Oolite Bulletins

amix wrote:

Right. I am thinking about buying a new rig. I guess I will go for a Radeon HD 5850 and i5 quad (or maybe even i7, but that makes it way more expensive, than I want to,since I need a water-cooler. Summer here gets up to 43 degrees max. with 37-40 possible for the norm. Celsius, I mean )

Core i5 should be plenty, I doubt you'd see any noticeable performance gains in most games between an I5 and I7, especially not if you're getting a beast of a graphics card like the 5850.

Those summer temperatures sound nasty, I'd be water cooling myself under those temperatures, never mind my P.C!

Focusing on a few of your comments so far:

1 - Style guides, when you've got different oxp creators coming at Oolite from different artistic directions and producing incredibly quality work, how do you tell them that one of them is "right" and the other is "wrong"? I love Simon's neolite ships, I think he's created a fantastic set of re-imagined ships for Oolite. That said, I think the same about Griff's ships as well. I like both and I'm prepared to tinker with OXPs to have both.

Having a style guide will stifle some of the creativity here. It might resolve some of the conflicts, but for me they are not that big a deal.

2 - Realistic Physics - while I see your point that realism does help immerse you in the game, my counter-argument is that I cannot think of a single dog fight in FF or FFE that was nearly as enjoyable as the many I've had in Oolite. Certainly I don't recall any dogfights in FF/FFE against multiple ships to the number you get in Oolite, that were anywhere near as fun and didn't involve all the NPCs crashing into each other.

3 - Planetary Landings ala FFE/FF - yes this would be the motherlode for Oolite in my mind, but a huge task. Also to date, I've yet to land on a single planet (and I have planetfall OXP installed) as there is so much to do in space. Can't really miss what I don't use.

Sendraks wrote:

3 - Planetary Landings ala FFE/FF - yes this would be the motherlode for Oolite in my mind, but a huge task. Also to date, I've yet to land on a single planet (and I have planetfall OXP installed) as there is so much to do in space. Can't really miss what I don't use.

Also, as I'm filling the role of canon-guy here ( ), in Elite you are not supposed to land on planets. They are off-limits for outworlders. What little interaction there is between a space pilot and the ground-dwelling beings, it is restricted to the station.

That's why I in my personal configuration haven't installed Planetfall.

And by the way, here you see another problem with a style-guide. Fortunately on these boards we don't have a canon police (even if it may seem otherwise to some new members). If we had, OXPs which contradict some part of the canon would be prohibited. Which would be silly, because a prohibition couldn't be enforced anyway. Therefore it is left to each player to be his/her own style-police. That's what Oolite's expandability is all about. If it doesn't fit into your own personal Ooniverse, don't install it. But don't force your own personal style upon others. It wouldn't work anyway.

Commander McLane wrote:

Also, as I'm filling the role of canon-guy here ( ), in Elite you are not supposed to land on planets. They are off-limits for outworlders. What little interaction there is between a space pilot and the ground-dwelling beings, it is restricted to the station.

Although ... this does bring up an intriguing possibility for modifying Planetfall, and making smuggling a potential career choice. At the moment I think Planetfall just gives you a random selection of landing site; but what if we (and by "we" I mean "someone who knows what they're doing, i.e. not me" ) changed this so that landing on a planet always took you to a smugglers' dropoff – with a chance of getting busted based on the government type of the planet (from almost zero on an Anarchy to almost certain on a Corporate State). And landing gear could be tricky to get ... maybe only available at certain places, e.g. Rock Hermits and the like.

The penalty for getting busted could range from having to dish out a large bribe (yes/no) or paying a hefty fine and having your cargo seized. Or you could choose to flee, and be faced with a squadron of Vipers in close orbit as soon as you launch.

Disembodied wrote:

... so that landing on a planet always took you to a smugglers' dropoff – with a chance of getting busted based on the government type of the planet...

I haven't installed Planetfall, so I'm not sure how you land. Is it a location marker over a certain area of the planet? If so then as well as Disembodied's idea above, maybe there could be a penalty for not landing 'accurately'.

For instance, the location marker may have a small amount of movement (random?), reflecting a 'hole' in the scanners of the authorities. This would be surrounded by other invisible markers, which still allow the player to land, but represent a less 'accurate' landing, and therefore incur a slight penalty.

Poro wrote:

I haven't installed Planetfall, so I'm not sure how you land. Is it a location marker over a certain area of the planet?

