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witchspace

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 4:14 pm
by Jason Whitelock
I remember from years gone by that you could 'force' a witchspace failure which always resulted in you being dropped into witchspace when you initiated a jump. [pause, W, unpause or something like that]

It would also happen at random every once in a while.

Keen to take on some thargoid bad booys. !!!


Is this still a 'feature' in this modern ooniverse?

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 4:22 pm
by another_commander
Yes. Launch from station, start hyperspace countdown, just before jump is executed press "Up" to achieve full pitch. Welcome to witchspace.

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 4:39 pm
by The Edible Poet
Cool. I didn't know that.

Will come in handy when I feel like doing a bit of bug bashing. :twisted:

Speaking of which I shot down my first thargoid carrier today (well I finished him off, credit to a galactic navy behemoth and a swarm of other assorted navy ships for softening him up for me).

Those Navy frigates look v cool with all their plasma cannons blazing as well. :)

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 5:10 pm
by matt634
For those courageous commanders looking to squash bugs, interstellar space is one option. But, the Navy is always looking for qualified reserve pilots as well. :wink:

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 9:08 pm
by Captain Hesperus
One word of advice regarding purposely ditching into Witchspace: either navigate a short distance (less than 3.5ly), take a spare fuel tank (fueltank.oxp) or make sure that you are not alone out there (behemoth.oxp, military.oxp) because Oolite will deduct the fuel for your whole journey. If you haven't taken extra precautions, you too could end up a legend just like Commander Jameson.

Just for the wrong reasons.

Also, it's advisable for all pilots attempting to jump into interstellar space to take at least one Trumble with them to stave off the effects of Space Craziness induced by the extreme loneliness. It just happens that I have a small handful in my magic bag here.

One second...<proot> <proot> <proot>
Interested?

Captain Hesperus
......Go on, you know you want one.....

Alas...

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 1:42 pm
by Jason Whitelock
Well i made it as far as witchspace but upon arrival - my nasty ship environmental system shuts down and my life force gets pushed into a state of suspended animation.

Ok- my pc completey hangs
On normal run - which seems absolutley fine by me - my FPs clocks at around 33 - 40. This only ever varies when a kill a big beastie thargoid carrier when it drops to around 4 and takes approx 1 minute to spawn ALL the debris. This doesn't happen that often so i live with it.

On hitting witchspace - my radar fills with lots of beautiful green/red dots, blue dots and the like - but i never get to see any of the action

Poor me.
(running a 2 year old IBM stinkpad with 1GB ram , pretty quick beastie. I run autocad and various other BIG work applications all the time with no issues)

Any ideas - i have a whole host of oxp's installed - are there any that are likely to slow things down to a point that oolite doesn't recover !!

Re: Alas...

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 1:49 pm
by Captain Hesperus
Jason Whitelock wrote:
Any ideas - i have a whole host of oxp's installed - are there any that are likely to slow things down to a point that oolite doesn't recover !!
Depends on the OXP's big ones like Assassins or Galactic Navy can slow you a bit, but if as you say, you have shedloads of OXP, then Oolite will be running through each script and checking to make sure that none of the requirements of those scripts are being met. This will sap your fps.

Captain Hesperus
.....sounding unusually technical

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 1:52 pm
by LittleBear
Not in themselves, but quite a few OXPs add ships to witchspace (Assassins does so if the Navy have developed the Navy BattleBot - you'll know if this trigger has been reached). At lot like Thargon Threat, Behemoth, Military etc add more craft whenever you enter wichspace. So the collective effect of loads of different OXPs adding ships to witchspace could cause a slowdown That said, I'm playing on a 5 year old dell with all the OXPs installed. Although there is a real humdinger of a battle raging the game is running in witchspace, I'm only dropping about 10 fps and the game is still playable (albiet a bit slower than normal). You could try taking out a few OXPs and see if it makes a difference, but your system is miles faster than mine!

The Scripts won't be the problem so much as the shear number of ships. Spawning ships is very memory intesive.

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 2:12 pm
by The Edible Poet
I was having slowdown problems on my machine as well (iMac with 1 Gb of ram). Lots of ships/debris could crash it and the YOUR AD HERE oxp seemed to make it run permanently glitchy.

But 2 more Gb of ram sorted it right out. No problems at all now.

Of course forking out money just to get oolite to go better probably isn't the answer you're looking for. Guess I must just be developing an addiction (again). :shock:

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 4:54 pm
by matt634
This only ever varies when a kill a big beastie thargoid carrier when it drops to around 4 and takes approx 1 minute to spawn ALL the debris.
Sounds like you're still running 1.65 which spawns tons of debris when large ships are destroyed. With several OXPs installed its an inevitability that at least one carrier (behemoth, leviathan, thargoid) and most likely two or three will be destroyed in witchspace causing massive slowdowns even on fast machines. Moving up to 1.70 really helped my machine out with this problem, and pitched battles are deadly smooth :twisted:

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 1:33 pm
by Commander McLane
@Jason Whitelock: As you are attempting to explore interplanetary space now (often referred to as witchspace, although technically speaking "witchspace" only stands for the multidimensional pocket that allows you to travel to another planet out of the realms of the normal Ooniverse, or, in short, the "tunnel" you see every time you're travelling), you should pay special attention to those OXPs that add a lot of ships to witchspace. The large number of blips on your scanner indicates that there are indeed a lot of ships created.

Some of the OXPs involved (in no specific order, with no guarantee of correct spelling and with no claim to completeness) could be
Thargoidcarrier.oxp
Thorgornthreat.oxp
ThargoidWars.oxp
Behemoth.oxp
Military.oxp
GalacticNavy.oxp
Assassins.oxp
Supercobra.oxp

So if you take those out and put them slowly in again, you could test with how much witchspace-action your system can cope.

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 3:53 pm
by zimmemic25
another_commander wrote:
Yes. Launch from station, start hyperspace countdown, just before jump is executed press "Up" to achieve full pitch. Welcome to witchspace.
i start witchspace with [H], when at 1, i press[UP], i turn around and then i'm witchspaced to the target system!

when exactly do i have to press UP?
-----------------------------
got it.
i need to press DOWN while the whole countdown and while jumping to get it working

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 4:43 pm
by Captain Hesperus
zimmemic25 wrote:
another_commander wrote:
Yes. Launch from station, start hyperspace countdown, just before jump is executed press "Up" to achieve full pitch. Welcome to witchspace.
i start witchspace with [H], when at 1, i press[UP], i turn around and then i'm witchspaced to the target system!

when exactly do i have to press UP?
-----------------------------
got it.
i need to press DOWN while the whole countdown and while jumping to get it working
Yeah, you have to be pitching as you begin to enter Witchspace. Which, you can imagine can make running away from a particularly not fun fight wien your WFIs are damaged very risky.

Captain Hesperus

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 6:04 pm
by Eric Walch
McLane wrote:
you should pay special attention to those OXPs that add a lot of ships to witchspace.
I just want to add: Not all scripts test for witchspace before adding a ship. condition = (planet_number = -1); So some just add ships that shouldn't be there.

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 10:34 am
by Jason Whitelock
ok - Where do i find version 1.7

I assume the install is straight forward and I simply copy my save files and active OXP's into the appropriate areas of the new 1.7 install area.

Thanks