Oolite Bulletins

And I thought my 4,5 km long Aurora was big

Commander McLane wrote:

When the OXP was first released, there was less going on in interstellar space than nowadays.

I think the whole Interstellar Space thing might need a tweak anyways.

In original Elite, you only got sucked out of the Wormhole due to Thargoids - so obviously there were a couple of Thargoid battleships taking you on (and it wasn't often that the player survived - or at least, I didn't).
In Oolite, there might now be some navy ships as well, or perhaps another trader that got sucked out of witchspace just before you did. Fair play.

But it's also possible to have a misjump now due to engine malfunction (lack of maintenance) rather than Thargoid intervention - in this case, shouldn't the pilot be stranded completely alone? With the same tiny chance of a GenShip nearby? IMHO there should be absolutely no reason why anybody else should be within a couple of lightyears - Thargoids, Navy, or otherwise. After all, space is big(ish).

This would affect all the OXPs which populate interstellar space - a Thargoided misjump - normal behaviour, an engine failure misjump - reduce chances of encounter to almost negligible levels.

Thoughts?

Commander McLane wrote:

(2) Oolite's still crappy collision detection. Probably it has improved now, I shall check it out in the latest versions.

Not by much. Oolite is not a game or a game engine designed for giant structures. If you ignore this fact, you will build things that don’t work well in Oolite. I hereby pledge not to “fix” this for MNSR.

Commander McLane wrote:

I think about that, and try to ask Draco_Caeles. He isn't out of the world—at least he wasn't when the issue if Generation Ships came up last time.

He responded to this Youtube video in the reasonably recent past.

dajt wrote:

Oolite doesn't have these big ships either, as far as I know. I recall a thread a long time ago where the it was said it was only fair for Giles to create these ships and have Oolite be the first version of Elite that included them because the game is his baby.

You can script what happens in witchspace in Oolite, and that would be a pretty good place to look for these things.

The one place a generation ship would never be is witchspace, surely? The whole point is they do interstellar travel the old-fashioned way...

zevans wrote:

The one place a generation ship would never be is witchspace, surely? The whole point is they do interstellar travel the old-fashioned way...

I’m not so sure about that.

I’ve always thought of Witchspace (why does something in the back of my mind tell me that it used to be “Wytchspace”) as the wormhole. If you get tugged out of the wormhole, then you are in interstellar space, with no hope of getting anywhere.
Exactly where you would expect to find a Generation ship.

If I encountered a Generation ship in the wormhole, then I would be surprised.

Witchspace is a layman's term for the Hyperspace jump tunnel created by the hyperspace engines aboard modern spacecraft. Most people never experience Witchspace, either being placed into Hyper-sleep by the ship's automated systems or because the external viewscreens become non-functional during Hyperspace transit, instead displaying real-time diagnostics of the ship's hyperspace engines and other ancilliary systems. On the occasions a vessel exits its Hyperspace tunnel early, either due to a malfunction from an engine that has missed one or more scheduled maintenance works or due to the nefarious devices employed by the Thargoids in their mission to disrupt Hyperspace transit, the vessel ends up in extra-stellar space, deep space, or as the career Spacers call it 'Witchspace'. Most often, continuing travel from 'Witchspace' is simply a matter of re-initialising the Hyperspace engines and continung on your journey. However, there are occasions when an unexpected arrival in 'Witchspace' due to an unserviced Hyperspace engine has been compounded by an uncontrolled leak in the Quirium fuel reserve tanks. This resulted in several vessels becoming stranded in the extra-stellar void. Many superstitious Spacers feel that the souls of those pilots lost in that place become trapped there, unable to move on to whatver afterlife they subscribe to. Many of these Spacers say that in the brief hours of Hyperspace travel, they've heard strange unaccountable noises, rattles across the exterior of the hulls, impacts on the shields, scrabblings across the outsides of the airlock doors. They say that it's the lost souls looking for a way, any way, to return home. Or to bring others to their limbo, to join them in their eternally lost realm.

