Oolite Bulletins

Commander McLane wrote:

The question that springs to mind immediately is what would happen to stations and other OXP-related stuff that is deliberately placed in deep space. Suddenly you would for instance fly through a Hacker Outpost's asteroid field with mad speeds. Or what about the Tianve Pulsar? You'd get there considerably faster than now. So, basically accelerating speeds towards the outer system would partially defeat the purpose of spawning things in the outer system in the first place.

This wouldn't be an option to put into Oolite as it currently stands – as far as I can see it would require a major rebuild of the core game, with a big upscaling of star systems, placing planets etc. in actual orbits around the stars ... we'd have to assume that any locations within a system would produce a sufficient field around them to reduce ship speeds on approach.

The purpose of any such hypothetical setup would be 1) to allow large amounts of space between items of interest (stars, planets, asteroids, stations, ships etc.) to provide the sense of scale, and 2) to prevent that scale detracting from the game by producing large amounts of "dead" travel time to get anywhere. Any outer-system location would be far, far away from anything else - so the player would scoot towards it really, really fast. But the game would have to have a mechanism to slow the player down as they approached anything potentially interesting.

Disembodied wrote:

But the game would have to have a mechanism to slow the player down as they approached anything potentially interesting.

Which creates the problem of having to define what is potentially interesting. Only planet entities? Only planets and stations? Or ships as well? This would mean that with Deep Space Pirates installed you'd practically always be slowed down. Or each type of entity, even a lonely alloy that was thrown out at high speed during an explosion and is now drifting in the outer system?

Swings and Roundabouts...

Disembodied wrote:

OK, I think I see ... so if it's problematic to make distances non-linear, is it possible to make speeds non-linear instead? Make the real distances bigger, but have the maximum speeds much higher the further away the player is?

If you don't drop the maximum speed back down in the vicinity of anything interesting - and Oolite being open-ended you'd have to define "interesting" very loosely - you're getting very close to a Newtonian flight model. If you do, it's not much different to the torus drive.

Planet-witchpoint isn't too bad. 300km is traversable (especially since you won't be going as far as the planet's core...) in about 10 minutes, and some of the spacelanes are already about that short anyway.

The big problem is planet-sun. You don't want that journey to take more than about ten minutes perceived time either or sunskimming becomes too dull. But you also want the sun to look large close up, and to look relatively small from the planet, to get the sense of scale. (Even if the non-linear space trick worked for objects that large, you'd have to apply truly ridiculous amounts of scaling for this...)

(Other options which would work but only in entirely different games: don't have sunskimming as a mechanic and set the entire game in the general vicinity of the main planet; some sort of discontinuous space mechanic like jump gates or carriers or an "overworld-space" map)

cim wrote:

Other options which would work but only in entirely different games... some sort of discontinuous space mechanic like jump gates...

You mean like the jump drive in 8-bit Elite, which was nothing like the torus drive in Oolite?

Wildeblood wrote:

cim wrote:

Other options which would work but only in entirely different games... some sort of discontinuous space mechanic like jump gates...

You mean like the jump drive in 8-bit Elite, which was nothing like the torus drive in Oolite?

I don't know about nothing like. The torus drive feels to me like an adaptation of the jump drive to a non-player-centred engine.

Commander McLane wrote:

Which creates the problem of having to define what is potentially interesting. Only planet entities? Only planets and stations? Or ships as well? This would mean that with Deep Space Pirates installed you'd practically always be slowed down. Or each type of entity, even a lonely alloy that was thrown out at high speed during an explosion and is now drifting in the outer system?

I'd make pretty much everything "interesting". But I don't think, in this hypothetical new game, "Deep Space Pirates" would have any meaning. When the player was out deep in real game space, it would be so deep that the chance of meeting anything at all would be practically nil. If under such circumstances you were so freakishly lucky to find a lone alloy plate, then I suppose that would count as "interesting"! But usually, encounters would only happen in busy parts of the system - which would tend to be in towards the inner planets, and in orbits around outer planets, moons etc. I should stress, this would be a very different game, with a very different set of scales, to the current Oolite. A rock hermit, for example, would probably be tens of kilometres in diameter. Tiny on a planetary scale, but very big when you're up close to it in a ship: but unless you knew it was there (or thereabouts) in advance, you'd be very unlikely to find it. Everything - except the ships - would have to be scaled up enormously.

cim wrote:

If you don't drop the maximum speed back down in the vicinity of anything interesting - and Oolite being open-ended you'd have to define "interesting" very loosely - you're getting very close to a Newtonian flight model. If you do, it's not much different to the torus drive.

As above, I'd be in favour of a very loose definition of "interesting" (and for things like debris, I'd suggest only maybe a partial slowing down, not masslocking or anything like that). I think, regarding the torus, that Oolite's version works very much like my memory of the Spectrum version of Elite. As far as I remember the BBC and Commodore versions just made a whole series of little jumps - essentially the same thing as the torus, with some frames taken out.

