Oolite 2: scales, Frontier and flames

[Vibrator]

FE2 and Elite don't have exactly the same gameplay for the very reasons you've given yourself. In FE2 your ship accelerated at X g for hours and hours and hours ( or minutes if you went to 10,000x normal time) - then there'd be a blip on the screen as a pirate went whizzing past, you'd lock on to it and then for hours and hours and hours (or minutes if you wound the time acceleration back up to many 1,000x normal time) chasing it down, which in fact meant letting the auto-pilot make the adjustments for you. If you were really lucky you'd get two or three shots off before you over flew each other and you could begin the process again. If you were unlucky you'd run out of fuel during this process...

In the end I bought shields and turrets and either rammed my enemies to death or used the moving turrets while paused "cheat".

Huge scales means huge speeds and huge speeds means minimal interactions because to get anywhere you have to be going really fast and so does everything and everyone else.

I still own a working Amiga and Frontier and when we had this debate last year I dug them both out just to confirm that it was as bad as I remember and it was...

Heh that's a bit disengenuous, you must be aware this was the situation that confronted many folk who couldn't get to grips with the engine controls but was just a case of switching from 'manual' to 'off'. Not complicated. Once you get your head round it you can select a target on the system map - including other ships - and close on them accurately.. with a little skill you can stick to 'em like glue or run rings round 'em. But if you're gettting into an uncontrollable joust that's just hamfisted airmanship i'm afraid... can't blame Braben any more than Newton. Likewise AI could accurately close on you - if you disengaged engine cruise control when they arrive their speeds will usually be within range of yours. The only exceptions where when too coarse a time resolution was selected for the program to be able to calculate and sync everything perfectly - the same mistake would often caused a CFIT too but this is a pilot error and perhaps hardware limitation issue, not an intrinsic game design flaw.

Of course, if you should happen to come within attack range of a craft on a non-parallel course then obviously you'll fly by at silly speeds... but then if either of you wanted to fight you would've / should've plotted some kind of intercept trajectory beforehand. After all that's how the pirates manage to catch up with you after you enter the system.. they're not just randomly spawned in-flight, but often in the system already, or arrive after you - either way they're visible on the system scanner so you can check if anyone's closing in and be prepared, if you only cared to check. I mean, basic piloting skills innit..

Most ppl's initial enthusiasm gave way to the same kinds of misgivings i think, but it was more culture shock than failure in game design... like i say, these types of complaints seem to be in much the same vein as Elite's original snubs from prospective publishers - basically saying "..it's not arcadey enough!" But Elite was always meant to be a "space sim with stuff to do", not Project X 3D...

Like i keep saying Oolite's great in it's own right, and also a nice nostalgia trip. But in all its DX9 polish it does beg certain other development possibilities.. just from a "why not?" perspective...

[Disembodied]

[...] with hardware no longer an issue realistic scale would seem a similar kind of logical progression.

I'm all for a bigger scale. The problem is, that it's not just a question of inflating the sizes of things and the spaces between them, and carrying on as before. The game – like all games – is based around a series of assumptions: one of those assumptions is that, for playability reasons, it takes a certain amount of time to get places and you're likely to meet a certain number of ships on the way. Changing the scale changes the bases for these assumptions. I think it will take a major amount of game engineering to make a game with Elite/Oolite's gameplay, and Frontier's sense of scale.

The question of scale is a major problem, I think, for space-sim (for a given value of "sim") games, and it's interesting how it's been handled. Elite was small-scale, partly for hardware reasons (although there's an element of "keeping things human" there, too: originally B&B were going to have 8 squillion galaxies, because they could, but were persuaded that such vast numbers would be dehumanising and would probably numb the player). Frontier had some of the scale, but while it was fine for sightseeing it was awful for combat, and – personally speaking, anyway – I found the "fast-forward button" approach to reducing the boring travel times a bit of a disappointment. The X games, meanwhile, are if anything even more cramped than Elite: planets have been reduced to background scenery and, although the stations are pleasingly large, everything is crammed into one big box that a) feels too small, and b) takes too bloody long to trundle around in (almost, but not quite, ending up with Elite's sense of scale and Frontier's gameplay).

