Oolite Bulletins

Doesn't the time adjustment match the estimated travel time?

Agree with Cmdr McLane on the time situation. Leads to the interesting situation that spacers age 'slower' than planetbound humans.

If the various effects (post-MNSR?) do get revamped it'd also be nice to have the animation running smoothly until the setup tasks for the new system are done. Currently the animation runs, then the game pauses while the system and OXPs initialise.

El Viejo wrote:

Doesn't the time adjustment match the estimated travel time?

No, there is no estimated travel time. Even with the new wormhole analyzer there is only an Estimated Time of Arrival.

Either way, the game itself doesn't contain any information on how long the actual travel takes. Actually that's incorrect. It does contain a very clear information. Your travel takes exactly the time from the beginning to the end of the tunnel effect. That's about two seconds. Only after that the clock is adjusted. At a moment when you clearly are not in witchspace anymore.

Commander McLane wrote:

No, there is no estimated travel time.

Really! Look at F6.

From "The Dark Wheel" (and if that ain't canon what is!?)

Jason Ryder always said this, and Alex always fell for it. He tensed up as if the ship was about to plunge over a gravity-roller. In fact, the entry to Witch-Space was accompanied by an almost negligible accelerative surge, a moment's dizziness, and then the spectacular sight of the stars brightening, spreading out and suddenly streaking in multi-coloured circular patterns, so that the ship seemed to be passing down a spinning tube. Almost as soon as the surge of acceleration had come it had gone. The ship drifted in 'Witch
Light', in the non-place in space and time. It was crossing the void between stars in seconds, but for those seconds it was in a twilight world whose existence was beyond imagination.

They say that Witch-Space is haunted. Maybe that's why they call it 'witch'. Time turns all around, and atoms turn inside out, and gravity waves billow up, and things move there, lifeforms, or shadows, or atoms, or galaxies, who knows? No-one has ever stopped and gone outside to find out. Only robot remotes exist there, switching stations, monitors, rescue Droids and the like. Whatever lives in Witch-Space, in the
Faraway tunnels, will remain a mystery always.

So we have a description of what the entrance to Witch-space looks like.

We also have the issue that in the Dark Wheel the jump near instantaneous - now I'm happy to accept that human's fail to perceive the passing of time and that the jump feels near-instant but when you emerge from witch-space your ship picks up a new time signal and your clock is updated with the actual passage of time which took place.

Finally, and I've always held this image in my head since I read DW is that witch-space is the non-space, the tunnel between wormhole entrance and exit, when a mis-jump occurs and you're jumped by Thargoids, its because they have disrupted the normal mechanism of transit and you become aware/dropped back to "real-time" (but not real-space) and fight them in witch-space not normal space (but a long way between habitable/recognised systems). You are no-where when you've mis-jumped (I guess a similar idea to Babylon 5). I guess that's why I like the idea of the Thargoids "suppressing" the tunnel, destroy the thargoids and your original worm-hole opens up allowing you to continue your journey.

Irrespective of how it actually behaves in the game this is how I imagined the Universe working on my old 8-bit wire-frame C64 days and I won't (and don't want to be) swayed now we've got fancy modern graphics and gameplay - much of my Oolite still exists in my imagination!

From my own point of view I prefer the idea that the clock adjustment represents at least the onboard ship-time time taken to travel the wormhole. This is largely for reasons of fiction: if you want to have things happening onboard a ship, i.e. crew interaction, etc. then you need some time for these things to happen in. The clock gets adjusted on leaving the wormhole because that's when the ship's computer has a chance to compare its own internal clock with ... um ... something else. What with time being relative and all, it does break down a bit here! But I still prefer the idea that ships have to be able to support a crew for some considerable amount of time between space stations, that ships have to be lived in as well as just piloted.

Time dilation – either way – could create interesting problems for crew members if they're being paid by the hour. Maybe that's what the internal clock adjustment is for: it's an agreed-upon, artificial measure of "absolute time" for the purpose of calculating wages, as well as for determining the delivery times for shipments.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Irrespective of how it actually behaves in the game this is how I imagined the Universe working on my old 8-bit wire-frame C64 days and I won't (and don't want to be) swayed now we've got fancy modern graphics and gameplay - much of my Oolite still exists in my imagination!