This would be a different game: it would probably require some form of long-range scanner, which might hint at the presence of "items of interest" in the far-away distance, sort-of-thataway, so players could steer towards them (or try to avoid them). Maybe in such a game, masslocking wouldn't be such an issue: space would be less crowded, and with multiple destinations per system, and a long-long-range scanner, there wouldn't be the same on-lane/off-lane problems. At the moment, masslocking can be avoided totally by taking the off-lane route - which is dull and requires no skill. But with a long-long-range "there might be something out there in sort of that direction" sensor, players could use their skill and judgement to either try to avoid other ships, or to hunt them down. NPC ships would of course be able to attempt the same thing. So the torus drive could be kept, and indeed given to NPCs, and would work at higher and higher speeds the further out from the star the ship was. Sunskimming might become an issue, true - but players could opt to go gas-giant skimming instead. Being further out (probably), they'd be quicker to reach.

These are just a series of idle thoughts, on my part! Basically I'm just trying to imagine a game that has the fun of Oolite and could also combine the good bits from Frontier - the scale, the functioning solar systems etc. These are definitely not proposals which could be easily adapted for Oolite 1.78 ...

Disembodied wrote:

Basically I'm just trying to imagine a game that has the fun of Oolite and could also combine the good bits from Frontier - the scale, the functioning solar systems etc.

Getting the right blend of space sim and space game would be a very hard trick to pull off - but it would be interesting!

El Viejo wrote:

Getting the right blend of space sim and space game would be a very hard trick to pull off - but it would be interesting!

Absolutely. The game is the important part: the "sim" bit should just be for ambience only. Simulate stuff that's fun: if it's not fun, or doesn't add to the fun, it shouldn't be in a game!

A game I've played briefly, Vega Strike, had a drive similar to Oolite's Torus Drive, but it had a gradual ramp-up and ramp-down based on nearby objects and their gravitational field. It also had two different settings for this drive; one manual steering and one where the drive was engaged in addition to an autopilot based around planets.

Perhaps a similar arrangement would be effective? A possible third option would be a sleep-drive, similar to the handwavium surrounding insta-docking.

cim wrote:

The real weirdness starts if you have a binary planet system. Let's say that there's a moon in lowish orbit. From a long distance, the two appear to be independent objects, separated by tens of times their own radii. Up close, though, they're nearly touching. That's not what you'd expect to see as you get closer. The angular distortion isn't between the centre of the objects - it's between their edges.

Would it help if "low orbits" were prevented from being too low? The Earth-moon system is (at least in our current limited experience) probably the closest, given the relative sizes. The moon (356,700 km distant) is roughly ten times further away than geostationary orbit (35,786 km) ... that's 56 times the planetary radius (6,357 km), more or less. And the moon is very big, compared to the size of the Earth, for a satellite - just under a third of the radius. Most moons would be a lot smaller (probably).

Disembodied wrote:

Would it help if "low orbits" were prevented from being too low? The Earth-moon system is (at least in our current limited experience) probably the closest, given the relative sizes. The moon (356,700 km distant) is roughly ten times further away than geostationary orbit (35,786 km) ... that's 56 times the planetary radius (6,357 km), more or less. And the moon is very big, compared to the size of the Earth, for a satellite - just under a third of the radius. Most moons would be a lot smaller (probably).

The use of the graphical over-scaling is to make the system look bigger than it really is. Making the system actually be bigger makes it unnecessary. 50x planetary radius is about twice as far as the default sun/planet distance, so pretty much every current planet-adding OXP would be placing them too close - and that's with Oolite's tiny planets, at that. (But yes, having done that you could use the scaling to make the system look even bigger)

Disembodied wrote:

So the torus drive could be kept, and indeed given to NPCs

Of course, to give it to NPCs, there'd need to be a way for a formation of NPCs (pirate pack, trader+escorts) to declare each other "uninteresting". The current problem with giving NPCs a torus drive is that they'd end up in a big mutual masslock that crawls down the spacelane.

So, what about this:
1) Change the torus drive so that it projects a "torus field" out to some distance (say 5km)
2) Set up a protocol where ships within that field can choose to avoid masslocking the projector by matching heading and speed (probably the player would need a HUD indicator for this: perhaps target the leader and press 'j' to bring it up).
3) Activate the torus drive, and anything within the field gets dragged along with the ship
4) The torus field is an extremely bright emitter. At 5km radius you'd be able to pick it out at a substantial distance (especially since it would be moving). Handwave this as non-visual spectra, so that your ship's computer can filter it out when you're inside a field and want to see where you're going, and perhaps colour it to approximate the mass inside the bubble.
5) With the torus drive on, you can't steer. Torus speed is tied to the slowest ship in the bubble.
6) Scale the planet up a little (not too much, or texturing becomes tricky), extend the spacelane accordingly, move the sun to a larger distance too. The spacelane is mostly going to be at torus speeds through the boring bits, so it can be longer safely. And if everyone gets torus, the interesting bits can find you...

