Oolite Bulletins

suggestion: oort cloud.

description: an oort cloud is the name of the shell of asteroids that surrounds the solar system. many theories as to how such a thing came about are put forth by scientist, but the only thing that is known is that most of the meteors come from there.

i would like to propose that each system have an oort cloud. the mechanic would generate a higher number of asteroids at a distance that is greater than x, but is smaller than y, where y is greater than x. presto a shell of asteroids surrounding a system.

i suggest that it be far enough out, to make it take some time to get out there, but not beyond playability. especially as npc's should be taking advantage of it as well. perfect place for pirates to hide, rock hounds to have bases and be hunting, etc.

nijineko wrote:

suggestion: oort cloud.

That’s not a scripting request.

It’s also not practical given the way Oolite works. For it to be practically possible to find an asteroid in an actual belt, there would have to be many thousands of them. Oolite simulates every object in the system all the time, and very definitely cannot scale to thousands of asteroids. What you suggest would require a very different model in which asteroids are dynamically created when the player (or an NPC ship) comes close, which would require dramatic changes to the game.

Then again, considering the scales involved in Oolite, a belt of about five asteroids would give an unusually realistic feel for what the asteroid belt and Oort cloud are actually like. :-)

oh. hmmmm. would it be feasable to have it randomly spawn a few asteroids in a clump anytime the distance from x location (probably station or planet. edit: sun would actually be more realistic-perhaps set it to be beyond the witchspace beacon) is exceeded at a distance just beyond the scanning range in a direct line (x axis?) to the players travel?

this should only work once per time that the distance flag is tripped. perhaps docking or warping into witchspace would reset this flag. increased chance of deep space dredgers perhaps?

(ran into my first one today-blasted docking computers-flew me right into the side of the thing! fortunately it spawned again right away so i was able to dock. sorta. the loop-de-loop it was doing made docking with it more challenging than usual... not to mention getting out of it's way upon exiting.)

i suppose that including randomly generated rock hermits into the mix would not be kosher. having them pop in and out would be a bit frustrating. what if it just generated a set of asteroids, one per system. and whenever someone goes exploring out that way, that set is used. is it possible to have it in a "storage location" to start, and whenever suggested distance flag is tripped, the whole set is moved to just outside player scanning range?

how's this for an ammended suggestion?

That would require the generated asteroids to *POOF* when outside scanner range again otherwise the numbers of objects would overcome even faster systems after a while.
THis might have worked in the totally playercentric original version of elite, however in oolite the system is simulated as a whole. Thus magically poofing asteroids breaks the consistency of the mechanics.

Maybe having only the location of such objects in memory untill such time that a ship comes close enough to see it may reduce the memory overflow.
Rendering abjects as sprites (if large enough) at extreme distances may also reduce CPU-use, but as Ahruman already stated: that would require a lot more than tinkering with the way oolite works.

got it. thank you for the explanation. i'll keep thinking about this one.