Basically, we need something that looks grand, epic, awesome and so on, and suggests vastness, endless freedom with no boundaries etc., but which also lets the player cross it fast enough and bump into enough action to be entertaining, without becoming silly (in short, which effectively keeps the player within boundaries and seriously curtails their freedom, for the sake of better gameplay). Giant solar systems with a big network of spacelanes running through them might work. The lanes aren't visibly different to the rest of space, they're just the only places where your torus jumpdrive will function. You still get masslocked, so you can still force encounters, and you can still fly anywhere you want, so it feels unlimited ... it's just that if you fly to where there's nothing at all it'll take forever – but why would you?

Even here, though, there still needs to be some fiddling around. If we assume that a ship with a torus jumpdrive can travel at, say 10 times the speed of light, it'll still take roughly 7 minutes for a trip from Earth to Saturn, and (even more roughly) 30 minutes for a trip from Earth to Neptune ... that's too slow. It's epic and grand – and really boring. But at 10x c you'd get from Earth to Venus in just over 30 seconds ... which is too fast. All sense of the actual vast distances involved is destroyed. You'd have to fiddle it so that the real distances were dumped, and something much more human-friendly (but still sort-of epically large) were built in; or fiddle the torus physics so that it went faster as you got further away from the sun, because of subspace shearing or whatever technobabble you prefer. Or – more likely – fiddle it both ways: shrink the outer system distances, and increase the outer system speeds.

If you want to see what something on a realistic scale looks like, Celestia would be a good starting place. It's fantastic for getting the sense of the endlessness of space ... but without any kind of wangle though it would make for a pretty terrible game setting.

[SiriusCG]

Want boring? http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

Great app ... massive scale, wonderful graphics ... would not make for good game play though IMO ...

Yes, in Frontier you trade and you fight, but you don't dogfight. Like DH says above, it was just screaming back and forth on autopilot, holding down the trigger for a bit and screaming back and forth some more until one of you died, usually of boredom or old age. Dogfighting is the heart and soul of Elite/Oolite, and Frontier – obsessed with the idea of having "realistic" Newtonian(ish) physics in this one bit of the game for some reason – threw it away.

I'm reminded of Haldeman's solution to "dogfighting" in The Forever War: the computer threw the ship into a series of random maneuvers while the crew were zipped up in cocoons in acceleration chambers. The ship then fired a missile or two and the crew waited for a week, in the cocoons, to see if it hit. If they were alive, the missile presumably hit the Tauran target.

Cheers.

[Vibrator]

There's no proof I've seen in any interview with Bell or Braben that they conceived Elite to be a "Space Sim" - if this is your starting point then I'm not surprised that you find the original concept of Elite to be limiting, you're looking for a Space Simulation where there isn't one.

Pioneer therefore sounds right up your street.

Or you could try and find something stunningly unplayable - with physics up the wazzoo - and then you'll see that Simulation != Game != fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Combat

lol you're kidding? Please don't get so defensive, not attacking anything just shooting crap.. of course Elite was a space sim, it was unprecedentedly so, a proper 3D one...! hence our whole raison d'etre here, no? And FE2 all the more so.

I suppose one could also rate it under fantasy / strategy genres but its appeal first and foremost is surely in the 3D modelling of epic space voyages. In fact if i'm not mistaken i think one or two folk might regard it as the ultimate defining quintessential and archetypal epitome of the space sim / trading genre..

seriously tho, the basic sentiment here regarding scaling seems to be more militant conservatism than any rational objections. And i totally get it, it's cool, cutesy scaling=good, realistic scaling=bad and there's maybe an authenticity issue for those who've disowned FE2 cos they couldn't find the F7 key. Whatever. The thread topic is where the game could develop in future, not which other games you'd like me to go and play instead!

