Oolite Bulletins

May I be the first to congratulate you with this historical achievement!
For the first time in the history of ELITE/ OOLITE ( not Frontier and FFE) it is possible to land on planets. Just made 2 successful entries on Lerelace and on Xexedi (HD version). Sometimes the little things can be great. And this is great. May I do some suggestions?

General

- Atmospheric entry is not possible for all types of ships
- Or a commander has to buy a planetary shield system? of atmospheric shielding plus?

Landing procedure

- Excellent till now but is it possible to detect the angle of the nose to the surface so that you have to tilt to less than 45 degrees on final. This should make it more interesting
- Is it possible to introduce a landing gear key. Even if you don't see a landing gear it can be great to be asked ( by control) to extract your landing gear.

Surface

- Is it possible to make more locations per planet. In fact a sort of adventure rooms like in the old text adentures so that you can roam the continents-

or

have customized locations such as: Space port, Conference center, Farmland unit A7 and such. Maybe in a sort of Random hits way to get a good randomization?

Trade market

Is it possible to have a market with a range of other products for the surface. like:

Medicines, Building parts, Compressed gasses, Earthquake sensors.

It's then possible to bring medicines to a planet that is cursed by a disease. They will pay a good price for it.

Orbital boost Sound
Someone should I make a new launch sound for it. Orbitalboost.ogg or something like that? Should be nice with a countdown or something like that

Anyway Gr8 work!

Damn! Not going to able to try this for a whole week!!!

NIce work (appreciation in advance!)

Cheers,

Drew.

pagroove wrote:

May I be the first to congratulate you with this historical achievement!
For the first time in the history of ELITE/ OOLITE ( not Frontier and FFE) it is possible to land on planets. Just made 2 successful entries on Lerelace and on Xexedi (HD version). Sometimes the little things can be great. And this is great. May I do some suggestions?

Thank you

pagroove wrote:

General

- Atmospheric entry is not possible for all types of ships
- Or a commander has to buy a planetary shield system? of atmospheric shielding plus?

Limiting to ship type is perfectly possible, I just didn't really want to do it, at least at this stage. But if an over-riding reason to make it impossible for a certain ship type or types to land then it can be done. In fact it is actually impossible for larger ships (ones that cannot dock normally to a station) to land anyway due to how the OXP works.

As to buying planetary shield systems (or a heatshield or something like that) I did consider that but decided against it. As has been said elsewhere I'm not sure we need any more equipment just for the sake of it at the moment.

pagroove wrote:

Landing procedure

- Excellent till now but is it possible to detect the angle of the nose to the surface so that you have to tilt to less than 45 degrees on final. This should make it more interesting
- Is it possible to introduce a landing gear key. Even if you don't see a landing gear it can be great to be asked ( by control) to extract your landing gear.

Angle detection is perfectly possible again. Just seemed an over-complication but it can be done.

Landing gear key isn't possible, at least at an OXP level. Adding the request from control would just be a case of editting the existing request from control that you get just before landing anyway.

pagroove wrote:

Surface

- Is it possible to make more locations per planet. In fact a sort of adventure rooms like in the old text adentures so that you can roam the continents-

or

have customized locations such as: Space port, Conference center, Farmland unit A7 and such. Maybe in a sort of Random hits way to get a good randomization?

The text adventure thought is certainly possible, similar to the station mission in Assassins. But it just seemed a bit of a repeat of that.

And for locations, some of that is going to be covered elsewhere in another upcoming OXP (not by me). But if you look carefully there is some variation in the characteristics of where you land already, at least in trading terms

pagroove wrote:

Trade market

Is it possible to have a market with a range of other products for the surface. like:

Medicines, Building parts, Compressed gasses, Earthquake sensors.

It's then possible to bring medicines to a planet that is cursed by a disease. They will pay a good price for it.

Not easily. It's possible to change the commodities, but not really to add new ones

pagroove wrote:

Orbital boost Sound
Someone should I make a new launch sound for it. Orbitalboost.ogg or something like that? Should be nice with a countdown or something like that

Anyway Gr8 work!

The launch is actually just a standard one, so it may be difficult, although I guess playSound could be used similar to in FP. Not sure the timings of sound vs action would work so well though.

Great work Thargoid. Not used it yet but landing a planet should feel superb.

Pangroove already gave some excellent suggestions that all will improve the landing feeling. I just want to add:

- Limit the landing speed to something like 50 m/s. If higher, just explode the player !!:evil:
- Define a landing zone. You must be within a certain distance of an added object. If not --> explode player.

