do the same thing as a torus (i.e. allow players to skip the boring bits), AND make for a playable game with player convoys, escorts, and slow ships.

Ahruman wrote:

... in fact you have to loot it from an NPC to get it.

Yeah... good fun is that!

El Viejo wrote:

Far better the torus than TAF

I agree, given the choice between the two, not least because supporting TAF properly is much much harder from a coding perspective.

There is quite a difference between 1.76 and trunk in terms of optimisation - the AIs cope a little better with precision turns at low frame rates, a number of large per-frame bottlenecks have been optimised, and certain frame-rate dependent things have been tuned to be more independent - but it's nowhere near enough to make TAF work properly at 16x (which is still only half the speed of torus drive) except on the most ridiculously powerful computers. If we assume that you need 30FPS for decent behaviour - anything much below that starts to have other frame-rate dependent behaviour start to come in which would require a complete ground-up redesign of the game engine to fix - then you'd need a computer capable of 480 FPS to support TAFx16.

Example: the fire rate of a beam laser is 10 shots per second. If you're at less than 10FPS, you can't possibly fire it that fast since the maximum fire rate is 1 per frame (and in the 10-20 FPS range you'll get quite choppy behaviour). So combat must have at least 160FPS, ideally 320FPS, to support TAFx16 or the weapons don't work properly any more - even if the AI could cope.

As I said, there has been quite a lot of optimisation done on this, but given a choice between running at a routine 500 FPS so that TAF works, or running at a respectable routine 50 FPS (but with several times the number of in-system entities interacting), I know which I'd go for.

...

However, I'd far rather have neither - to me the underlying problem is that under normal power in a Cobra III it takes around 30 minutes to travel from witchpoint to station (and as established, it would be nice to make slower ships viable too), and there isn't usually 30 minutes worth of "things to do" on that trip [1]. Sun-planet is similarly about 45 minutes, and witchpoint-sun can be anything between 15 minutes and a couple of hours. All of those times seem a lot longer than they were in the original Elite, though my memories are a bit hazy.

That's not an easy problem to solve without major changes elsewhere, of course: shortening the distances between witchpoint, sun, and planet is quite possible, but if you don't then rescale the planet and sun down too, the sun will be ridiculously large, and if you do, the planet will be too small compared with the Torus station it orbits. An alternative, then, is to put more interesting things on to the journey ... but "interesting" in Oolite currently tends to mean "dangerous", and it's hard enough for a new pilot as it is, so that might need a lot of thought to get right - and OXP content needs somewhere to live, too, so the new "interesting" bits would have to be very easily ignored if you didn't feel like that sort of interest right now. All very tricky, and potentially also extremely controversial in terms of whether any particular idea is stylistically correct.

Still, I'd rather deal with the problem of "how to skip the boring bits" by putting the "boring bits" somewhere other than the obvious witchpoint-planet-sun routes in the first place.

[1] Sightseeing aside, of course, but on some of these routes there's not even that much to see.

cim wrote:

... to make TAF work properly at 16x (which is still only half the speed of torus drive)

Interesting - I didn't know those stats, and had only an approximation in my head.

cim wrote:

Still, I'd rather deal with the problem of "how to skip the boring bits" by putting the "boring bits" somewhere other than the obvious witchpoint-planet-sun routes in the first place.

[1] Sightseeing aside, of course, but on some of these routes there's not even that much to see.

It's a perennial problem with space games. You need the sense of scale (the X games are (for me) let down by the completely inappropriate sense that everything is cramped and too close together), but with scale comes the problem of getting to places before we grow old(er). I think we need the big empty voids (there's a reason they call it "space" ), but there has to be some method of skipping through them too if it's going to remain a game.

Disembodied wrote:

You need the sense of scale (the X games are (for me) let down by the completely inappropriate sense that everything is cramped and too close together)

I paid good money for two of that series... and gave them away pretty damn quickly!

The only solution which would work and makes any sort of in-game sense would require a major re-write, namely that the ships have two fuel sources, one for witch-jumps and one for injectors. If a ship arrived in a system with a full fuel tank the player has the option of using injectors to speed things up, but this would have to be separate from the witchdrive fuel to prevent consecutive jumps.
Not really a viable option, I suspect.

Smivs wrote:

The only solution which would work and makes any sort of in-game sense would require a major re-write, namely that the ships have two fuel sources, one for witch-jumps and one for injectors. If a ship arrived in a system with a full fuel tank the player has the option of using injectors to speed things up, but this would have to be separate from the witchdrive fuel to prevent consecutive jumps.
Not really a viable option, I suspect.

That's an interesting notion, though, Smivs ... what if the injectors didn't consume any fuel at all, but instead increased the cabin temperature of the ship? Use them too much and ... BOOM. There would have to be enough leeway for a player to "inject" all the way from the witchpoint to the aegis, though, otherwise you'd be forcing players to crawl along.

Of course, however you do it, the downside would be that the player could just scoot on past any waiting pirate. Pirates would then have to use injectors themselves to pursue the player, and you'd end up with probably fairly daft high-speed chases and dogfights ... hmm.

No, the more I think about it, the more it seems clear: the current in-game ship speeds are ideal for dogfighting, but far too slow for transiting a large amount of space. I think we need to keep the large amounts of empty space, so some form of acceleration through the empty bits is therefore required which automatically slows down again in the presence of other ships. The torus-and-masslock system works, but can only ever be player-only; the TAF would remove the player-only problem - but it doesn't work ...