Oolite Bulletins

The haul between stations is long, even with the J short-range jump drive.

I'm sure I remember either the C64 or Amiga Elite having a time acceleration key, which would be very useful in Oolite. IIRC, you could accerelate time 2x, 4x, 8x, and of course 1x!

That would be a very useful addition.

I don't remember any version of Elite having time acceleration. I thought Frontier was the first elite universe game to feature time compression...

Aegidian has already explained that time acceleration could cause a major hangup, where ships flew straight through each other because the collision detector only polls for collisions on an time-interval-basis. Upping the intervalbeyond what is reasonable, ups the effective gap between pollings.

I know he is working on completely revising the collision-detection code, ATM, so maybe that particular problem is no longer true, but I'm still not sure 'time dilation' is a desirable feature... Maybe if I was a new player, I might see it different, since, nowadays, I go out with empty holds with the express intention of getting mass locked: it's the only way I ever get to come back with full holds, after all!

We all need to maybe go back and try playing as a Jameson from time to time, to see whether all those Snarks and Wolf Mk2 SE's were a good idea

Flying_Circus wrote:

Aegidian has already explained that time acceleration could cause a major hangup, where ships flew straight through each other

As I gather they used to occasionally in FE2/FFE.

The new collision code won't stop that, it'll just refine collision checks to about a 1m resolution, dispense with a level of dodgy code, and offer a few opportunities to improve the engine.

you can get from station to station in about 2 minutes if you fly towards
the station in a semi circle rather than a straight line (so as to avoid heavy
traffic) and approach the station from the outside so you dont get mass
locked by the planet before you get mass locked by the station.
as soon as you see the station, dont go straight at it but a bit away from
the planet. with the advanced compass you know where it is even before
you see it.