Sorry, it's not as exciting as that I'm afraid. When you approach the planet or moon, at a particular height above the surface you dock as if you are in a station. (There is a lot more to it than that, like the type of place you land at, but that is the essence of it.) Thargoid did an excellent job getting it to work under the limitations of Oolite.

allikat wrote:

If you're looking at getting watercooling, there are worse places to get help than www.overclock.net I'm also a user around there

Okay, thanks, will check it out.

Have you seen FFED3D?

I will now Thanks.

I have also seen a DirectX conversion of FFE. But as I do not have access to a Windows machine atm, I can not say more. I just took out the hard-disk of my old Win machine in order to set it up dual-boot/Parallels. But I need to get a big drive first, in order to make some good backups. OT, I know

Sendraks wrote:

1 - Style guides, when you've got different oxp creators coming at Oolite from different artistic directions and producing incredibly quality work, how do you tell them that one of them is "right" and the other is "wrong"?

You are right. I agree. This is not what I meant with style-guide (like in "design" guide).

What I meant was rather something like a board, where the Universe gets fixed a little. If OXP creator needs a Tech-Level 17, Democracy planet for some special reason (s)he would register that. And now every other OXP creator knows, there is a tech-level 17/Demo at 12,33. Imagine you have two great OXPs, that you adore. And one creates the afformentioned planet, the other one, at the very same location, a tech-level 1/Corporate state. See what I mean? They clash. Usually we would try to email a bug/feature report, try to modify the OXP ourselfes. This all could be left to the Intelligent Creator, called a Wiki, who creates Universe and all the rest

Just some democratic laws, standards. No dictatorship !

As for planetary landing I just mentioned it, because it added so much athmosphere in FFE. Landing on a real-size planet gives you athmosphere. One, on an abstract level, at least, feels, that one really is in space (it's a space sim, ain't it, so why not feel right there?). Once you landed you could deploy your mining stuff and come back in three months. And while it would not gain much profit the imagination, what would be possible if this would be exanded into planets-exploration (be the first to discover it, find plenty of gold and stuff), made me all excited. Todays computers can do a lot. Especially in a P2P network, like SETI, Folding et all.

I still hope, that the MMO Elite4 will use such a tech. With centralized servers, that give out stuff to calculate and our machines to most of the work, while we are idle or so. Since I am so much for Virtual Reality and simulation, I dream of GTA SA on all planets in Elite4, lol.

Okay, a bit "Über", maybe. Hey, just dreaming...

amix wrote:

As for planetary landing I just mentioned it, because it added so much athmosphere in FFE. Landing on a real-size planet gives you athmosphere.

A nitpick, if I remember correctly the FFE planets were far from real size.

amix wrote:

I dream of GTA SA on all planets in Elite4, lol.

Dude, where's my starship?

i think everything in FFE, sizes to orbit times etc, were correct.

Killer Wolf wrote:

i think everything in FFE, sizes to orbit times etc, were correct.

Even if it wasn't - it certainly felt that way!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Killer Wolf wrote:

i think everything in FFE, sizes to orbit times etc, were correct.

Even if it wasn't - it certainly felt that way!

It did, along with the semi-realistic times from deep system to landing..

allikat wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Killer Wolf wrote:

i think everything in FFE, sizes to orbit times etc, were correct.

Even if it wasn't - it certainly felt that way!

It did, along with the semi-realistic times from deep system to landing..

Ah yes, the epic levels of boredom!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

allikat wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Even if it wasn't - it certainly felt that way!

It did, along with the semi-realistic times from deep system to landing..

Ah yes, the epic levels of boredom!

Not to mention the epic WTH moment when you dropped out of Stardreamer with pirate lasers carving your ship up.

Thinking about the landing on planets and the tech required for it.

1) I guess a procedural mesh creation for a sphere would be needed, the closer you get the higher the density of sub-divisions - to a maximum of course. Localised to the side/portion of the planet you can see in the camera view.

2) Apply in realtime a hieght map to the current density of the mesh.

3) If the planet textures are being created procedurally, maybe a similar/matching height map can be done soon at the same time. So they match up. If a specific texture is used as in the system_Redux OXP maybe you can add a matching heightmap too.

4) Add Cities/Space Ports etc as models, as we do with the Space Stations.

Seems simple to me, right someone just code that up for us that would be great ta.