Hear Hear !

Micha wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Irrespective of how it actually behaves in the game this is how I imagined the Universe working on my old 8-bit wire-frame C64 days and I won't (and don't want to be) swayed now we've got fancy modern graphics and gameplay - much of my Oolite still exists in my imagination!

Hear Hear !

I think that it can be agreed upon that we ALL want to see "stars brightening, spreading out and suddenly streaking in multi-coloured circular patterns"

On the subject of time passage, I share the same ideas as Commander McLane and Micha. Travel in the tunnel is a two-second trip. The adjustment of the clock is to compensate for the difference in the way time passes outside of the wormhole. That's the way I have always preceived it.

i haven't read through the whole thread yet but i just wanted to say that the Dr. Who tunnel sequence Disembodied linked to is great!
I'd love to see a whichspace tunnel looking like that especially the first 'liquid metal' tunnel.
Is it possible to use shaders on the ring.dat model during the Oolite witchspace sequence? that liquid metal effect you got going with the "Ahruman Cube" ages ago in the shaders outpost thread would look awesome here A_C!

Examples:

Riraed to Anatma 5.6 LY - Estimated Travel Time (as shown on F6) = 31.4 hours.
Riraed to Anatma - Time Adjustment = c31.4 hours.

Lezaer to Esmaoanbe 0 LY - Estimated Travel Time (as shown on F6) = 0 hours.
Lezaer to Esmaoanbe - Time Adjustment = 0 hours.

Riraed to Irite 3.2 LY - Estimated Travel Time (as shown on F6) = 10.2 hours.
Riraed to Irite - Time Adjustment = c10.2 hours.

Time Adjustment starts as soon as the wormhole starts, not when you arrive in-system.

I'm with Disembodied on this, in my mind, there is a passage of time going through the wormhole. The passage of time on ship might not be consistent with the passage of time in the source or destination systems, but there is more time passing than a few seconds.

At least thats how I like it for the fiction I'm working on in a half assed, procrastinating, way. Having an entire chapter set during hyperspace travel that is only two seconds long would be a little on the short side.

Sendraks wrote:

Having an entire chapter set during hyperspace travel that is only two seconds long would be a little on the short side.

I do not mind the idea of the subjective time of the crew be a lot less than the objective external time in reference to the galaxy. Not really bothered either way. It could even in theory be longer. What I prefer to think is that the subjective time isn't really as short as 2 seconds but is shortened to 2 secs for game play experience. As long as there is in theory a period of time the crew experiences Hyperspace, otherwise it doesn't make sense for it to based on a hyperspace concept in the first place as you would just have a short wormhole from one place to the next.

As to Hyperspace jump graphics doesn't it need somehow to match with the blue sphere of a wormhole? Such as starting as a blue glow and turning into a tunnel effect (and maybe relsoving into witchspace whatever that looks like). And all of this would be in reverse for the exit. It looks like this idea I described above is way outside what the Oolite engine can do as far as I can tell.

Docking graphics should really look something like the insides of a station if at all possible. Rendered using the game engine if possible. And if this can be done have it possible to script which graphics is used so you can have different graphics for Coriolis station, Ico, Dodo, Rock Hermit, Torus, Black Monk Monastary, etc.

But if nothing approaching either can be done docking should look different to jumping.

I believe in a middle-ground between these scenarios. There is passage of time inside witchspace tunnels, but it at a much slower rate than in normal relativistic space.

However, for game-play mechanics, I would be THRILLED with a new ring.dat sequence, and if the dev's could make the script-pause occur DURING that sequence. I.e. - Do system population & etc before drawing anything... Now, I have no idea how hard it would be to implement, or if such an implementation would occur Pre-MNSR - But I SERIOUSLY doubt it.

The Dr. Who sequence is a good one, or the current Dr. Who series sequence could also be cool...