[DaddyHoggy]

Heh that's a bit disengenuous, you must be aware this was the situation that confronted many folk who couldn't get to grips with the engine controls but was just a case of switching from 'manual' to 'off'. Not complicated. Once you get your head round it you can select a target on the system map - including other ships - and close on them accurately.. with a little skill you can stick to 'em like glue or run rings round 'em. But if you're gettting into an uncontrollable joust that's just hamfisted airmanship i'm afraid... can't blame Braben any more than Newton. Likewise AI could accurately close on you - if you disengaged engine cruise control when they arrive their speeds will usually be within range of yours. The only exceptions where when too coarse a time resolution was selected for the program to be able to calculate and sync everything perfectly - the same mistake would often caused a CFIT too but this is a pilot error and perhaps hardware limitation issue, not an intrinsic game design flaw.

Of course, if you should happen to come within attack range of a craft on a non-parallel course then obviously you'll fly by at silly speeds... but then if either of you wanted to fight you would've / should've plotted some kind of intercept trajectory beforehand. After all that's how the pirates manage to catch up with you after you enter the system.. they're not just randomly spawned in-flight, but often in the system already, or arrive after you - either way they're visible on the system scanner so you can check if anyone's closing in and be prepared, if you only cared to check. I mean, basic piloting skills innit..

Most ppl's initial enthusiasm gave way to the same kinds of misgivings i think, but it was more culture shock than failure in game design... like i say, these types of complaints seem to be in much the same vein as Elite's original snubs from prospective publishers - basically saying "..it's not arcadey enough!" But Elite was always meant to be a "space sim with stuff to do", not Project X 3D...

Like i keep saying Oolite's great in it's own right, and also a nice nostalgia trip. But in all its DX9 polish it does beg certain other development possibilities.. just from a "why not?" perspective...

All true, but in the end - an Imp Courier, with 25 shield generators, two turrets and ramming speed was the fastest way to get through any system.

Also, if you jumped far enough in Frontier (usually until your engines failed and left you stranded) - you saw that all the systems repeated (including Sol) - all sense of scale and immersion destroyed in a way that Elite never managed.

Oh, and because Oolite works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS, you'll find it's an OpenGL game not DirectX anything...

[Disembodied]

Heh that's a bit disengenuous, you must be aware this was the situation that confronted many folk who couldn't get to grips with the engine controls but was just a case of switching from 'manual' to 'off'. Not complicated. Once you get your head round it you can select a target on the system map - including other ships - and close on them accurately.. with a little skill you can stick to 'em like glue or run rings round 'em. But if you're gettting into an uncontrollable joust that's just hamfisted airmanship i'm afraid... can't blame Braben any more than Newton. Likewise AI could accurately close on you - if you disengaged engine cruise control when they arrive their speeds will usually be within range of yours. The only exceptions where when too coarse a time resolution was selected for the program to be able to calculate and sync everything perfectly - the same mistake would often caused a CFIT too but this is a pilot error and perhaps hardware limitation issue, not an intrinsic game design flaw.

It's a design flaw. If you have to play the game "the right way" to make it even slightly interesting and/or competitive, then it's a design flaw. I worked my way all the way from an Eagle II to an Imperial Courier, and I never had a single dogfight: just "lock target; turn on autopilot; wait until target reaches 8km; press and hold down fire; when target reaches 2km turn off autopilot and move slightly to one side; as target screams past, flip over, turn autopilot back on, repeat". And once I'd got myself up to an Asp with a few shield generators, I didn't bother turning the autopilot off at 2km or moving to one side: I just ploughed straight over the top of them and scraped their remains off the windscreen afterwards with a putty knife. I Blame Braben for bringing Newton into the game in the first place, where he frankly wasn't needed or wanted.

[DaddyHoggy]

There's no proof I've seen in any interview with Bell or Braben that they conceived Elite to be a "Space Sim" - if this is your starting point then I'm not surprised that you find the original concept of Elite to be limiting, you're looking for a Space Simulation where there isn't one.

Pioneer therefore sounds right up your street.

Or you could try and find something stunningly unplayable - with physics up the wazzoo - and then you'll see that Simulation != Game != fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Combat

lol you're kidding? Please don't get so defensive, not attacking anything just shooting crap.. of course Elite was a space sim, it was unprecedentedly so, a proper 3D one...! hence our whole raison d'etre here, no? And FE2 all the more so.

