Oolite Bulletins

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 1:47 pm**

Thanks Astrobe.

I'll check it out some time soon.

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 2:03 pm**

Cody wrote:
Norby wrote:
toggle offline by the player using underscore key to enable Supercruise
That way would be best - some minor prep is good.

Moreover in this case the first way is good also, you can toggle between yellow and green alert with your weapons key.
Now I am thinking on a dual solution which complements each other. I wrote these before the "torus-2" post of Disembodied, this is why contain both simiar and different ideas.

1. Cruise (7x)

Redirects energy from weapons, shields and maneuvering thrusters to main engines.
When you toggle weapons off the maxSpeed of your ship jump to 7x but suffer the followings:
- must hold down speedup key much longer than usual as spool-up to reach cruise speed,
- shields start depleting proportionally with speed,
- drain energy if no shields left and slow back to normal (1/7 of current max.) if energy is low,
- controls slow back to normal speed so must accelerate again after any direction adjustment,
- collision prevention slow also to normal speed if anything is near in front of your ship,
- red alert slow you also so must use injectors for escape.

This help to new players also due to not need Injectors.
Injectors can reduce the spinup time by using fuel but do nothing at cruise speed.

If the list sounds too strict for the benefit then equipment upgrades can reduce some drawbacks.
For example a tool which allow usage in red alert can help out of trouble if fuel run out, but this change the combat odds so should not be available at start imho.
Another equipment can allow Injectors to add +7x speed to cruise and reach 14x in total, consuming fuel at normal rate.

2. Supercruise (32x)

Faster and still possible to activate near friendly ships with the following rules:
- clear all shields and no restore at stop so you risk instant lost of injectors in a surprise attack, although no energy drain at least,
- requires Deep Space Pirates OXP to off-lane tactics be less safe,
- need preparations: toggle weapons offline and turn to a proper direction,
- green alert appear only if head to a planet, sun or a beacon on advanced compass,
- controls locked: must turn off with "j" or slowdown key before any direction change,
- get masslock when a ship appear on scanner, but alert stay green if not in front of you,
- unusable in red alert,
- speed limit 7x until scanner is not empty (the trick for this is change maxSpeed to 7/32 temporary),
- replace Torus completely, so no green alert at all with online weapons or without destination.

In a dangerous system better if use cruise only to keep shields up. You will lose all shields even if activated in empty space so should reduce the attraction of the off-lane detour.

If weapons offline and player change the target on compass then possible to auto turn the ship to the selected object. So what the player must do:
- turn off weapons,
- select target on compass (or turn the ship manually),
- wait a bit until steering is finished and alert become green,
- press "j".

Advanced compass has a "Target" mode also, if you press compass selection key until it shown then possible to ignite Supercruise to the direction of your current target. If it is on your scanner then the collision prevention keep alert yellow but Telescope OXP demonstrate how to put target box on objects outside scanner range. This way could allow Supercruise to any locations.

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 2:26 pm**

Disembodied wrote:
Important features of the torus-2
Speed: 2.8lm, for all ships (subject to testing, of course)

10-second spool-up time required to activate: ship must fly straight and level (perhaps below redline speeds? Or even remain stationary?)

No manoeuvring is possible, as per Wildeblood's Bullet Drive

Shields and weapons are automatically disabled

Encountering another ship results in temporary "masslock" for both ships - both are forced to use manoeuvre drives only (including injectors, if they have them). Shields and weapons come back online automatically. Ships masslocked by other ships can choose to reactivate their torus-2 drives if they want to (subject to dropping shields, deactivating weapons, and flying straight/sitting still for 10 seconds: so not advisable if hostile ships are present)

Masslocking by planet/star is the same as at present: ships cannot use the torus-2 within range of a planetary or stellar gravity well

In my previous post I wrote 2 plans due to I see two problems:

1. On-lane masslocks, this is where your torus-2, my Cruise or Astrobe's surjectors can help. We surely will discuss further about the differences.

2. Travel to far in empty space like to sun or other planets, Supercruise is a good name imho which help in this case. I think Torus originally made for this, so you should leave it as is, or are you other ideas?

Astrobe wrote:
when you switch off your weapons and engage injectors, you get a X4 base speed bonus (a bit more than half injector speed) but you don't burn any fuel. The drawback is that your shields go down and your instruments (i.e., your HUD) go down as well.

Thank you for the implemented way 2: injectors without fuel usage, now I can focus on others: my Cruise plan use way 3 (dynamic maxSpeed) and Supercruise use way 1 (Torus without masslock).

Are there anybody who can experiment with way 4 using velocity?

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 2:28 pm**

Just a general comment. Draining shields is very dangerous from the player perspective and as such any speed up based on that should only be for emergency situations. Another point from a player point of view. The reason for skipping the lane is mostly bore, so making things outside the lane more dangerous is not really helping here.

Here's a simple idea that I'm about 99% sure is buried inside one of the ideas already presented here. Apologies and kudos to the individual responsible in advance if this has been already been mentioned.

In code yellow, ships can torus twice their normal speed. And on green, back to normal business. If some penalty is needed, then heat the cabin when torusing on yellow. Because of friction caused by gravity or something. Torus only drops out on red.

