Oolite Bulletins

Does Planetfall requires any ship modifications, and can I just fly at a planet or moon and land on it with that mod and other needed mods installed?

You don’t need any extra equipment. The original equipment item has been renamed and made optional.

phkb wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 7:50 am

You don’t need any extra equipment. The original equipment item has been renamed and made optional.

Sorry, I don't get you. Which set of options? Game options, or one of the in game menus?

I did look on You-Tube for any Oolite Planetfall vids.

I'm also going to read through this entire post and the wiki?

I tried flying at the planet/moon, but the ship keeps breaking. Witchspace-Injectors don't help.

phkb wrote: ↑Mon Mar 18, 2024 12:33 am

Soooooo.....

PlanetFall. A lot of players like being able to "land" on planets. However, there's a couple of things about the implementation that I find annoying and immersion-breaking.
1. Where you land is almost complete random. You could land, then launch, immediately turn around and land again, and be somewhere different. I know some players liked the uncertainty of this, but to me it just feels off. You're rolling a dice to find out where you land.
2. The markets are broken. Even with Norby's "Planetfall Markets" fix, all you get is a copy of the main station market.
3. You can't save the game while planetside (this is a big issue to me).
4. As noted by other players, the maintenance costs don't align with the rest of the game.

So, I'm having a go at reworking this to address all the above issues and more. If things go according to plan, the "docking sequence" should even change depending on whether you're on the dark side of the planet or not.

Stranger created an alternate version of this which he called "PlanetLand", that addresses point 1 and at least some of point 2. For anyone who have used that OXP, did the markets feel fixed? If so, I will leverage some of that work when dealing with the markets in PlanetFall.

But before I push my vision of this OXP on the world, are there any strong feelings about keeping the original version as is. Should this be an upgrade, or an alternative to the original? I'm happy to go either way. If we want to keep the original as-is, I could release an update to PlanetFall Markets which restores the original market calcs. Let me know what you think.

Not programmer or coder myself, but wish to learn one day. Until that day, I am a little clueless when I ask question such as...

Can code from the second or third Elite game make a more immersive landing on planets and moons possible?

From what I played or both emulations of those games. I do kind of like what they had for the players

Commander Mick wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 8:06 am

phkb wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 7:50 am

You don’t need any extra equipment. The original equipment item has been renamed and made optional.

Sorry, I don't get you. Which set of options? Game options, or one of the in game menus?
…
I tried flying at the planet/moon, but the ship keeps breaking. Witchspace-Injectors don't help.

Neither. “Optional” as in you don’t need the equipment to land, although it does help with the turbulence.

You need to aim at a port transit point just above the planet surface. And slow down when you are at low altitude pr atmospheric friction will burn up your ship.

If there are no ports then you can’t land. And the vanilla game code destroys your ship (as with trying to land on a sun).

Thanks...

BTW, I'm trying to download/install the Elite Two - Frontier & Elite Three- First Encounters...

Butt here are so many options. This page might be the best...

https://www.frontierastro.co.uk/Files/files.html

Have you looked at “Pioneer”? No good for AppleMacs but a modern mod-able version of FFE.

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 9:17 am

Have you looked at “Pioneer”? No good for AppleMacs but a modern mod-able version of FFE.

Yes, I did. About 10 years ago. Has it improved much? I believe Is still have it in folder somewhere. It's not really Elite anymore though...

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 9:08 am

Commander Mick wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 8:06 am

phkb wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 7:50 am

You don’t need any extra equipment. The original equipment item has been renamed and made optional.

Sorry, I don't get you. Which set of options? Game options, or one of the in game menus?
…
I tried flying at the planet/moon, but the ship keeps breaking. Witchspace-Injectors don't help.

Neither. “Optional” as in you don’t need the equipment to land, although it does help with the turbulence.

You need to aim at a port transit point just above the planet surface. And slow down when you are at low altitude pr atmospheric friction will burn up your ship.

If there are no ports then you can’t land. And the vanilla game code destroys your ship (as with trying to land on a sun).

Trie3d it again (Thrice now...) and found the glowing white ball twice, and managed to fly closer to that while the sky turned a brighter shade of blue.

Then it was over... Crashed Your right about the turbulence. Tried this on Biramabi btw...

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 9:17 am

Have you looked at “Pioneer”? No good for AppleMacs but a modern mod-able version of FFE.

You see, in this you tube video. I commented under the name of Vidstarr 11 years ago...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aVf-8qVdsg

Can I get a Link for the latest Pioneer download please?

Found it finally, it does help to type in game after it's title. I kept getting the firmware before.

Commander Mick wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 8:11 am

Not programmer or coder myself, but wish to learn one day. Until that day, I am a little clueless when I ask question such as...

Can code from the second or third Elite game make a more immersive landing on planets and moons possible?

From what I played or both emulations of those games. I do kind of like what they had for the players

The second or third Elite would be ... the re-write for the BBC ? or for the Acorn? I'm not sure. About 1986?
Or do you mean the Bell-not-Braben (or vice versa) Elite-2 from the mid-1990s? Or the "Elite Dangerous" from around 2010? I've heard of them, but never seen them (I pre-ordered IIRC "Dangerous", but had shifted off Windows before it became condensed-ware.

From what you say about "YT videos" of some landing sequences, linking to such might help those who are familiar with such games to tell you which is which.

But ... returning closer to your point :
The "Planetfall 2.0" experience is -

• Aim at one of the named bits on the ground.
• as you approach, control your speed to control your skin temperature (as seen through your cabin temperature gauge - a logical difference to, say, how space shuttles failed. You can kill yourself at this point. And any passengers?
• you'll also get turbulence, for which you can buy a "reducing-fix" (never used it), but you just fly through it.
• At some point, with a low speed, safe skin/ cabin temperature, the screen will bring up a warning about landing procedures in 3... 2... 1...
• cut-scene graphics
• you're now "docked" at an on-the-ground station, with assorted novel bells and whistles.

