Oolite Bulletins

that looks nice!

It does - really impressive. It's great to see an asteroid at something beginning to approach full size.

This, though, makes me wonder if a rescaled game would need to have a different approach to asteroid mining … you might have done this already, Redspear, but if not, it seems a bit crazy to me that shooting this asteroid a few times would cause it to break up (or to vaporise altogether). Maybe, for rescaled asteroids, shooting them with ordinary lasers should do nothing except to produce a small explosion on the asteroid's surface every now and then, for visual effect only. Shooting them with mining lasers could cause a boulder or two - scaled down to ship-size - to pop off the surface, where they could be further reduced to fragments and then scooped. The original asteroid would remain where it is, unchanged.

This - I hope - wouldn't require too much rejigging of miner AI: it's still basically "shoot an asteroid until boulders appear, shoot boulders until fragments appear, scoop fragments". The boulders would have to pop reasonably far away from the asteroid surface, to avoid miners constantly colliding with the parent asteroid.

Thanks guys

Disembodied wrote:

This, though, makes me wonder if a rescaled game would need to have a different approach to asteroid mining … you might have done this already, Redspear, but if not, it seems a bit crazy to me that shooting this asteroid a few times would cause it to break up (or to vaporise altogether). Maybe, for rescaled asteroids, shooting them with ordinary lasers should do nothing except to produce a small explosion on the asteroid's surface every now and then, for visual effect only.

That's a good point and one I was reminded of upon shooting the very asteroid you see on the previous page.

A few considerations / clarifications:

• Relative to the cobra, the asteroid is actually only twice as big as before
• Asteroids needn't be solid masses of course and 'destroying' them might not be as impressive as it sounds
• Boulders are at half size and splinters at 1/3 (so that even the smallest ships can scoop them)

Boulders though make a nice 'stepping stone' between asteroids and splinters. It might be nice it any 'destroyed' asteroids simply broke up into boulders (unless hit by a missile perhaps) wheras boulders would be destroyed unless using a mining laser.

I do like your suggestion of non-mining lasers being ineffective however and it might make sense given the very high intensity, short duration damage that the mining laser can inflict. Given that asteroids are fairly big anyway there's a case for such a change to the core game. More realistic and impressive but sadly restricting a new pilot from the easiest bounties and target practice out there.

Any more discussion and we should probably switch threads but meanwhile thanks for the much appreciated feedback

Hello everyone, it's been a while!
I was debating as to whether this belonged in Screenshots or Tales from the Spaceways, eventually decided that it was mostly images and belonged here.
Anyway, I present:

"Death of a Reesdice Worker's Commuter"









I was lucky enough to be recording a mission when this happened - these are stills from my video recording.
(Video recording software: OBS Studio for Linux)

Oh, the—
(checks planetary data for Reesdice)
—humanity!

Good to see you again, Ranthe!

I just made a few screenshots one behind the other:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poU3sRDsqc4

Sneak preview of a top secret ship:

'... in the hands of an Ace, it is a killing machine!'

0.60LM - or has that been tweaked?

Cody wrote:

0.60LM - or has that been tweaked?

The additional mass of this many guns cause somewhat lower speed and turn rates, yes.

A "BattleCruiser":

These guns are two times larger and powerful ones than the others above.

Norby wrote:

Cody wrote:

0.60LM - or has that been tweaked?

The additional mass of this many guns cause somewhat lower speed and turn rates, yes.

<nods> I once had a tweaked Constrictor in my hangar (a reward from a test mission in interstellar space) on which the fore laser had been replaced by a plasma cannon (at least, I think that's what it was). With that loadout, it was a fearsomely powerful, and extremely fast, ship!

Redspear wrote:

spara wrote:

Shame, you still have to duplicate details from shipdata.plist to effectdata.plist . Granted it works, but it's a helluva lot of work and needs to be updated for every new object.

Of course, it's a fudge but once it's done...

There are some other issues too, like lighting and trying to place a background behind it.
I could tweak the effectsdata models to be more shiny (doesn't solve ambient lighting isues) or even change their textures to resemble green (or whichever) wireframes (without all the 'fiddly bits').

spara wrote:

A way to dynamically create effectdata from shipdata on the fly would be quite awesome.

Absolutely

I hate to write this but I actually worked on something completely like that. FOV is a bother though.. seems i need to enter custom coordinates for each FOV setting. been trying to use math.. no successful so far

Still tinkering. Freespace inspired HUD. Tinkering with FOV. The small model is yellow shaded and is moving like the target.

Still tinkering. Freespace inspired HUD. Tinkering with FOV. The small model is yellow shaded and is moving like the target.

I like the yellow shading looks like something from a ships database

Frame wrote:

Still tinkering. Freespace inspired HUD. Tinkering with FOV. The small model is yellow shaded and is moving like the target.

The altitude indicator on your HUD has me bemused. Don't remember seeing a main station that close to a planet. Some logical explanation, I wouldn't wonder?