Oolite Bulletins

Frame, converting from world co-ordinates to camera co-ordinates does not give you back precision for free, no matter where in the pipeline it’s done.

God I love these geeky posts...

I think the only convincing representation of planets and ship interaction I've seen in a space game/sim has been in FE2/FFE.

I liked the cohesiveness of semi-realistic gravity, inertia, speed and distance in those games. The travel to and down onto planets was very impressive. They did give a very convincing impression of scale.

Without re-igniting the old debate - those game suffered from not being any fun in combat situations - and unflyable without the autopilot.

Trouble is - you can't have a sensible 'space lane' when you have scale like that. In fact, you would never encounter other ships as you do in FE2/FFE as the velocity differential for incoming ships versis lurking or outgoing ships would be so huge you'd be past each other before either ship registered on the scanner.

The only place pirates could hang out realistically is around the stations or jump points.

The only way it could work is if the game dynamically re-sizes planets/suns as you approach....

An interesting point with the speed of light in Oolite only being 1km/s - shouldn't we be seeing significant red/blue shifting of our visual when looking forward and back?

And at 1/3 of the speed of light in a Cobra (more in some of the faster ships), time should slow down, and mass should increase too! Depending on your frame of reference....

Cheers,

Drew.

Ahruman wrote:

Frame, converting from world co-ordinates to camera co-ordinates does not give you back precision for free, no matter where in the pipeline it’s done.

Nothing is for free..i´m afraid, only commercials you get them by the bundle every day, and everywhere..

Not even those - commercials are paid for by a mark-up in the selling price of the advertised goods or services.

Air is (still) free and untaxed.... you can breathe in peace

Micha wrote:

Air is (still) free and untaxed.... you can breathe in peace

Well, no. Even the costs for cleaning and filtering polluted air are reflected in the prices of products you buy (and/or in your taxes, when the state somehow paid subsidies to polluting companies for installing filters).

Commander McLane wrote:

Micha wrote:

Air is (still) free and untaxed.... you can breathe in peace

Well, no. Even the costs for cleaning and filtering polluted air are reflected in the prices of products you buy (and/or in your taxes, when the state somehow paid subsidies to polluting companies for installing filters).

How do we have taxes if we are changing from Government to Government? Do they just pick random people in the station and tell them to pay them?


FSOneblin

EDIT: Wait, are you talking about RL or oolite?

The question is how would piracy work in a real universe. I'm pretty sure pirates would find a way. You just need to implement it:)

For example, first they would hack your computer to get the route you want to fly. Next they would throw a grappling hook (very sophisticated device) which brings your ship in sync with their ships or vice versa. Now you can start fighting using the thrusters. The problem with FFE is it's programmed like this.

while (1)
{
jump_to_system();
spawn_50_pirates();
die_within_a_second();
restart();
}

Duh! B&B programmed all that fancy physics and then the AI makes the game unplayable!

If the planets and distances have to be scaled up hundreds or thousands times to be realistic, then why not scale up ships' and stations’ dimensions too? And radar field, indeed? Then the problem of encountering other ships vanishes, is it not? You will hardly miss a ship a hundred kilometers across and a station a thousand km in diameter.
There is another to this. The distance from the moon to the parent body is important for the moon's stability (see wiki for Roche limit). Basically in Oolite moons are separated from parent bodies with a single diameter of the planet (or so it looks). This would almost certainly result in desintegration of satellite by tidal forces. Since moons do not have important part in gameplay, I would suggest moving them at least ten times further from planets, if for the sake of suspension of disbelief alone.
And many thanks to the dev. team for v.1.72! Lots of improvements, and now it really runs much faster

dmipet wrote:

If the planets and distances have to be scaled up hundreds or thousands times to be realistic, then why not scale up ships' and stations’ dimensions too? And radar field, indeed? Then the problem of encountering other ships vanishes, is it not? You will hardly miss a ship a hundred kilometers across and a station a thousand km in diameter.

Three things:

First, if the point is more realism, who would believe in ships hundreds of kilometers across? I wouldn't.

Second, the problem of missing other ships and stations would not vanish. I suppose you still haven't really imagined how big space actually is. On a journey from planet to sun, about a distance of 150 million(!) kilometers, a ship of hundreds or even thousands kilometers across is still no more than a grain of dust.

Third, if you scale everything up by the same (or similar) factor, you don't change the relative sizes of things, relative to each other. And this is what is (has to be!) messed up for gameplay purposes. The only thing that changes is that instead of a ridiculously small planet you get ridiculously big ships and stations. That's no improvement, if you want my opinion.

I concur with the great Commander McLane!

It's a game - and it's not supposed to be realistic! It's supposed to be fun and entertaining and consistant within itself and nothing more.

I do not miss the days of Frontier on the Amiga of winding the clock up to 10,000x normal speed, or combat that involved mainly: shoot, miss, turn around, pass each other, shoot, miss, turn around...