At no point are you actually "flying" in an atmosphere. There's just a bit of random turbulence, and the "stick" doesn't stay straight and level. But banking turns, flying around clouds (or other ships), strafing the groundlings who ripped you off on your last visit ... nope, not happening. The physics engine for the "in flight" parts of the game are not sophisticated enough for that sort of thing - your spacecraft flies in space like a point object with position and 3 axes of orientation. And (this is important) no inertia.

• Say you're ticking along at the top of your torus drive, doing 25000-odd "OOkm"/h towards the "sun" (Primary for the system).
• Hands off the throttle.
• Yaw or pitch by 180°.
• Flip to your rear-view mirror

IF the Ooniverse followed Newton's laws of motion, your rear-view mirror would be filled with a view of the "sun", slowly expanding as you fly backwards towards it. The Ooniverse is non-Newtonian - big style. Which Jamesons learn to live with somewhere within a light year of Lave Academy. Such behaviour in a nominal "aircraft" would rip the wings off.
Modifying the game engine to make such behaviour more-or-less Newtonian ... well, just for starters, we'd need a second "fuel tank" for producing kinetic energy by fuelling the main rocket (reaction) motors (and at a lower fuel flow rate, fuelling the attitude jets to change the attitude of the spacecraft independently of it's velocity vector).

• Arrive from Witchspace with, say, a 10 "OOkm"/h vector at 30° in the direction toward the planet.
• Accelerate to 300 "OOkm"/h in the same direction, using (say) 20 units (however big) from your "reaction drive" tank.
• Now roll so that the planet is towards one or other "wingtip". If we were doing Newtonian dynamics, this would need one burst of energy to start the re-orientation roll, then another burst to stop the roll once you're at the desired orientation. Say, 2 units. You could set up the "flight realism" to automagically cancel the roll when you release the "roll" key - or you could leave it to the flight computer - so reliable! Computers never fail?
• Now yaw (do you understand pitch, roll and yaw? Sorry, I spent decades at sea I forget some people don't know these things) through 90° to put your nose (and main reaction/ rocket motors) perpendicular to your direction of flight.
• Fire your motors for half as much as you did initially (another 10 units from the reaction drive tank).
• Yaw back towards the planet. You should be travelling more or less directly towards the planet, and at about 333 "OOkm"/h.

When you get to the planet's vicinity, you'll need to spend about another 30 units from your "reaction drive" tank to come to a stop. Let's not give the planets gravity, for the moment.
Accelerating and decelerating to get from point A to point B has cost you about 60 units from this new tank, independent of your "Witchspace/ Qurium fuel" tank. In today's game engine, those manoeuvres would cost you nothing.

This is a much more complex way of flying than the current game engine. It's also much more realistic. There is a reason that flight simulator games have various levels of realism. The only person I've ever seen flying a serious "sim" on full realism went by the nickname "Flyboy" and was already in training to get his commercial pilot license after having held a PPL for a decade or so. The last I heard, he was throwing Emirates Airbuses around in the sky. You won't be surprised to hear I don't find assurances about the wonderfulness of "flying cars" terribly convincing. If I ever meet "Flyboy" (now Cap'n Flyboy?) again, I've got a good bet on what his interpretation would be.

There are several OXPs/ OZPs in the archive which give you more acceleration at the expense of Qurium fuel or which disconnect the pitch and yaw attitude jets while you're in torus drive. I've always interpreted those as attempts to bolt a "cost of acceleration" onto the existing game engine without going "full Newtonian".

Cholmondley's (or is it pkhb's?) OZP isn't implementing a flight engine for a physics-based reaction engine (with or without needing forward motion to generate lift) takes over as you descend through the atmosphere. The OZP just throws some random motions onto the pitch, roll and yaw axes without updating the HUD about it (or do they ? - been a while since I played it). Which compared to making a full flight sim engine ... well I thoroughly understand why that's the route not travelled. Just the number of additional control keys ... toggle_undercarriage ; toggle_flaps (several stages?) ; is your model of spacecraft a belly-lander, or a tail-lander?

Sound effect : lid being very firmly screwed back onto a can of worms.

Gosh - how I wish I had the skills to write an oxp like that!

My understanding is that Oolite had no facility for planet landing because it was based on Classic 8-bit Elite (6524 bytes?) and there was no space to handle that sort of thing!

So Aegidian’s Oolite didn’t introduce it and did not allow for its introduction. Handwavium then explained that GalCop forbade planetary landings. Thargoid then came up with a way of allowing docking using an invisible dock which you dock at just before crashing into the planet. Phob’s v.2 improves on this.

One of the requirements for PlanetFall2 is the Library OXZ. With that installed you can to your F4 screen and change some of the ways that Planetfall2 behaves. Although it is listed as Optional in the manifest of PlanetFall2 it is highly recommended that you also install the Planet Rotation Cosmetics OXZ as it will make landings easier. The Landing Points will not rotate out of your angle of approach as quickly with the Planet Rotation Cosmetics OXZ installed.

As for "How to Land". Choose your Landing Point. DO NOT aim directly down on it from above at a steep angle. Approach the Landing Point at a shallow angle from a distance. Once instructed to await Landing Clearance come to a complete stop and await for said clearance. Continue to approach the Landing Point slowly at less then 100 meters per second. As you get nearer to the Landing Point the automated Landing Sequence will engage and you will end up at your destination.