I suppose one could also rate it under fantasy / strategy genres but its appeal first and foremost is surely in the 3D modelling of epic space voyages. In fact if i'm not mistaken i think one or two folk might regard it as the ultimate defining quintessential and archetypal epitome of the space sim / trading genre..

seriously tho, the basic sentiment here regarding scaling seems to be more militant conservatism than any rational objections. And i totally get it, it's cool, cutesy scaling=good, realistic scaling=bad and there's maybe an authenticity issue for those who've disowned FE2 cos they couldn't find the F7 key. Whatever. The thread topic is where the game could develop in future, not which other games you'd like me to go and play instead!

As a Lecturer in Modelling and Simulation I can safely and confidently tell you that Elite is not a Simulation, it's a game, massively more expansive than anything before it, but a Simulation? No.

I'm happy to debate this, therefore I'm not being defensive, I'm certainly being robust - as I said, I played Frontier only last year with my old deadly pilot in his Imp Courier and it's as I recall: you spend most of your time in 10,000x speed both to accelerate and then decelerate between jump point and docking point of choice. The objective therefore was to miss out most of the space and thus rendering it pointless.

The only thing I liked in Frontier was the bounty hunter aspect - to have a faster ship and to jump ahead of your mark and wait for them to appear - now that I liked.

[Disembodied]

seriously tho, the basic sentiment here regarding scaling seems to be more militant conservatism than any rational objections. And i totally get it, it's cool, cutesy scaling=good, realistic scaling=bad and there's maybe an authenticity issue for those who've disowned FE2 cos they couldn't find the F7 key. Whatever. The thread topic is where the game could develop in future, not which other games you'd like me to go and play instead!

Rational objection to realistic scaling: a speed which gets you from Earth to Venus in 30 seconds of game time, gets you from Earth to Neptune in 30 minutes of game time. The first is too short, the second is way, way too long. That's the problem with reality: it's not as much fun as something created with the express purpose of "being fun".

• Current scaling = too small to provide a real sense of the immensity of space, but it's still fun to play nonetheless.
• Increased scale = increased sense of immensity, but fraught with game-changing problems; needs extensive dedicated playtesting to spot the pitfalls.
• Realistic scale in a single-planet system = requires massive re-scaling of the game, e.g. huge increases in the distances between witchpoint and station, planet and star, etc. Also fraught with game-changing problems; needs extensive dedicated playtesting to spot the pitfalls and find out if the game – interacting with other ships in space – still exists.
• Realistic scale in a full solar system = inhumanly vast, and hopelessly broken in terms of gameplay.

[CommonSenseOTB]

Is star wars and star trek more like a sim or a game? I have a point but it needs some background.

Star Wars is unarguably one of the most popular SF's around. You hardly ever see ships in deep space or not near some planet and the ship combat speeds are like our RL flying speeds. To get around they use a hyperdrive.

Star Trek is also one of the most popular SF's around. They are always in deep space encountering strange things and the combat speeds can and do happen while bending or warping space. To get around they Warp space so that the effective speed is 10's or 100's or more x the speed of light.

Which is more realistic or believable?

Star Wars is actually quite believable if you ignore the whole force thing. Except for the antigravity/repulsor and hyperdrive technology we can pretty much do/will do soon most of what is portrayed. Wormholes and quantum mechanics make me believe it's likely/realistic to have hyperdrives.

Star Trek is not as believable. I think it would require a lot more energy to keep space bent and I haven't read anything yet that supports this propulsion method scientifically. Transporters scare the hell out of me. I'd be more willing to walk through a wormhole unprotected than try that device. It literally kills you and then rebuilds you at the other end. What happened to my soul? Where did it go.

Communications for both use the same respective techniques as their propulsion does. Quantum tunnelling and wormholes also are a more realistic and practical idea bringing instant communication with a real scientific explanation.