Nifty, I'm working on an atmos ship at the moment. To make things a little easier why not just Extent the capacity of the existing heat shield enhancement? If it can protect the ship from limited sun skimming then chances are it can handle the odd atmosphere.

ClymAngus wrote:

Nifty, I'm working on an atmos ship at the moment. To make things a little easier why not just Extent the capacity of the existing heat shield enhancement? If it can protect the ship from limited sun skimming then chances are it can handle the odd atmosphere.

It's coded in the trunk (both the atmospheric flying heat-up and the shield enhancement), so would be a pain to work around (and to trigger the event, as the ship is already at max red alert due to the altitude). But it's not really necessary, as unless you come in at stupid speeds and/or using fuel injectors then you land before you bake anyway.

On second thought, don't check a fixed speed but a percentage of maxSpeed. Take such a percentage that the speed indicator is green. And you are right, when flying to fast you burn up anyhow by atmospheric friction.

I think it should be possible to place a landing strip on the surface. Just an extremely long and flat ship. On the triggering of the landing, the player has to be directly above this strip. Add flashers on it as landing lights. It makes landing very realistic in combination with pangrooves suggested landing angle. When the player starts its approach to early, he will run out of landing strip before touch-down and has to pull up to prevent a crash.

Just a few ideas of mine to make landing not to easy and even sort of realistic by adding the need for a sort of landing skill.

Ooo, righty ho. I think I'll go back to my pretty textures, my ignorance is showing like the top and tail fat rolls on a tightly boob tubed chunky girl.

Still, landing..... way cool! I'm going to go land on a rock! Woot!

ClymAngus wrote:

Still, landing..... way cool!

Or hot when coming in to fast. The player has just two values of heat shielding. 1.0 without shielding and 2.0 then he has bought the shielding. NPC ships can have all degrees of heat shielding up to several hundreds (or millions when defined as such).

Eric Walch wrote:

I think it should be possible to place a landing strip on the surface. Just an extremely long and flat ship. On the triggering of the landing, the player has to be directly above this strip. Add flashers on it as landing lights. It makes landing very realistic in combination with pangrooves suggested landing angle. When the player starts its approach to early, he will run out of landing strip before touch-down and has to pull up to prevent a crash.

Just a few ideas of mine to make landing not to easy and even sort of realistic by adding the need for a sort of landing skill.

My only problem with this is when clever people like PAGroove make lovely textures for the planets. Me then sticking a big black rectangle on them seems like vandalism Plus there's the whole question of where to put the thing, so it doesn't end up in a perceived ocean, or across part of one and part of a landmass or something equally ugly.

Plus knowing me I'd be tempted to code an easter egg in that occasionally they open up and reveal that they're full of stars I start to wonder also about scaling again, as to have a landing strip that you could see and aim at would end up on a planetary scale-wise being about the size of a small country in real terms. We're suffering again from Oolites famous scaling issues.

As I said before there is at least one other OXP'er working in this area, and (from the discussions that lead on to this script idea) his working is much more in line with this thinking than mine is. I just wanted to write a little script to stop the planet being just something to crash into, whereas his method would easily allow for additional individual components to give the planet more "character". And it would be entirely compatible with mine too...

So I will say thank you to everyone for their appreciation and ideas, but at least for the moment will offer them as suggestions to that persons work where they are actually more appropriate

I start to wonder also about scaling again, as to have a landing strip that you could see and aim at would end up on a planetary scale-wise being about the size of a small country in real terms. We're suffering again from Oolites famous scaling issues.

You are right. It probably has to be done as a part of a bigger city oxp.

On the scale: In ups there is a mission were I place 4 satellites in a square, quite close to the surface. The square is not so big and the area in between looks large enough as a landing strip.
In this particular mission it is the clue to find this area. For this mission I gave all 4 satellites military jammers to prevent them showing up on radar. But even on pure sight they can be found fast when following the instructions. (Or am I the only one that ever found them?) And each of those has just the dimensions of a very small ship.

Some other thing I noticed was that products on the surface are more expensive than on the station.

I bought food at 2.4 credits on the surface and it was 2.0 on the station. Shouldn't this be reversed. If you buy food directly from a farmer it should be cheaper than if it is transported to the station.

The only price difference in two stations within the same system is the random component MARKET_RND (see the commodities.plist-documentation). So prices could be cheaper or more expensive. It's totally random.

The only way to change this would be to write custom commodities.plists for the surface stations. Which is non-trivial, because you have to cover stations for all economies.