Then the AIs would all need adjusting to cope:
- police patrol up and down the spacelane. Space is big: you can't patrol much of it effectively.
- traders therefore generally stick to the lane, often bunching up into convoys that will fit within a single field. An ambushed convoy will act as a group (so the player can get a nice early game survivability by joining up to a convoy as an informal escort)
- pirates will start out a little way off-lane, but dive in to intercept ships moving in on torus drive. If you go off-lane, the pirates will preferentially go for you, because there's much less risk of meeting police. Likely tactic: fast interceptors like Sidewinders and Mambas fly in first to masslock you, and that lets a separate bubble with the cargo extractors catch up. Pirate groups would probably have a mass range that they considered suitable: too small and it's probably got no cargo worth stealing; too large and it probably includes a huge crowd of escorts. Once they've cleaned up a trader group, they'd flee off-lane again, to stop the police finding them.
- bounty hunters might act like police, or might intentionally go off-lane to lure in pirates.
- rock hermits go off-lane. You'd probably have no stations within scanner range of the centre of the lane, unless someone was intentionally trying to block traffic (customs stops OXP?). But you could find stations by following other people.

(It'd be a real pain in the neck to code it all, but you could theoretically OXP most of this up in current trunk, if you were careful to keep within the 10^6.5 precision sphere)

cim wrote:

So, what about this:
1) Change the torus drive so that it projects a "torus field" out to some distance (say 5km)
2) Set up a protocol where ships within that field can choose to avoid masslocking the projector by matching heading and speed (probably the player would need a HUD indicator for this: perhaps target the leader and press 'j' to bring it up).
3) Activate the torus drive, and anything within the field gets dragged along with the ship
4) The torus field is an extremely bright emitter. At 5km radius you'd be able to pick it out at a substantial distance (especially since it would be moving). Handwave this as non-visual spectra, so that your ship's computer can filter it out when you're inside a field and want to see where you're going, and perhaps colour it to approximate the mass inside the bubble.
5) With the torus drive on, you can't steer. Torus speed is tied to the slowest ship in the bubble.
6) Scale the planet up a little (not too much, or texturing becomes tricky), extend the spacelane accordingly, move the sun to a larger distance too. The spacelane is mostly going to be at torus speeds through the boring bits, so it can be longer safely. And if everyone gets torus, the interesting bits can find you...

That sounds potentially promising - although I'd change 3) to

3) Activate the torus drive, and anything within the field with an active engine gets dragged along with the ship

Or maybe - to avoid ships dragging each other around willy-nilly - maybe torus drives could operate at some "frequency" or other: if ships have tuned in to "share" their frequency, then they can convoy without mass-locking each other (but still masslock, and are masslocked by, non-tuned ships). There could be squillions of potential frequencies so you have to make a deliberate choice to be part of a convoy. If you catch up with, and masslock, a slow ship (or are overhauled by a faster one), the polite thing to do would be to tune in to a common frequency - a standard "overtaking" band reserved for this purpose - and continue on your way. NOT allowing someone out of masslock would be a pretty clear signal of potential hostility. The police might do it, to give a ship the once-over, ditto for bounty hunters ... the occasional trader might be a bit dozy and fail to retune quite as quickly as you'd like, perhaps, too, just to keep players on their toes. Pirates, obviously, would use the masslock as an offensive weapon.

I like the non-steering and visual element to the torus, too ...

There would need to be big changes to ship behaviour, right enough.

Disembodied wrote:

Or maybe - to avoid ships dragging each other around willy-nilly - maybe torus drives could operate at some "frequency" or other

That was roughly what I was getting at with point 2) - if you don't all have synced heading and speed, the drive won't activate. Line up and the handwavium emissions from the drives are polarised so you don't get interference. You can't drag anyone along against their will.

I'd probably make any object mass-lock if it's inside the bubble, even a cargo pod, to stop them being dragged along. Space/time resolution is too poor to do proper collision detection at torus speeds - you can fly right through an asteroid easily enough - so this would nicely conceal that bug. The deceleration on mass-lock would have to be a lot faster, too.

cim wrote:

The deceleration on mass-lock would have to be a lot faster, too.

Or - and this may just be complicating things further - perhaps the masslock deceleration could begin when the object is further away? At scanner range + X the torus speed begins to fall, until finally bump! you're masslocked. So torus bubbles could try to steer round each other (or not, if they're seeking to masslock you).