How does the above have anything to do with elite vs frontier? It appears that elite has most things in common with star wars and star wars has a lot more support scientifically. Therfore I'm using the "like_ship" argument to say that oolite is more realistic(the arguments here are missing the point)than frontier and it's a happy coincidence that this makes for a better game. The issues of scale(aside from that in my coffee maker) can be resolved, maybe, if we want to. The basic premise for oolite is correct so why not make the planets just big enough to go fly down to the surface, make the stations big enough to accomodate a realistic number of much larger ships and move the witchpoint out 2 to 5 time as far? A "little" more realism couldn't hurt if it enhanced gameplay also. The sun distance and size would be the wild factor. Maybe 1/2 the suns would be too far to scoop from and the rest would be very close to the planet because it was a small dim star and maybe some of these planets were actually moons of gas giants. Just imagine the look and feel of solar systems such as these!

I play oolite because I believe that it is a great game with unlimited potential and playability(haven't even scratched the surface, maybe another 10 years ) and to me it is by far the most realistic but it could be improved.

The most important thing I want to say is that oolite is made by and for oolite fans(fanatics would be a better word)and should reflect what they want to see while making what makes it oolite even better and more realistic in that way. Gene Rodenbury and George Lucas had no idea what their franchises would become and most of us probably have no idea what oolite will become but I know what it could, would and should become if we try. The best darn game/fantasy/ooniverse/genre(add more words here)even cult if you like that is designed completely by the people/fans themselves and will lead the way for this type of thing for the next 50 years perhaps. David Braben is already setting the stage for this with his $25 computer to let kids design oolite oxps. They'll probably build a Cobra MK III when it becomes possible(just like star trek the enterprise(space shuttle). Let's be part of that future, work together and have another cup of coffee(sans scale).

[Killer Wolf]

"crammed into one big box that a) feels too small, and b) takes too bloody long to trundle around in"
doesn't that all contradict itself?!

there's been some great debate in here, some of which i agree w/, some i don't. I don't think this will ever be resolved to any degree because as others have stated some of the aspects CAN'T be. I'd like larger distances, and i'd like to have huge, megahuge stations around a planet whose size doesn't jar w/ them. beyond all of that tho, i think i'd prefer some of the game mechanics to be addressed before looking at the eye candy - collision detection, eg.

[Disembodied]

"crammed into one big box that a) feels too small, and b) takes too bloody long to trundle around in"
doesn't that all contradict itself?!

Yes. Yes it does. But that's my honest impression of playing X2: "All the stations are weirdly close together, given that we're in space and all, and yet it takes a bloody age to get anywhere." Partly that's because of the flawed mechanic of having warp gates at the edges of their big boxes, which means you have to cross acres of MAMBA space in order to get to the door to the next giant but over-full box.

Scale is undoubtedly a problem in space games: they all seem to struggle with it. If you go for playable, it's unrealistic. If you go for realistic, it rapidly becomes unplayable. Given that this is a game, not a simulator, it's obvious that "playable" trumps "realistic" every time – but there's still room to find the best balance between the two.

Did anyone every play Damocles (aka Mercenary II)? Although the spaceflight element in it wasn't really intrinsic to the game – you were just travelling about from planet to planet, not meeting or fighting anybody – it did manage to have a decent sense of scale within its solar system without being unusably (i.e. realistically) vast. You could land on all the planets and moons (and one comet) too. Of course, that might not transfer to a game like Oolite where the point is to meet other ships and have dogfights with them.

[DaddyHoggy]

Is star wars and star trek more like a sim or a game? I have a point but it needs some background.

Star Wars is unarguably one of the most popular SF's around. You hardly ever see ships in deep space or not near some planet and the ship combat speeds are like our RL flying speeds. To get around they use a hyperdrive.

Star Trek is also one of the most popular SF's around. They are always in deep space encountering strange things and the combat speeds can and do happen while bending or warping space. To get around they Warp space so that the effective speed is 10's or 100's or more x the speed of light.

Which is more realistic or believable?

Neither are "sims" - if you have a game which replicates the appearance of what you see in the movies/TV series then you have a Simulation (but only in the context of simulating an expected behaviour).

