Oolite Bulletins

matt634 wrote:

Very cool building..... love the idea of adding dockable cities to the already existing planets. They would make great targets for raiding and some should be well defended by plasma cannons and/or missiles.

And fighters of course

Eric Walch wrote:

matt634 wrote:

Very cool building..... love the idea of adding dockable cities to the already existing planets. They would make great targets for raiding and some should be well defended by plasma cannons and/or missiles.

And fighters of course

Has anyone already thought about how to put the buildings upright on the surface?

Disembodied wrote:

Along the lines of "less is more", perhaps it might be an idea to reduce the number of multi-planet systems... just a feeling, but it might be better if these were occasional "wow!" places to visit, rather than just commonplace additions which players might become blasé about. Maybe it should only apply to Rich systems; or even Rich systems above a certain TL and population limit? (They could be the only ones who could afford to sustain multi-planet colonisation, with all the extra station upkeep, police patrols etc.)

If there were only a handful of such systems -- say, two or three -- across each galaxy, each one could be hard-coded with interesting "special" locations, where unique items, missions, cargos, ship-types etc. could be found. With long travel times I think a lot of players will have to be given a big incentive to make the effort. Otherwise I think there's a risk of a bit of initial sightseeing, followed by a lot of "nah... not this time".

This is not to disparage the main idea! But if players are asked to put in a lot of effort then there would have to be relatively big payoffs. "Wow!" is, in itself, a big payoff: the spectacular and the strange have a big appeal. But asking them (us!) to trek across a system to find cheap ores or alloys or gemstones probably isn't enough to do it more than once or twice.

Some possible "special" places could be:

• Scientific/technical outpost (where they look for volunteers to test new equipment/weapons/ships)
• Prison planet
• Archaeological dig site (requiring specialised equipment, and shipping out antiquities)
• Anti-Thargoid early warning station
• Breakaway/rebel colony
• Duelling zone
• Religious cult HQ
• Interdicted world (plagued by Von Neumann machines or runaway nanotech)
• Other...

• Mining sites, including Cloud-cities at gas giants
• Planets, moons that need surveying, scanning, for natural resource exploitation, maybe in competition with others, stake claiming.
• Rescue operations, salvage operations from planets used for nuclear bomb tests etc.
• Help Navy with Thargoid eradication, colonization attempts on worlds inhabitable to Thargoids but not to GalCorp species.
• Yet more others ...

Lestradae wrote:

Bit more difficult for the main planet, though, but using something along the lines of pwm "planet radius" "planet radius" "planet radius" (in "metres" times 10 for some reason, methinks) you should get a positioning in a 3D diagonal from the main planets core.

this.shipSpawned = function()
{
this.ship.setPosition(system.mainPlanet.position.subtract(this.ship.orientation.vectorForward().direction().multiply(system.mainPlanet.radius * 2)))
}

this.shipSpawned = function()
{
  let targetVector = this.ship.position.subtract(system.mainPlanet.position)
  let angle = this.ship.heading.angleTo(targetVector)
  let cross = this.ship.heading.cross(targetVector).direction()
   // align the heading to the targetVector
  this.ship.setOrientation(this.rotateQ(this.ship.orientation, cross, -angle))
}

Commander McLane wrote:

Just a humble remark, although it will cause a lot of extra trouble for the positioning of buildings:

Have you considered that planets usually are rotating? This means positioning a ground structure at a fixed point on a planet will not give any realistic impression at all, even if it has the correct outbound orientation. The planet will turn away under it, while the structure remains fixed.

So for a realistic visual impression the buildings will have to move in a circular orbit, a few meters above the planet's surface. And of course constantly change their orientation in the process.

To make things even more complicated: Depending on their latitude on the planet's surface, they will have to rotate on their lines of latitude, not just on the equator or any meridian. Therefore a building close to the pole will go in a very small circle (a building exactly on the pole will just turn around itself), while a building on the equator will go the biggest possible circle (equal to the planet's diameter).

And as if this all wasn't enough, it gets even worse: If we are talking about textured planets (like in System_Redux), we have on top of that to deal with the fact that the rotational axis of Oolite's planets it not related to the poles defined by the texture. So the optical north and south pole (which are easily identifiable on at least some of the textures), are wandering randomly over the planet, instead of the planet turning around them.

A lot of work to do, in order to make ground structures realistic and believable.

Kaks wrote:

nope, they do rotate, albeit slowly... Even though you could reposition the structure using javascript & a timer in the oxp, I don't think there's a way of getting the rotation speed & planetary axis position from within javascript...

What about having floating cities inside the atmosphere? Kind of goes round this problem, but will have to be used very sparingly, can't expect every planet to have them, and having more than 3 or four in a single planet might be overegging it...