Oolite Bulletins

Can these be ordered by deadline instead of contract time?

Wouldn't be of much use, since a contract that has more time left but with a far destination can be tighter than another one with little time left but the destination close by.
You'd have to order by the difference between time left and estimated time to arrive or their ratio, but then, how exactly do you calculate the estimated time to arrive, as it's usually a mixture between "least jumps" and "fastest".

Both times would be interesting, and could be given as "... within x hrs, time needed between y and z hrs". The difference between x and (y+z)/2 could be the value used for sorting the list.

But even more important would be to always display the time in hours (or days), and not in hours on some of the screens (e.g. the galactic map) and in days on other screens (the screen we are talking about). That's really annoying!

Btw what I'm always wondering is how much time the route planner dedicates to each system when calculating the estimated time to arrive (in addition to that time which the jumps need). E.g. you dock with a hermit, some OXP station and the main station. 30 min. You buy fuel at two of those. More than 20 min. You're flying around at torus, you fight a little. That's at least 1 hour of ingame time or so. Does the route planner plan this ? If so, how much ?

Anonymissimus wrote:

Btw what I'm always wondering is how much time the route planner dedicates to each system when calculating the estimated time to arrive (in addition to that time which the jumps need). E.g. you dock with a hermit, some OXP station and the main station. 30 min. You buy fuel at two of those. More than 20 min. You're flying around at torus, you fight a little. That's at least 1 hour of ingame time or so. Does the route planner plan this ? If so, how much ?

I think it's based purely on jump time - you can see this in things like circuitous routes that shave a couple of hours in theory, but in practice don't because you have to dock a couple of times more along the way.

Purely jump duration - no in-system time included.

Ninja'd!

Even sorting by distance would be better than the current scheme...

That's true. But that's almost the travelling salesman problem, and it's not as easy as it sounds. It would be relatively easy if all target systems are arranged in a neat line, like a sensible pilot would choose them, but what if they are distributed all over the map?

I don't want the game to calculate an optimal route - that's the pilot's (read: my) job.

I only want some kind of (sensible) sorting instead of the current mess.

As a software developer, I'm inclined to say that it's your computer's job to calculate the optimal route!

If your contracts are aligned reasonably, ordering by the distance would of course be sensible, and if they are not, it's your fault.