Thanks for replies
I personally have no trouble with believing in a ship a hundred km across. Do you believe in intergalactic travel, after all? In fact, I am sure interstellar trade would simply be not feasible with ships less than that. Look at Vader's flagship in StarWars to see what I mean.
Besides what I had in mind is just to change the scale - that means not to touch any of game mechanics, or ship sizes, or planet sizes, or whatever. I thought of simply multiplying all this by a factor of, say, 1000. Everything will remain the same, except for radar field will be 20,000 km, not 20 km (the latter is too small even by standards of modern atmospheric fighters, not to say spaceships capable of interstellar hyperjumps).
Yes, the stars will still be too close to planets (probably much closer than Mercury is to the Sun), but I did not mean true realism, just something more believable

I added some gas giants at semi-relistic size and distance with Assassins. They should be about a light-hour away. In fact they take about 30 minutes at J jump speed in game to reach. As J jump increases speed 3 times and the Cobra III is meant to do about a third light speed, I suppose that they are realistic in that sense. However, as the Giants are just eye-candy and you don't need to go there, I really went for a distance and size where they looked pretty rather than realism. If you had to go to them, it would be a pain in terms of game play. The moons in assasins you do need to visit to complete missions I put at unrealistic near distances. The trouble with realism is that if you put a moon at a realistic size and distance, its tiny from the player's starting point at the witchspace beacon or station and the player probably won't notice its there. In terms of prettyness I'd say the moons in system redux are at the right distance and size either though they are too big and near. Installing the Orbits.oxp and FarSun.oxp automatically moves all objects to realistic distances, if that's your bag.

In my imagination though, I image that the witchpoint is probabley about as far away from the inhabited planet as Earths moon and LM does not really stand for Light Mach. The ships are fast as they can make a journey that took Apollo serveral days in a matter of 15 minutes (or even 5 with fuel injection) but nowhere near the speed of light. The action takes place in a fairly small area of space near the inhabited planet as thats where the witch jump dumps entering ships and there's no reason for piolts to wander about in deep space, so they don't. The jump engine dumps ships here because it was desgined to do this; its where you want to be when you make a jump. You don't want to be in deep space and take weeks to arrive at your destination, you want to be as near as the jump engine can safely deposit you! This explains why you meet lots of ships. Space may be really big, but space traders are only making a short flight in real space and most of the flight is actually in hyperspace. Pirates, military, thargoids and police all fly in this area as this is where their victims / those they defend are / the quickest route to safety is. Of course you can fly into the rest of the system (and its empty of ships), but nobody does as the characters in oolite are interested in making money one way or another rather than exploration. The US is a pretty big landmass, but 99% of its population occupies about 5% of it, with most of it just being empty. You bump into people all the time in a city, but can wander for days in a national park without meeting a soul. The space lane is the equivilant of New York!

Thank you for the detailed reply, LittleBear, and for the tip - I will definitely try both oxp's you mention.
That is pretty much as I felt - the whole trade line should occupy only the tiny part of the system adjacent to the inhabited planet. There is no reason to make planets this small. They can be their normal size (that is, thousands km in diameter). This will only seem to make witchspace exit point closer to planet than it is presently. And distance to sun only matters for sunskimming, the usability of which is still unclear to me, to my shame (except for Trumbles, of course ).
Well, not that I cannot stand the things as they are presently. I grew accustomed to these planets the size of small asteroid
One more question of realism – in space the contrast between day and night sides of an object is dramatic. In fact, unlit sides are nearly invisible. I understand that in distant future ships’ and stations’ lighting systems will compensate for this in order to avoid collisions (and to reduce load on player’s computer, probably ), but could this effect be done just for planets, moons and asteroids? It will make them look much more “spacey”, so to say. There is nothing wrong with planets having days and nights, is it not?

dmipet wrote:

One more question of realism – in space the contrast between day and night sides of an object is dramatic. In fact, unlit sides are nearly invisible. I understand that in distant future ships’ and stations’ lighting systems will compensate for this in order to avoid collisions (and to reduce load on player’s computer, probably ), but could this effect be done just for planets, moons and asteroids? It will make them look much more “spacey”, so to say. There is nothing wrong with planets having days and nights, is it not?

No, it's certainly not (although the usual request by players is to make thins brighter, not darker ).

Anyway, this is a setup option which is already supported by the game. In planetinfo.plist there is the key ambient_level, which sets exacly the level of light that arrives at the dark side of objects. The default is 1.0. To make things darker, you can reset it to something closer to 0.0.

Practically: Create a (or open the existing) Config-folder inside your AddOns-folder. Create a (or open the existing) file called planetinfo.plist inside that folder. Here's what you need to put inside: What it does is applying a new value for ambient_level to the whole Ooniverse. You can of course experiment with the value.

Many thanks, Commander McLane. Still I must get something wrong, since I did not manage to change the lighting level as you recommended. I am playing v.1.72 on XPsp2. I created the folder Config in AddOns with a file planetinfo.plist in it, then added the code you posted. As it did not work, I tried to do the same in file planetinfo.plist in oolite.app->resources->config. This did nothing, too. Then I just added ambient_level = 0.0 under key universal in that file - to no avail. Then I went to the page describing planetinfo.plist on EliteWiki (the link to which you provided), read carefully what is written there and tried to reproduce it. I put the following code: in the planetinfo.plist file in directory AddOns->Config. This again did nothing.
Alas, I am not a programmer, so I just tried to use common sense to do all this. Unfortunately, either common sense is not applicable to programming, or (what is probably closer to reality) my common sense is flawed Could you please explain in more detail what I am doing wrong, and how to do this correctly?
Of course I am playing Oolite because of trade, and pirate attacks, and headhunt, and thargoid war, and trumbles, and space bars, and black monks, and many other things. But another aspect which attracts me in this game is the ability to feel the space, its vastness, its deepness, its greatness, and gape at it freely for some time as interplanetary dust and meteors speed by beyond the illuminator. And that is why I want it to be closer to reality Yes, I know there is a lot of programs which do this stimulation (Celestia to name just one), but I like all the former no less then flying through space, so for me Oolite is better in this respect