Oolite Bulletins

Hey to all mission oxp makers,

I have an issue that has come up with quite a big amount of missions recently.

Space is big and the Oolite scanner small, it scans only a very small volume of it.

Today, there are loads of stations, ships and also parallel missions going on. The scanner only covers a region of roughly 20.000 cubic "kilometres". Even if staying on the space lane (and, assuming, a mission target is there also) the space to be scanned is about 500.000 cubic kilometres. Missions that expand beyond the space lanes can make you search for something in an area of about 30-50 million cubic kilometres!

In other words, the chance to find something you can't see visually and have to find via scanner which is not on the space lane can be in the region of 1 : 60 with odds against you as player - or worse.

I have had this problem with i.e. lovecats, random hits, deposed and other mission oxps. It gets tedious to search for something for which you are not equipped properly, and it has already lessened my enthusiasm for such searches.

I propose some sort of solution should be created for this. The game should be fun foremost, shouldn't it?

Possible solutions could be:

Inside a mission oxp:

* Give such mission objects a beacon by default

* Give a detailed account in the mission text as to where you can expect the mission's objective to be found

Via core game:

* Create a Long Range Scanner that somehow makes it at least manageable to find something between all the other traffic/stations and/or outside the space lanes

Those are just some suggestions, there might be many further options to solve this.

For me, it would greatly enhance the missions in the game, as for the moment, I've had it with the pointless twentieth hide-and-seek runs ...

Discuss!

L

Maybe something you can buy like a deep space object detector, so it's different from the normal scanner and still keeps a small element of search to it.
It can't tell you what the object is, it just picks up some kind of signal from anything out there (that you can cycle through including asteroids), although it is programmed to avoid clutter by lumping any objects that are close together as a single signal. It would have to notify you that the signal is dividing as you approach, or that it is an amalgamation.
I imagine it displaying as a marker at the bottom of the screen, it slides left and right for horizontal direction and fades from light blue to red for vertical direction (hot and cold), It changes to a plus sign when merging is occuring.
It ignores anything within a certain distance, and standard system features.
I suppose it would have to work by imagining a two dimensional circle at the player (or a 3d cone that would appear identical) around the objects it detects, anything falling within this range are to be counted as one. Would that function?

I imagine the longrange scanner option is best for including in core as a standard feature, as zooming the scanner is already possible.

upgrades the scanner:
when J-flight is possible, allow for extended scanner range in exponential leaps.
normal range x1
range exp2
range exp3
etc

the clumping together may be handy, but only from efficiency, cluster signals will be visible as clumps anyhow.


---- system navigation:

planets and moons direction should be tracked inside the compass.

the standard compass should lock to any moon/station if nearby enough,
not only the main one.

the advanced compass could have modes added to display planet_prime/planet_2/moons in distinct colours
or with display text to notify of it's name or number.
A 'cluster mode' with all planetary bodies in different colours may be cool, but quite frankly also pretty useless.

Except the probe missile doesn't work. When I try to buy it, it just charges me 350 cr and does nothing! I've killed many shop owners for that.

wackyman465 wrote:

Except the probe missile doesn't work. When I try to buy it, it just charges me 350 cr and does nothing! I've killed many shop owners for that.

I presume you've actually fired it off? (it's a pylon-mounted item) It should then fly away from your, reporting back twice on what it finds before returning for re-scooping.

What happens if you try it, and how are you doing so?

>Here's a chance to expand the Welcome Mat.oxp I imagine that the data you get from locking on to the Nav Buoy's is networked?

>If every ship has a certain signature of digital fingerprint passage between the various buoys could me measured. So I propose a ship system that could extract 'hit' information out of the navbuoy network. After downloading (which takes much longer than normal threat indication downloads the mark is displayed on the advanced space compass as: M?

pagroove wrote:

So I propose a ship system that could extract 'hit' information out of the navbuoy network. After downloading (which takes much longer than normal threat indication downloads the mark is displayed on the advanced space compass as: M?

Sounds good.

Is something like that already oxp-able?

Not as a standard feature. Has to be handcoded for every mark.

The reason for this is that a ship either has a beacon, or not. You can't activate or deactivate it. So you would need two clones for each possible mark, one with beacon and one without. Then you would create the ship without beacon first, and only if the player requests more information at the witchpoint buoy it would be deleted and replaced by the clone with beacon.

While technically doable, I don't think we can convince every OXPer to go this way for every mark he creates. And of course it would only work with Welcome Mat.oxp in the first place, which not everybody has installed (I haven't).

Simply being able to expand the scanner range "beyond" the 1:1 limit would do the trick, methinks.

It would still entail a search for a specific target then - you would see a lot of blips on a scanner that scans the area 200 or even 2000 "km"s around - but at least you'd know where to start searching.

I think something like that should be a feature of the game itself, then no one would have to rewrite their oxp for it.

Just my 0.2Cr,

L

No, it doesn't even show up in my missile rack!

Beacons are a quite a special case and while I'd agree they should be used for things like planets and stations, using them for individual ships should be justified in some way, otherwise it amounts to giving the player an infinite-range scanner. I know in some of my OXPs I haven't used beacons but hopefully I've provided enough clues to help players locate their targets; this still leaves the way open for people to use equipment like Thargoid's probing missiles, but still gives them a bit of work to do. There has to be a bit of challenge left for the player otherwise missions become too easy.

Ramirez wrote:

Beacons are a quite a special case and while I'd agree they should be used for things like planets and stations, using them for individual ships should be justified in some way, otherwise it amounts to giving the player an infinite-range scanner. I know in some of my OXPs I haven't used beacons but hopefully I've provided enough clues to help players locate their targets; this still leaves the way open for people to use equipment like Thargoid's probing missiles, but still gives them a bit of work to do. There has to be a bit of challenge left for the player otherwise missions become too easy.

That sums up my position as well. I try not to give beacons to targets. Exceptions are when there is a time-component (the target has to be found quickly, before it hyperspaces out) or there is no way to find it without a beacon (like the Hacker Outposts, which are placed way outside the space lanes; Salvage Gangs are in the lanes, so no need for a beacon).