A simulation is a model used for a specific purpose and in a specific context. Since neither Star Wars or Star Trek are real they cannot be, in themselves, simulations.

Star Wars has "hyperspace" so that the big distances can be crossed near instantaneously. Star Trek has Transporters so that small distances can be crossed near instantaneously - they're both plot devices - neither stands up to scientific scrutiny using science as we currently understand it.

Perception is clearly a personal thing though, given that you feel Star Wars is more scientifically credible, given the amount of effort Star Trek made in later series to be scientifically credible and self contained within its own canon. For example, the creators of Star Trek (TNG) knew, no matter how ridiculous a number they thought of as memory storage capacity or processing speed of the main computer on the Enterprise they would be proved wrong in short order and so they created the "Quad" - and refused to compare it to any currently understood convention for memory or clock speed. Quite sensible really.

When I worked with scientists from CERN the first thing our experiments in creating and storing (all be it briefly) anti-hydrogen atoms (anti-proton orbited by a positron) were compared with was of course the anti-matter fuel of Star Trek.

I love Star Wars and Star Trek and as a physicist I wish even a small percentage of either was true!

[ADCK]

I regret bringing up the issue of universal scale now

Now that I've thought about it and read what others have to say I'm doing a complete 180 and saying leave the scale as is.

I still think ship scale needs fixing though... but that's another topic.

[Selezen]

Isn't it funny how Fronter vs Elite conversations always get quite heated?

The scale issue is / was part of the original Elite, it just wasn't explored very much due to the nature of gaming (and the originality of Elite) back in the 80s - in short, no-one really cared as long as the game was good.

DH is right, Elite is not a simulation. It is a game. Pure and simple. Object of game: trade and make money and get to Elite. Accurising the relative scale of things in the next iteration of Oolite would take the game a significant step away from what make Elite so engaging. The main worry is the cascade effect.
:: Rescaling system would make planet bigger and distance between planet and sun much much larger therefore refuelling from sunskimming would be a longer journey
:: to retain accurate or similar travel times, relative speeds of objects would be increased, leading to a change in the combat model
:: station would have to be moved to realistic distance away from planet therefore station would be harder to find in relation to the planet and mass lock from planet would probably be further out (again, added realism)
:: witchpoint beacon would be further away, again meaning more travel time?

I wouldn't say I'm a purist, cos I like the OXPs and what they can do, but I think the scaling question is one that would lead to far too much change for it to be a simple thing to achieve. I don't think I would describe it as laziness to leave it as is - I would describe it as not being cost-effective. There are few returns to it and it would be a lot of work and not that many people would actually demand the changes.

Incidentally, I timed the journey between an Oolite planet and its sun at max speed in a Cobra 3 as about 15 mins. The approximate travel time between Earth and the Sun at about 0.35 light speed is about 15 mins. So at least one scale thing is right.

[CommonSenseOTB]

DH current thought from several top scientists say that if you put the energy from a star for a fraction of a second into a set of 2 conductive plates the space between would open up a wormhole or rip to somewhere else. That's not made up. Scientific basis for starwars hyperspace.

Star trek the biggest problem they have is they make up gobbledygook to explain the poorly thought out equipment and insult the intelligence of the thinking man while hypnotizing the low brow in the street.

I like a lot of star trek story. I get turned off whenever I hear them trying to explain their science as it sounds like a lot of witchdoctor mumbojumbo shaking and a dancing and a holloring around to look important.

At least with star wars it's not about the tech, it just happens to be there and makes a great story and just so happens to be the most realistic.

On the social side of it what is more realistic that man wants to war and kill and be just like he's been for 100000 years+ or to become all buddy buddy with all his neighbors. Nice dream but that's all it is, a dream. You can't deny human nature. That is why oolite rocks because it is based on greed and death and follows the progression to greater and greater carnage in the human future. That I can believe. That is realistic. Another plus for oolite realism.

oh and ADCK just use a little CLR that'll take care of the scale for yah!

Selezen: I thought that they referred light macht as the percent of speed of light so 0.35 would be a 3rd of a percent of light speed. I thought i read that in the elite manual. Might be wrong.