Oolite Bulletins

[wiki]FarPlanets[/wiki] OXP is populate the outer space of solar systems and provide travel methods to reach these far away places in reasonable time.

The first test version is done which create planets in Lave to try out the new drives. Later contracts will be made for far planets, but currently the only thing what you can do is to install [wiki]Stations_for_Extra_Planets[/wiki] (which has a brand new version, thanks spara!) to be able to trade and refuel after a long journey.
[wiki]DeepSpacePirates[/wiki] is also suggested due to no built-in similar functionality (yet ).

 NumericHUD and [wiki]Telescope[/wiki] are updated to work with FarPlanets and measure the very large distances which are realistic in Oolite 1.79 and reduced in 1.77. Planet sizes are realistic also.

Speed is limited in all travel methods by the distance of the nearest mass. You must go farther from the sun than the main planet and witchpoint to get any more than the normal Torus speed.

Travel methods:

1. Forwarding:
Your ship theoretically is not faster but your clock will be adjusted forward to shorten the boring parts of travel (but TAF is not used so everything is working in deployment versions also). Is not the best way if you have time limited contracts.

My stress-test was succesful using this method on an exceptionally large distance: I reached the planet Sedna at his aphelion within 15 minutes in real life (when I turned off the limits described below). Small problem is that the time adjustment is finished 2.5 hours later and my pilot is probably died during the elapsed 139 years.




2. Micro-G Torus:
Must buy this equipment to get the same speeds than in the previous case but without time adjustment. This is a very good drive far from the sun which is limited by the lightspeed only.

To step over a bit, these two method will be used together if possible. In this case the limit is 9 times of the lightspeed which mean the Micro-G provide 0.9 lightspeed and the remain is covered by a 10x time adjustment.

Using this way you can arrive to the Mercury and an Earth-type planet also within your cup of tea break. But Jupiter need about half an hour and there are much farther planets also. To get a view check this map:



So you need something faster than light to reach Pluto within 24 hours. Here it comes:

3. FTL Torus:
You can burning fuel and using energy to get more from your Torus, where the rules are the same but additionally the gravity of the galaxy is coming into the picture which give the limit of this method due to constant in the whole system. The current background calculation is based on this Micro-g table.

Using a full tank fuel you should be able to reach the Pluto in tea time.
But still a challenge to reach comets in the Oort-Cloud.

This is the current WIP state, I am curious to your opinions.

Details and download in the wiki: [wiki]FarPlanets[/wiki]

This looks all kinds of interesting to me and the scope of this, alongside extra stations and more in-system functionality like in system market restore and in system trader, could make remaining within systems for a longer a more enjoyable prospect. Essentially really calling a system home.

Would be great to see this built upon with more in system missions such as passenger and cargo contracts, as well as in system combat missions.

In short, I think this is a good idea.

Does this add more planets to Lave only or to all systems?

Keeping an eye peeled on it, looks seriously amazing!

Hey Sendraks - long time, no see!

Hey Cody!

Hello Norby,

These oxz files are a nightmare to get to work in 1.77 , I create a new folder entitled in this case FarPlanets.oxp.

I then take the oxz file as there is apparently nothing to unzip .. and put it in the newly created FarPlanets.oxp Folder and add it to my Addons. Restart my game and nothing, so I am afraid that Gallery and this oxp do not work in 1.77. for me.

I have nothing against 1.79 but remain aware that it is a development version and therefore a work in progress.

In the interim then , while we are waiting for 1.79 to become stable release , is there any way that you can realease these two very good OXP's as OXP's as opposed to oxz's .

Thank you.

Sendraks wrote:

Would be great to see this built upon with more in system missions such as passenger and cargo contracts, as well as in system combat missions.

Thank you for your interest, this is one of my goals also.

Duggan wrote:

I then take the oxz file as there is apparently nothing to unzip ..

Please rename the .oxz files to .zip then try to unzip. It is the zipped files of the .oxp folder. Both Total Commander under windows and Midnight Commander under Linux can step into if I press enter on these .oxz files then I can copy the contents with F5.

It is possible to make an .oxp.zip also but I do not want to make redundant files if possible due to it is almost the same. If you rename the file and copy the contents to the FarPlanets.oxp subfolder what you created then you do exactly the same what you asked from me to do. (+1 ninja award to Thargoid. )

In 1.77 you can see the planets right after undock due to these very large objects are placed within the limited usable distance. For example if you travel to a starton of these then the visual target model placed by Telescope will flicker, and you should use the Shift+C key to dock.