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 3:42 pm**

Norby wrote:
Travel to far in empty space like to sun or other planets, Supercruise is a good name imho which help in this case. I think Torus originally made for this, so you should leave it as is, or are you other ideas?

A good point … one advantage here is that this sort of long-distance travel isn't something that the player will do very often, or that standard NPCs will do at all: a player-centric solution could be used here (e.g. allowing the torus drive to reach higher speeds the longer it is active, as at present).

spara wrote:
Draining shields is very dangerous from the player perspective and as such any speed up based on that should only be for emergency situations.

True … this aspect would need to be tested. It might be enough just to make the player have to sit stationary for a ~10-second spool-up in order to activate the torus. I think it's important that the torus shouldn't be used to escape from combat, and that trying to do so would be almost certainly fatal (unless, for example, the hostile ships are currently moving away from you, fast: a situation like that might just give you enough time to activate the torus and flee the scene).

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 4:19 pm**

Incidentally, there's an experimental NPC torus implementation - with a significantly extended space lane - in my Altmap test OXP. There are trade convoys which go down the lane to the station - sufficiently wide so that they probably won't run into each other - and there are police checkpoints every so often down the lane (more so in high security systems) which send torus-speed patrols to check out ships passing by. (I didn't particularly like the overall effect, which is why I didn't develop it any further there)

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 7:56 pm**

If this were a real-world problem (and players weren't the only ones with a torus drive) how might it be handled.
Perhaps it is analagous to passport control at an airport, although thankfully not that tedious...

Where there are many people trying to pass through the same place, a queue might form. If there is adequate control then multiple queues might be available.

A sufficiently widened space lane simulates this fairly well but we then have less encounters with pirates and police as well as with traders. There may be a simple way around this...

System government could be used to determine both number of traders and width of lane.

For example, a corporate state might have lots of traders but also a very wide lane.
A system described as an anarchy on the other hand might have very few traders but a narrow space lane.

The following presents a possible model, where the value of 1 is equal to the current game standard:

Corporate - lane width x 2.4, traders x 1
Democracy - lane width x 2.2, traders x 0.9.
Confederacy - lane width x 2, traders x 0.8
Communist - lane width x 1.8, traders x 0.7
Dictatorship - lane width x 1.6, traders x 0.6
Multi-Gov. - lane width x 1.4, traders x 0.5
Feudal - lane width x 1.2, traders x 0.4
Anarchy - lane width x 1, traders x 0.3

In terms of pirate encounters, the safer systems are now safer and the dangerous systems could remain dangerous.
The more perilous the system, the more likely you are too be mass-locked and the more likely that it will be a pirate encounter. Having tested a lane width of x 2 with traffic of x 1 I can say that you would still encounter the occasional trader.

What about police? Well, they would still be responding in appropriate numbers to the pirate threat present in the system (according to government type), so the pirate to police ratio encountered remains the same. This could make things easier for the fugitive player but safer systems would probably be more likely to have police stationed at the witch point. Police presence could, however, probably benefit from a slight boost in such systems.

Once you have a variable lane-width, all that is required to significantly reduce 'crawl-by' mass-locks, is to reduce the number of traders in the more dangerous systems accordingly.

What is the current population model here?
Do high levels of pirates require high numbers of traders?
Could it instead be reasoned that less trade makes piracy more appealing (demand is now high and supply low)?

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 9:40 pm**

Somehow i sense a paradox somewhere,
less traders means less masslock
less traders also means less pirates?
so reducing the number of traders would reduce the numbers of encounters and would reduce masslocking resulting
in faster flying but less pirate encounters which would result in less excitement for those looking for excitement?

if we look at current airplanes, they are assigned certain routes to an airport.
Certain system could have parallel spacelanes, for example a large high techlevel could have a 6 x 6 grid of spacelanes,
6 layers of 6 parallel spacelanes
your assigned to travel in a certain spacelane to the station/planet , in the other spacelanes traders, convoys etc can travel at there own speed to the station/planet. masslocking would not occur unless something is happening in your spacelane

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 10:11 pm**

cbr wrote:
Somehow i sense a paradox somewhere,
less traders means less masslock
less traders also means less pirates?

As I was asking at the end of my post, need that be the case?

If economic wealth = succesful trade then...
...does the number of traders equal those required for said trade plus the amount lost to piracy?
I suspect it would be more complicated but that's why I queried the current model.

In either case (the model I proposed or that in the game at present), if the ratio of pirates to traders is not higher in the more dangerous systems then you would need many more mass-locks to simulate the supposed greater danger (or else nearly every trader would be in a convoy; escorts not counting as they typically have no cargo capacity).

True, trader numbers might be dropping all the time due to piracy but just how fast is this process happening?
If it's happening quickly then there must be quick replenishment of traders or pirate numbers would be expected to drop as well.

Realism's complicated

but thankfully we don't need a true simulation.

cbr wrote:
so reducing the number of traders would reduce the numbers of encounters and would reduce masslocking resulting
in faster flying but less pirate encounters which would result in less excitement for those looking for excitement?

