Oolite Bulletins

Thargoid wrote:

You can't disable the players ship in the sense you mean.

Also there are always frames of reference, such as planets, suns, other ships and indeed space dust...

Well, you say that, but often enough on these boards as soon as something is delared impossible somebody finds a way to do something as near-as-dammit similar. Your ship is "disabled" every time you engage the docking computer (Unless you hit it again) so maybe there's some way to allow such an enemy to hijack that? Just an idea.

Distant frames of reference will hardly seem to move, ships near enough to matter will be too fast and probably moving too erratically to judge by and you yourself'll be to slow to see any dust. All in all probably not easy to tell who is moving toward who.

tonyhippy wrote:

Well, you say that, but often enough on these boards as soon as something is delared impossible somebody finds a way to do something as near-as-dammit similar. Your ship is "disabled" every time you engage the docking computer (Unless you hit it again) so maybe there's some way to allow such an enemy to hijack that? Just an idea.

Yes and no (also as I seem sometimes to be the one who does the doing).

You can for example apply "performStop" to the player ship to stop it, but there would be nothing to stop the player pressing the accelerate key to speed up again. You would have to hit them with performStop every 0.25s or so to overcome that.

Similarly you could set the player ship position and/or orientation every 0.25s to overcome the flight keys. But it then gets complicated to have anything else act on the ship.

It wouldn't be too difficult to "freeze" the player ship in place for a period of time, but to actually get something to happen to it during that time (e.g. be towed by a tractor beam) is another matter entirely.

So perhaps not quite as impossible as I first thought (says he slipping into doer mode), but still not something I'd want to try and script with any great hope of it working well.

as we can assign scripts and HUDs to a ship, why not a keyconfig? if we could do that, you could assign a keyconfig that had no keys assigned, in effect disabling the keyboard so the player couldn't do anything. the JScript could assign the proper working keyconfig later as reqd.

So you can struggle in the grasp of the tractor beam, but you can't break free. Hmmm, I think that sounds even better than completely loosing control.