Oolite Bulletins

When you jump its seems to be the same time elapses. Is there any way of making the hyperspace tunnel last longer as a function of the jump distance. Ie a 1 ly jump is seven times quicker than a 7 ly jump?

The longer the jump, the longer it takes: specifically, the travel time in hours = the distance travelled in light years squared. You should check again: if it really is taking you the same amount of time each jump, regardless of distance, that's a bug.

Quite right, but that wasnt the question. He would like the actual real time consumed "in the tunnel" to vary according to the length of the jump.

The problem with this, arguments about what the tunnel actually is aside, is the squared relationship, meaning that a long jump would be reaaaaaaaaaly long in real life.

Cmdr James wrote:

Quite right, but that wasnt the question. He would like the actual real time consumed "in the tunnel" to vary according to the length of the jump.

The problem with this, arguments about what the tunnel actually is aside, is the squared relationship, meaning that a long jump would be reaaaaaaaaaly long in real life.

Ah, yes, right enough! Sorry, Bazabaza ... it might be possible, I suppose, to make the actual time spent "in the tunnel" longer for longer jumps, but to give it a direct linear relationship. That said, the current effect takes (at a guess) 5 seconds. If that's the shortest jump, if the longest one took 7 x 5 seconds, that's 35 seconds. In my distant youth I'd spend 7 minutes, loading games from audiotape, with no guarantee that they'd work ... do I now have the patience to put up with an artificial extra 30 second delay, for the sake of atmosphere? Possibly I might - it would need to be an OXP, though.

I think it would be easy enough to scale it to say one second per LY, so even long jumps wouldnt be too long. Might be a nice idea but hard to explain away the squared relationship.

Perhaps something like 0.5 + (d/3)^2 would give an impression of the squared relationship, whilst maintaining a range of less than 6 seconds? I think there needs to be a minimum time (hence the plus half a second) or very short jumps will be weird.

I do'n understand why the tunnel to a further away point should stay visible for a longer time. Why not a shorter time, or a random time. The tunnel probably travels through the fourth or fifth dimension. That means a point further away in the 3th dimension could be closer by when accessed through a different dimension.

Remember, the ships clock is not running faster during the jump. It has to be adjusted after the jump to match local time.

Eric Walch wrote:

I do'n understand why the tunnel to a further away point should stay visible for a longer time.

It would just be a form of feedback in the game, where a longer jump would be signalled to the player by a longer time in the tunnel. If something like this is done, it would be better to have an immediate, human-understandable, relationship. What the "actual" physics are doesn't matter: we're not representing n-dimensional space on the screen!

Disembodied wrote:

Eric Walch wrote:

I do'n understand why the tunnel to a further away point should stay visible for a longer time.

It would just be a form of feedback in the game, where a longer jump would be signalled to the player by a longer time in the tunnel. If something like this is done, it would be better to have an immediate, human-understandable, relationship. What the "actual" physics are doesn't matter: we're not representing n-dimensional space on the screen!

I like the proposal here - except that probably it would mess up some rather crucial timings in my Interstellar Tweaks OXP. But I might be able to work around the proposed change.

A change might mess up other stuff. At the moment, the tunnel time is used to create the planet maps for the new planets. New planets are not active in Oolite, but when they do, they will need a minimum tunnel time to create all the maps (texture, light maps, hight maps etc.), that depends on the hardware. Making it shorter is probably not wise, but making it longer would not be a problem of corse