Oolite Bulletins

I've played for some weeks and discovered that I hardly ever see any ship when move towards the sun or rock hermis. In different versions of elite there were lots of ships almost in any place of space.
I expected some ambushes near the rock hermit but almost always there is just miner.

What is the reasom of such implementation ?

Mad Hollander wrote:

I've played for some weeks and discovered that I hardly ever see any ship when move towards the sun or rock hermis. In different versions of elite there were lots of ships almost in any place of space.
I expected some ambushes near the rock hermit but almost always there is just miner.

What is the reasom of such implementation ?

Efficiency. The original 8-bit Elites were player-centred: if it wasn't near you, it didn't exist. So wherever you went the game engine could put up some ships in front of you and discard the ones you left behind.

Oolite is not player-centred. Every ship in the entire system is simulated whether you're watching it or not. So the numbers need to be kept down for low-end systems.

There are several OXPs which will add ships elsewhere:
- Pirate Coves: sometimes the rock hermit ambushes you
- Deep Space Pirates: what it says on the tin
- Switeck's Shipping: among other things, adds ships to the witchpoint-sun route
- Total Patrol: adds police ships to the witchpoint-sun route
...I've probably forgotten some others.

We're also working on various efficiency improvements to the game engine, which should allow it to simulate many more ships at once. The next version will run significantly faster than 1.76 does, though there's still plenty of room for improvements.

cim wrote:

Oolite is not player-centred. Every ship in the entire system is simulated whether you're watching it or not. So the numbers need to be kept down for low-end systems.

We're also working on various efficiency improvements to the game engine, which should allow it to simulate many more ships at once. The next version will run significantly faster than 1.76 does, though there's still plenty of room for improvements.

Is it possible for the game engine to decide whether the system its running on is capable of having more? Perhaps it could look at the number of processors you have. For example I have eight on my machine!!

- Deep Space Pirates by Eric Walch
- Total Patrol by Cmdr. McLane
- Sun skimmers by Dr. Nil

JazHaz wrote:

Is it possible for the game engine to decide whether the system its running on is capable of having more? Perhaps it could look at the number of processors you have. For example I have eight on my machine!!

While Oolite is technically a multi-threaded application, almost all the heavy work takes place in a single main thread, so that won't help you much. (Also, with the variety of OS and hardware platforms Oolite runs on, probably not reliably)

At the moment neither the system populator nor the AI framework are ideal for this sort of customisation, either. I have outline ideas on how to improve these, but there is a lot of preparatory work to be done first (so it won't be for 1.77/8).

Mad Hollander wrote:

I've played for some weeks and discovered that I hardly ever see any ship when move towards the sun or rock hermis.

In addition to all the OXPs recommended in this thread, your observation is also not quite true. In many systems you'll find a rock hermit between the planet and the sun, sometimes even more than one. And this is in "vanilla" Oolite, without OXPs. Thus it may be worthwhile for you to check out the planet-sun-route as well. Over time you'll also see some traders on that route, who after launching from the main station are heading for the sun to fuel up, instead of jumping to the next system immediately.

In addition to above, do planets in Oolite launch a few shuttles. And those go to the nearest station. That means that when you have an oxp that adds extra planets without stations of their own (most planets), you often will meet a shuttle when flying from the main station to that planet.

Okay, I agree that this sounds like a bug, and this phenomena won't happen anymore in the next official release. Or was it already fixed in 1.76?

The distance between the planet and sun tends to be considerably greater than the distance between the planet and witchpoint. If you have FarSuns OXP (or similar) installed, that sun distance is increased to 3x that!

You're likely to not be directly along the center of the planet<->sun route because the planet and sun aren't point-sources like the witchpoint buoy is, so you might miss a ship or 2 along the planet<->sun route...or at least miss an asteroid, as these seem to be spread in a larger area from the route.

So even if the planet<->sun route had equal numbers of ships and rock hermits as the witchpoint<->planet route, it would seem far more empty.

But the witchpoint<->sun route is even more empty, because the only ships along that route are the ones from the witchpoint that head to the sun, scoop fuel, and then jump out. You have to chase them down from the witchpoint, because going the other way will probably cause you to miss a few.

Even Deep Space Pirates OXP doesn't make everywhere else seem less empty than these routes. I often have to travel for 1 minute on torus drive to encounter a single asteroid or pirate added by Deep Space Pirates.

Go to Atriso. It is south of Quitiri at the bottom of the chart. The witchpoint, planet and sun are all in conjunction. Head for the planet (you will see the sun), pull up to skirt it and then re-centre the sun. You should see some asteroids. I've always found some offenders and fugitives just there.