Oolite Bulletins

Hiya,

An old BBC Elite player here, really enjoying this version. Nice work!

A few comments / suggestions / questions (apologies if some of this has been on here before):

(1) At present looks a though theres 1 corridor of ships from beacon to planet. Is that right? So even in Anarchy systems there are no random encounters away from the corridor? I can understand the logic of this. As a pirate I go where the ships are. I thought it might be nice to have, in some systems, another corridor from the sun to the station. The idea behind this might be : individual ships can scoop fuel so why can't there be a fuel-scooping industry? One massive heat protected vessel strips fuel from the sun and convoys of (viper protected) tankers take the fuel back to the depot (or space station...). On a smaller scale there could be a corridor of cheap-skate pilots who'd rather scoop fuel than pay the station prices...i.e. a corridor of small ships.

(2) In the systems where I have scooped fuel the planet looks pretty big from the position of the sun. Any plans to make increase the distance and make the relation between them more plausible?

(3) Trading convoys idea: My knowledge of history is pretty dodgy but didn't ships travel in convoy across the atlantic to minimize losses to sub attacks? Similar idea for trading in dangerous systems - rather than having an escort for single freight ships have many freight carriers - 15+ boas. Or, same idea from a slightly diff angle: freight pilots unionise and start working together for safety. Problem with large convoys would be > Energy bombs < . Could an energy bomb be blocked somehow?

Got a few other ideas and would quite like to do some mission/ship designing. Can't remember other stuff at mo'. I'm guessing there is some simple way to look inside those oxp files and see how a mission is put together?... I'll go search the BB.

pog

hi Pog.
nice ideas, and some of them not difficult at all to to with one's own hands, since.. maybe all.. the necessary groundwork is already there.

maybe not so easy to move suns
nor blocking energy bombs (they ought to be banned) but the only threat of that comes from the player.

if you're just starting to explore how things are made, try seeing how helpful the wiki would be.

1) yup we have been thinking about these things lately, but nothing has as yet been done about it.
You would find the most pirates at the sun in the elite of yore.

3)I believe there were also convoys of several anacondas even back then.
I was hoping to find them yet in Oolite, but possibly you are right about them bnot being there. yet.
I love convoys.

2)That is for Giles to fix or comment upon.

Pog wrote:

(3) Trading convoys idea: My knowledge of history is pretty dodgy but didn't ships travel in convoy across the atlantic to minimize losses to sub attacks? Similar idea for trading in dangerous systems - rather than having an escort for single freight ships have many freight carriers - 15+ boas. Or, same idea from a slightly diff angle: freight pilots unionise and start working together for safety. Problem with large convoys would be > Energy bombs < . Could an energy bomb be blocked somehow?

I knew there was a reason I bought that dirty great Q-Bomb

hiya, thanks for comments.

murgh: i had a look at the wiki. the 'creating an oxp' page looked useful - on reflection I thought that perhaps the freighters-working-together scenario could be one that I (given time, knowledge etc) could make up (perhaps as a mission where you have to defend it/make sure only a certain number of boas are destroyed etc...) does that sound plausible (from a coding p.o.v...about which I know nil) as a mission?

p

yes, I think that would be possible mission to write.

a 'generic' scenario of freighter convoys should be quite easy, but an OXP that creates a specific convoy group (gives them a special "role"), and establishes a starting point, informs of the objective, sets up specific waves of pirate aggression, and awaits a result at the finish line (checking for surviving numbers of yourRole at mission's end), should be feasible using the current scripting tools.

between analyzing the working scripts (internal Oolite and OXPs) and the script and methods pages on the wiki, the information should be there to learn how to do it. and do feel free to ask if you get stuck

shipdata.plist:
>death_actions<
>increment: mission_variable_covoy_lost<

and in script.plist:
conditions:
>mission_variable_convoy_lost greaterthan 3<
do:
>set: mission_state equal MISSION_FAILED<

Hi, Pog.

As a get-go, I'd like to say that, my understanding at least, was that all systems had a Station-Sun corridor, as well - it's just not as densely populated.