But that's just superstitious nonsense, right?

Right?

Captain Hesperus

Captain Hesperus wrote:

But that's just superstitious nonsense, right?

Right?

Hesperus, please, you should write about that poor trader who accidentally ended up in witchspace with a trumble aboard and no other food than passenger filled cabins...every former trumble owner knows that they know every human is edible, not only the poets.

It must not reduce your sales. You can tell that story those unwilling to buy the trumbles...and then ask them again if they won't buy one as a gift for someone special who's just about to leave to some distant planet

Screet

In Witchspace, marooned
Winter, all is still
Ghosts come calling…join us

Ahruman wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

(2) Oolite's still crappy collision detection. Probably it has improved now, I shall check it out in the latest versions.

Not by much. Oolite is not a game or a game engine designed for giant structures. If you ignore this fact, you will build things that don’t work well in Oolite. I hereby pledge not to “fix” this for MNSR.

Fair enough. There are probably ways around it by cleverly using what we already have. For instance, and just off the top of my head, collision detection gets better in the vicinity of the player, doesn't it? So I could spawn ships around the Generation Ship only if the player has closed in. That should prevent at least some of them from going 'pop'.

Ahruman wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

I think about that, and try to ask Draco_Caeles. He isn't out of the world—at least he wasn't when the issue if Generation Ships came up last time.

He responded to this Youtube video in the reasonably recent past.

Good to know. I just PMd him, and the new version of genships is done already, anyway. (Wasn't too much work.)

By the way, Draco_Caeles did a YouTube video of a Generation Ship himself a while back. Pretty impressing, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-PNr6dQg8

Commander McLane wrote:

For instance, and just off the top of my head, collision detection gets better in the vicinity of the player, doesn't it?

No. That would a be a somewhat reasonable optimization, although not entirely in the spirit of Oolite’s design, but it isn’t done at the moment.

The main restriction is the resolution of collision octrees. In the trunk, this has been doubled for largish structures, which now seems to work well – but that means the Anaconda and normal stations, not megastructures. Doubling octree resolution means up to eight times as much memory consumption, and making them arbitrarily big for megastructures is not reasonable. Basically, collision detection with giant thingummies will continue to suck forever unless we choose, at some point, to replace Oolite’s collision handling with a real physics engine. This is definitely a post-MNSR consideration. ;-)

Ahruman wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

For instance, and just off the top of my head, collision detection gets better in the vicinity of the player, doesn't it?

No. That would a be a somewhat reasonable optimization, although not entirely in the spirit of Oolite’s design, but it isn’t done at the moment.

It depends at what range you are looking. When further away than Math.sqrt(1E9) meters (=31622.7766 meters) there is no collision detection. Anything within the collision radius than is assumed to be colliding. (Except along the z-axis of stations so ships can dock with a distant player)

You see it very clear with the buoy repair station when it has externally docked ships. Fly away and look backwards. At a distance of >31622 meters from the station those ships explode.

Really? I sit corrected and confused.

How is the collision radius defined? The largest extension of the entity along any one axis? Then I could keep ships out of that radius until the player gets into scanner range.

Ahruman wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

For instance, and just off the top of my head, collision detection gets better in the vicinity of the player, doesn't it?

No. That would a be a somewhat reasonable optimization, although not entirely in the spirit of Oolite’s design, but it isn’t done at the moment.

Ok.. now I'm confused too.. why would improved collision detection at close range to the player be "not entirely in the spirit of Oolite’s design"?

Diziet Sma wrote:

why would improved collision detection at close range to the player be "not entirely in the spirit of Oolite’s design"?

Because Oolite (unlike Elite) isn't player centred. In principle everything in the system should work all by itself, regardless how close or far the player currently is.

Unlike this, in original Elite the player was always in the centre of the action. Everything else was only added around him. I guess the 8-bit computers just couldn't run an entire system when effectively nobody was looking. Modern computers, however, can.