Not quite.
Less traders = less mass-locks but no less pirate encounters.
Wider lanes however would reduce pirate encounters, that's why I'm suggesting that lane width be variable.

The values listed above are just for an example, the really dangerous systems could have lane widths slightly below 1, or there could be a less linear scaling of lane width between governments, there are many possible values that could be used to create a similar effect.

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2016 10:32 pm**

Redspear wrote:
In either case (the model I proposed or that in the game at present), if the ratio of pirates to traders is not higher in the more dangerous systems then you would need many more mass-locks to simulate the supposed greater danger (or else nearly every trader would be in a convoy; escorts not counting as they typically have no cargo capacity).

Unless more traders were Anacondas of course

Actually, that presents (yet) another idea (#406 or something

)
Why not just make the trading ships be the freighters? (e.g. Anaconda, Python, Boa)
With the possible exception of the Boa, they're all fairly slow and even an Adder can compete (just about) with a Boa for speed.

Although it may seem like another player-centric concession, other ships could also be traders but their chance of filling such a role could be significantly reduced. The life of a lone-wolf trader in a one man ship is a dangerous one...

Is there a simpler implementation of reducing frustration from masslock without dipping into the source? (...or hitting the sauce for that matter

)
Just a few lines of a shipdata-overrides.plist?

There's a challenge for anyone: suggest a simpler fix than that! (whilst staying on the 'space lane'

)

Posted: **Mon Aug 22, 2016 5:50 am**

A couple of ideas to encourage driving on a lane.

1. The space is full of micro particles and flying at torus speed is highly dangerous without shielding. However, due to the constant traffic the lanes are clean and basically safe for torus driving. Flying at extreme speeds (torus) outside the beaten track makes the front shield quickly deplete and later on causes hull damage.

2. Torus enhances gravitational pull of the great bodies in system and for the maximum torus effect the ship has to aim straight to a planet/sun. This effect should be gradual.

Combine these two and there is a good reason for staying on lane.

Posted: **Mon Aug 22, 2016 7:53 am**

spara wrote:
A couple of ideas to encourage driving on a lane.

I like the 'gravity well' idea but the other one could be problematic.
Suppose a player is headed for the planet and then decides they want to sun-skim. Unless they headed back to the witchpoint first, they'd be off-lane.

Thinking more on the ship role weighting idea, this could actually make more sense than the current state of affairs.
As it stands, you're much more likely to find an asp or a fer de lance as a courier than you are an adder or a moray; in fact the asp and fdl are by far the most common as couriers.

Well, that's probably because they're the best suited, right? However the adder and the moray both have two very significant advantages over them:
1. Much cheaper
2. Much more readily available

So the asp could be for the experienced, successful parcel courier and the fdl for the equivelant in terms of passenger delivery. It seems reasonable that their might be more less experienced, less expensive alternatives such as the adder (parcel) and the moray (passenger). Although the moray is no slower than the fdl (like the mk III it got a speed boost for oolite), the adder is much, much slower than the asp.

There might not be 'speed savings' everywhere but there should be lots of potential to 'trim the fat'.
I'll think some more and then make an oxp demo.

Posted: **Mon Aug 22, 2016 4:10 pm**

Redspear wrote:
spara wrote:
A couple of ideas to encourage driving on a lane.
I like the 'gravity well' idea but the other one could be problematic.
Suppose a player is headed for the planet and then decides they want to sun-skim. Unless they headed back to the witchpoint first, they'd be off-lane.

Well, some core solution would be nice for preventing the abusive use of torus. With the current design the only way to do this might just be combining the good old player centric desing with the current non-player centric design. Meaning some form of DeepSpace pirates.

1. Fly the lane and it's like it's now.
2. Fly off the lane and get random encounters.

Point two could be done intelligently so that just off the lane the probability is higher (more pirates lurking for stray sheep) and the farther you go, the probability decreases.

Posted: **Mon Aug 22, 2016 4:37 pm**

Redspear wrote:
Is there a simpler implementation of reducing frustration from masslock without dipping into the source? (...or hitting the sauce for that matter )
Just a few lines of a shipdata-overrides.plist?

There's a challenge for anyone: suggest a simpler fix than that! (whilst staying on the 'space lane' )

I already fixed that.
I called it "surjectors".

The thing is scary enough so you don't need to sprinkle extra pirates here and there or make lanes larger or narrower or whatever. And it's scary enough for normal people (that is, NPCs) not to use it. But it let you overtake the slow traders in a crowded safe system, without increasing your credits/minute more than necessary.

You can combine injectors and Torus by modifying line 44 of script.js:

Code: Select all

self.injectorSpeedFactor=4;

With:

Code: Select all

if(player.alertMassLocked)
   self.injectorSpeedFactor=7; /* EDIT: default injectorSpeedFactor is 7, not 1 */
else
    self.injectorrSpeedFactor=32;

I think that just injector speed without burning the precious fuel should be fair and believable.

Posted: **Mon Aug 22, 2016 4:49 pm**

Astrobe, could you give a link to surjectors? I'm sure it's somewhere, but I'm not able to track it down.

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