As for your point about Sun-Planet distances, and relative sizes: yes, you're right: space in Oolite is distorted, in terms of distance and scale, but as a seasoned Celestia pilot (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/), I can attest that reality is highly overrated . (Not that Celestia is overrated, of course - in fact, it's probably under-rated because it's realistic )

For instance, this sun-to-planet business: there's no way I could manage a Sun-Earth trip in realistic space, by visual lock, alone... With considerable practice, using Celestia's freeflight mode, I can now (by knowing my local constellations) reliably navigate, by eye, a course between earth and our moon and back - but only because I'm looking at the fixed stars, rather than trying to find either planet/moon. Sound trivial? Well, try it, if you never have (Celestia is free). Given that one sphere is liable to be sunlit and the other in darkness, even this comparatively simple exercise is much more difficult than you might imagine.

Likewise, by knowing how our local constellations distort over very short distances, I can reliably find my way from, say, Sol to Alpha Centuri and back, or a similar trek to Barnard's Star... (Stars are actually easier than planets, since they actually give off light).

So, here's the paradox. Computer games are designed to be fun. Computer games are often about war. War is never fun.

I suppose the point I am trying to make is that Oolite, like all its predecessors, is a line-of-sight, visual lock game. A game; and as such, it abides by its own internal rules, and is consistent to those rules.

Those rules do not conform to reality, but then - the reality of flying around in a spaceship trying to kill other people, similarly equipped, would suck so much you'd need to be paid to do it.

I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but I recommend you all check out what the reality would look like, even if we could travel faster than light, to see why the version that the games present us with is so damn cool.

yes these are some valid points. there is no need to make Oolite true to cosmic scale, and wargames must be considerably more fun than the real thing.

I read into Pog's first post a question whether sun-planet distance could be more plausible, not necessarily to the degree of sol-earth at .3LS in Celestia though, but if there are ways of making the distance slightly longer than the quick hop it currently is. some variation to the current pattern could be cool (it seems our destination planets always occupies a repeating goldielocks orbit) and to expose a method to customise the sun-planet distance in planetinfo.plist could be a handy thing. it would go well with addPlanet and addMoon.

I would argue that Oolite is not a war game, after all you could potentially have an Oolite Commander who made it his/her mission to avoid conflict. Maybe we should have a pacifist version where your lasers are just disruptor beams that temporarily disable your opponents controls...j/k!

Murgh wrote:

I read into Pog's first post a question whether sun-planet distance could be more plausible, not necessarily to the degree of sol-earth at .3LS in Celestia though, but if there are ways of making the distance slightly longer than the quick hop it currently is.

Pog's ideas are good, but don't most new players already complain about how damn long it takes to get anywhere? I dare say many give up, long before they get enough zlotis together, to buy themselves a set of fuel injectors.

I suppose we could make the sun-planet distance greater; we could make the actual star a good deal bigger, so that we didn't have to come within a few kilometers of its surface before we could scoop fuel off it; we could make for more ship-encounters along the way: but would we actually improve the game?

Hi all, thanks for the replies.

One of the reasons I really love this version of elite is the witch fuel injectors - I'm able to speed up my post 'j'- ing, or just seed away from ships so that I can 'j' away...so realism isn't a real draw for me -
the reason I brought up the planet-sun distance thing is that on the BBC version (unless I've remembered wrong) when you got up to the sun, the planet was a really small (perhaps even invisible from that distance...? memory is a little shady here although I did play it again last year...). So my question just came from a, perhaps misplaced, sense of an 'ideal' from the original. Though it seemed to me right that the planet should be small when we're at the sun, not every planet is as close as Mercury. Still, it's a small quibble - I wouldn't care if the distance stayed like this given the increased depth of play elsewhere.

AFAICR from BBC Elite, yes, the planet-sun distance did seem to be a bigger than in Oolite.

Although it may also be worth mentioning that, due to a rounding error in BBC Elite it was possible to make the planet disappear completely if you travelled repeatedly between the sun and the planet.

this percieved distance thing could just be seen as a difference in width in POV lens. maybe Og.Elite just had more of a a wide-angle

Murgh: for that sort of planet-sun view, you’d need a FoV a fraction of a degree wide. Managing to turn towards the planet, or any other point, would be damn hard… :-)