crazy idea: artificial planet ring

[ClymAngus]

Ok taking the taxi to real street here:

We need a big fat object (rough dimension) kind of domino sizing, slap it in rough orbit see if it causes things to blow up, if not string 2-3 together.

To make this happen someone has to bite the bullet and evolve this up.

[Switeck]

Biggest ship I know of is the generation ships (OXP)...try spawning them near a planet.

[Thargoid]

Ships right near the "surface" of a planet are fine (that's basically how Planetfall works). However ships inside a planet will just go kaboom. So to do this the ship itself would need to be positioned so that it doesn't do that.

But as to whether such a ship could encompass a planet (in terms of collision detection, even if the ring is hollow and no entity actually is sub-surface) is an interesting question. Might have to mock something up as a test perhaps...

Also as noted the sudden appearance/disappearance at range due to how Oolite draws things could be an immersion-breaker...

[Mauiby de Fug]

I was about to say that the whole thing with subentities not showing up at a distance could surely be dealt with by just using a series of whole ships, carefully placed and probably with a null AI, except it just dawned upon me that it might be a bit tricky trying to place them adjacent to each other without collision detection deciding that they're crashing into each other...

[Thargoid]

OK I've got a string of 1km long (and 100m square) entities encircling the main planet working. Each is a separate entity, but the general concept works.

At the moment I'm trying to get them oriented perpendicular to the planet (so they form a ring of sorts) but the code isn't playing ball for some reason. But doing it as a lot of seperate entities works.

[Thargoid]

OK, something like this?



That's just with a simple placeholder rectangular plain block. But as it's done with individual elements, if we have a few different ones of the same length and roughly same size but modelled and skinned differently, each ring could be different by letting Oolite pick by role...

This could be a fun idea - but now I'm going to bed.

[Cody]

Wow!! The TMA... one step ahead!

[JD]

That already looks absolutely brilliant. Does the entity count not weigh down the game performance?

[Thargoid]

That particular example adds 310 entities overall (the number of entities spawned depends on the planetary radius - it always spawns 1000m above the surface). On my Aspire One netbook it doesn't seem to affect it at all, although other peoples mileage may vary.

I'll package things up tonight and let people test it.

[Eric Walch]

And when you want to do this perfect, I assume the ring must be over the planet equator. I think the planet rotates around the vectorUp axis so that should become the axis to align the ring around.

Does the entity count not weigh down the game performance?

Probably not that much. It helps when the objects are unPiloted because that the collision avoidance code is only fully calculated for piloted objects. And having the same texture for all elements also will help.

When you press shift-F you will see a p- and a c- number. The p- number is the number of object-pairs for which a distance between the objects is calculated on each frame. The c- number is the amount of pairs a more thorough collision avoidance calculation takes place. Om my computer the p- number must raise to over the 10000 for starting to see any effect on performance. It would be interesting to see the effect on this numbers for the ring.

[pagroove]

Wow Thargoid Just Wow!. That looks good! Now we need some good background story behind it. It will need a home planet as this will be the 'only' ring in the eight. So it will be well known. Maybe other oxp's can step in also and make some 'hotel stations' All those guests can't be stationed at the surface.

I opt for some texture work If you want. But be free to seek others to.

Do you have further ideas with it? (such as a race track of some sort?). Maybe you can place a start of 'stargate' like rings on the objects so the ships have to fly over it. It is a sort of Ooonianapolis then. But we can also have other ideas like huge solar panels on it.

Anyone has other cool ideas with it?

[Disembodied]

You could always give the backstory a bodyswerve, as it were, and just claim that nobody knows who built it ... if you put it around a human colonial world, it might have just been there when they arrived, all empty and full of potential. Maybe there's an archaeological investigation still ongoing, and rumours of occasional disappearances. It also wouldn't need to be around a top-TL system, either.

[Cody]

You could always give the backstory a bodyswerve, as it were, and just claim that nobody knows who built it

I kinda like that idea, D... hmm.

[pagroove]

You could always give the backstory a bodyswerve, as it were, and just claim that nobody knows who built it

I kinda like that idea, D... hmm.

Could also be good source material for future missions.
But may I suggest to place the ring around a planet in a galaxy where there are not or not much missions yet?

[Disembodied]

Could also be good source material for future missions.
But may I suggest to place the ring around a planet in a galaxy where there are not or not much missions yet?

I'd suggest somewhere early, myself ... Galaxy 1 or 2. You could give new players a sense of what might be out there, and have a range of missions based on the player's level – so there could be a few "deliver some archaeological supplies"-type missions early on and maybe a big "woah momma"-type for players who've gone round the eight.