Zireael wrote:

Does this add more planets to Lave only or to all systems?

Currently add into Lave only, plus a moon into interstellar space between Lave and Zaonce (without station).

Next version will add unique planets to famous systems and later to other systems also but with somewhat repetitive textures until I can not get a few thousand ones.

Now I placed a FarPlanetsTest.oolite-save file into my box to help test this OXP.

The oxz file will be a renamed zip file. If you just change its extension to .zip

How do I go about changing a file extension please ?

Duggan wrote:

How do I go about changing a file extension please ?

This depends on your operating system:
https://www.google.com/#q=renaming+files+windows
https://www.google.com/#q=renaming+files+linux
https://www.google.com/#q=renaming+files+mac

But I think better if we continue it in private messages before we need to ask a topic split due to the changed subject.

Thanks Norby,

Up to press I can report that Gallery does not work fully in 1.77 as you guessed already;

23:47:07.587 [Gallery]: Fallback to a slow and inaccurate method without Oolite v1.79

...

Far Planets at Lave seems a success with the exception of the outer most planet which is very far in deep space at which point my steering is all over the place and jittery upon exiting the far planet.station:)

edit ...Gallery works without Salon which messes up the launch from a galcop station due to having an excess of
ships in front of the launch bay and overloading graphics card..

Duggan wrote:

Far Planets at Lave seems a success with the exception of the outer most planet which is very far in deep space at which point my steering is all over the place and jittery upon exiting the far planet.station

That will be because 1.77 only uses single-precision position coordinates.. the extreme distances that Far Planets can utilise cause positioning problems, as you have noticed. 1.79 uses double-precision coordinates, and can thus make use of far more extreme distances without problems.. at the moment Norby has a couple of OXPs under development which are really designed for a version of Oolite that may still be a year or so away from release..

Diziet Sma wrote:

at the moment Norby has a couple of OXPs under development which are really designed for a version of Oolite that may still be a year or so away from release..

Which is something we find very useful on the dev team - if OXPers don't try using the new features, we've got much more chance of releasing with bugs still in them.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Norby has a couple of OXPs under development which are really designed for a version of Oolite that may still be a year or so away from release..

I have two: FarPlanets and Gallery, but I do what is possible to made these usable in 1.77 also, and I put the details into the wiki about the limitations, please read it.

I can reach a level what is enough good for me under 1.77 so I need user feedbacks to polish further if needed, for example the mentioned many ships before the station is one where I made an FPS-based adjustment. But I can not avoid all porblems, for example if hundreds of ship OXPs are installed then the "old unaccurate" method which is the only possibility under 1.77 consume more memory and in extreme cases can hit the phisycally installed amount, which can be solved by purchasing more memory.

Oolite was not able to start with 4GB memory when I installed all ship OXPs at once (regardless from my OXPs) so I decided to buy +4GB for about 40$. With Gallery the same ship pack require somewhat more memory in 1.77 than in 1.79 so in older machines with 1-2GB RAM there is a border-line case when Oolite 1.77 can barely start with a few hundred ship OXPs but crash with Gallery.

Farplanets is working under 1.77 also and will wok better in later versions, but you will not need to use FTL due to the shorter distances and will no gas giants. Jupiter is willfully left in the test version to demonstrate the problem.

cim wrote:

Which is something we find very useful on the dev team

Thank you, and to confirm this here is my problems:
-Jupiter is disappear within 300.000km, I guess due to its radius which set to 7147400 to get the realistic size by distanceTo. Here is about the largest size what I can see, a bit nearer switch to invisible but can masslock and collide.



-Polygonal artifacts on Earth and Pluto: a puzzle-like atmosphere which changing rapidly if player is moving. No problem with Mercury which is in between in size.

Norby wrote:

-Jupiter is disappear within 300.000km, I guess due to its radius which set to 7147400 to get the realistic size by distanceTo. Here is about the largest size what I can see, a bit nearer switch to invisible but can masslock and collide.

So it disappears if you get too close to it? That's unusual.

It doesn't surprise me that there are in general problems if the planets are 100x bigger than usual - that's well outside what we'd test for... I'll have a look and see if there's an obvious cause, though.