Oolite Bulletins

I’m not yet committed to including yaw thrusters in the next stable release. They’re experimental. I’m planning to put up a poll in this at a future point.

Maybe I’ll work on a real space sim game one day (with sufficient emphasis on the game part, as well as the sim part). But I’m not going to turn Oolite into that.

Oh, and: hi, dajt. :-)

dajt wrote:

Which is exactly what I did in one of my unpublished experiments - I replaced the player's ship flight model with a newtonian one using the ODE physics library.

OMFG!!! You did that?! Can I have it?! Can you make it an OXP???

(Yes, I know, I'm admitedly a newtonian physics junkie...)

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

Can you make it an OXP??

No, dammit, you can’t do that sort of thing in an OXP. Even if you have magic programming powers. We’ve covered this already upthread…

Ahruman wrote:

I’m not yet committed to including yaw thrusters in the next stable release. They’re experimental. I’m planning to put up a poll in this at a future point.

Why a poll? Just put them up for sale on the shipyards as a new invention by some brilliant (and expensive) feat of engeneering - If someone doesn't like the idea, all they have to do is ignore it.

I think Big A is right, it would be almost sacrilege, Oolite is fundamentally Elite.

TGHC wrote:

it would be almost sacrilege

Luckily I'm an atheist so I don't have that kind of quelms.

Well, yaw thrusters were in at least one version of Elite, the Archimedes version.

They weren't standard equipment tho - they were the reward for the second mission.

So the fact that they did appear in an Elite version IMHO makes them fair game for including in Oolite.

stevesims wrote:

Well, yaw thrusters were in at least one version of Elite, the Archimedes version.

They weren't standard equipment tho - they were the reward for the second mission.

So the fact that they did appear in an Elite version IMHO makes them fair game for including in Oolite.

In which case I'll withdraw my comment, I have never played arcelite, I was about to after TNK, but then something called Oolite surfaced.............. so bring em on

To do it properly you then need to update the AI flight routines to use them too. The combat ones are the most important or the player will be at an advantage.

Anyone putting their hand up to describe how the AI should change it's combat tactics to take account of yaw thrusters?

Hmm sounds like a lot of work!

I have to admit I still don't know what yaw thrusters are good for. As I'm playing 1.69 I have them, but I never use them. The only good use I can possibly think of is firing four laser salvos to a non-moving target, by firing a full blast, yawing (is that a word?) 90 degrees and firing again with the next laser. And how often is that going to happen? If the target moves you have to pitch and roll in order to adjust, so you can just pitch and roll in the first place. And why would you want to yaw in normal navigation, when pitching and/or rolling do the same thing without taking considerably more effort or time?

Commander McLane wrote:

If the target moves you have to pitch and roll in order to adjust, so you can just pitch and roll in the first place. And why would you want to yaw in normal navigation, when pitching and/or rolling do the same thing without taking considerably more effort or time?

Completely and utterly wrong. It is always, without exception, faster to pitch and yaw to a given orientation than to pitch and roll, assuming equal speed is available about each axis. The only time rolling is actually better is when you need vertical alignment, e.g. when docking.

Okay, then it's just a question of being used to it. During decades of playing Elite (well, okay, I haven't played it all the time) I got so used to the pitch-and-roll-navigation that I have convinced myself it's the fastest thing to do.

Anyway, still I don't use the yaw thrusters.

i use the yaw constantly. especially helpful once i've got a vert/hor lock on a thargian carrier and then i just spin the ship sideways to bring all four lasers to bear in sequence til.... BOOM. =D works very nicely against targets that don't move all that fast for whatever reason. or at least don't leave the horizontal plane of your ship.

i played descent 1, 2, and 3 a whole lot before playing here, so i'm used to being able to thrust in any axis as well as spin along any axis. (but that takes up a whole lot of keymapping on the keyboard!) i'd vote for it, but fear that it's not *lite enough. ^^

If the ability to yaw is left in future versions, it would be nice if yaw could be mapped to a joystick axis, just as one can do so with pitch and roll now. And, of course, the yaw axis should respond to the "precision movement" [joystick] toggle that the other axes respond to.

I am happy to see that one of my suggestions a long time ago (the "precision toggle") was added to later versions. Unfortunately, it appears that this toggle only applies to joystick (and mouse?) usage. The keyboard controls have no such equivalent. Back when I first started playing OOlite (and way-way-back when I was playing the original 8-bit versions) I usually used keyboard controls. The relatively high 'sensitivity' of the keyboard controls was just fine for close combat, but not so good when trying to lock up a distant target for missiles, ID, or even laser fire. A "precision movement" toggle or modifier for keyboard controls would have been welcome in such situations. The existing one in OOlite for joystick movement is nice but not nearly as necessary, because modern joysticks are analog devices that already allow for "precision movement" by simple virtue of using small rather than large axis deflections. It is really the keyboard controls - where even the shortest key tap will move you several degrees of arc - where the precision movement modifier would be most useful.

The way I envision the precision toggle/modifier working for keyboard controls would be a simple (?!) modification of the axis rate-of-change acceleration curve. From what I can tell, pressing the roll/pitch keys does not immediately result in a full max-rate pitch/roll; rather, the pitch/roll rate accelerates (rapidly) to the max rate for the ship class you're driving. Releasing the key appears to result in a (faster?) deceleration to 0 of the pitch/roll (which can be stopped immediately by pitching/rolling in the opposite direction of movement). What I'm suggesting is that the proposed 'precision toggle' for keyboard simply use a much more "relaxed" (slower) acceleration of the pitch/roll rate. If one had the precision toggle on, and pressed, say, the pitch up key long enough, one would eventually be pitching up at the full rate allowed by the ship - it would simply take a lot longer for said pitch rate to ramp up to maximum.