i managed a rough landing on phobos just yesterday

Huh? something ate my post, it seems... so here goes again:

I'm not actually landed by the game's definition of landed, and I'm not burried beneath the surface. I'm sitting pretty snuggly on top of it, the ship is at an absolute standstill. Finding a place on an asteroid where you can align your gear with the center is somewhat... impractical. I think this still needs a bit of work. The collision detection seems to work pretty well, so there should be a way to involve it a bit more with the landed state.

Also, a bit of instrumentation for manual flight would be nice (artifical horizon, a straight-down camera view, good old targetting tunnels), especially considering the many "suicides by autopilot" I suffered on this mission with a fully decked out Imperial Courier (600 tons). They ranged from screwed up landing, screwed up docking, to screwed up stellar aproach (there I go sundiving again...) and screwed up asteroid aproach (The ka-boom type... most of it had to do with the asteroid being really close to the sun. I did get there eventually by chopping the way up into smaller, more specific autopilot instructions). Seems like the Autopilot doesn't like heavy ships yet. Oh well, everything in its own time.

You're right, the way it decides if you're landed or not is based on the assumption that a planet is nearly spherical.

So you must be aligned with it's centre on a flat enough piece of the surface.

Unfortunately I think that the planet collision system is also spherical based so I'm not sure that will be much help in this case.

Maybe you should drop your requirement to be landed? Perhaps base it on the distance if the object is an asteroid instead?

I'd just avoid the requirement of landing on asteroids. Treat them as done if the player gets close enough to them, and then move on.

I didn't get that impression. My Courier set down with its right foot, then tilted until it had something underneath the left foot. In other words, it fit itself to the terrain as you would expect it to. This tells me that the terrain collision detection is actually quite sophisticated, unless my tilting was for another reason and I misinterpreted it.

Kind of a pity, because landing on asteroids is fun... but well. I guess I can make do without them for now.

Not it's dumb as a brick but I probably didn't explain myself.

When landing on a planet it finds out what "height" the terrain is underneath you by querying the terrain generation with a position relative to the centre of the planet. That then generates the terrain height. It does this so that the collision is always "perfect" rather than relying on the terrain itself which might still be in the process of being created and is therefore changing all the time.

Problems with this are that if you have an asteroid or something that is not approximately spherical the terrain will rarely be level beneath you. You also get the ship intersecting the visibly generated planet, or hanging above it a little way, because the height generation is effectively at a much higher resolution than the visible terrain is.

Collision with ships etc is a completely different system.

I ran into all of this stuff dealing with the Orbital code which was tricky because I tried to keep using the same system but treat it as a projection onto the inside of a cylinder and my maths wasn't that great.

EDIT: Perhaps "dumb as a brick" is unkind 🙂 What I mean is that it's a very simple method which works well enough for planets but possibly not for other bodies.

Running delivery missions in sol with the starting ship my autopilot kills me about half the time. Do I need to know something else? Is there a way I can be avoiding these accidents, or is this a bug in the autopilot code?

The autopilot is one of the parts of Pioneer that is getting intensive development work right now.

Interesting. My eagle never commited suicide by autopilot so far, only the heavier ships. Anyways, it's good to hear it's being worked on. It's not only for the player, after all, it's also for NPC AI. It might be fun for a while to watch incomming trade ships crash and burn, but it gets kinda old... 😆

Whatever issues the current autopilot has, it's infinitely more robust than the one in Frontier. 'Save early and often' was the rule with that monster. 🙂

Related, jaj22 has completely rewritten the autopilot after the last couple of weeks. Imaginatively named "autopilot v2", it will hit the nightlies sometime in the next week.

@robn

On a completely different note, has any thought been given to those extra military drives?

There hasn't been any discussion on IRC. All the discussion is in the issue. My personal opinion is somewhere between "no" and "not yet". I'll try and find time to write something soon.

Cheers, it's just kinda hard to form a rebuttal to a "no" argument if there's been no argument 🙂

I'm personally a little in favour, but I'd like to add a second layer somehow defining that you cannot own them. I want them in so that we can have military ships with better engines than the players, if the engines don't exist them no-one can have them. Likewise I'd like to have smuggling missions with carrying these things as cargo, it seems very weird actually that we can't carry ship components as cargo just like the commodities - but that's probably a whole other can of worms.

So yeah, I want them in, but later on we should add a way of limiting them to prevent players from getting them (and other equipment) except via missions. Them not being there at all stops us from doing other mission scripting. We should actually be adding more items to that list rather than limiting it, things like cameras, nukes, mines etc. Things that aren't available to purchase but that can be given to the player via scripts for missions.

If they're not on the list, they don't exist in the game.

Will this autopilot allow for flying to other ships?

This is a reasonable argument in favour. Based on that, I'm happy to remove my "no" and make it a firm "not yet". The reason for that is that we first need a way to exclude them from the shipyard. I also think it'd be worth waiting until we have a clear outcome to #717.

I think it still only knows how to fly to a fixed point and doesn't update its target to follow. We're moving away from the general "intercept AI" concept towards allowing ships to make short in-system hyperspace jumps. The idea is still in very early development; see the Active Discussions topic on the wiki.

Well I can update the pull request branch with a flag that simply says whether something can be bought/sold and define it for each item, then check in the ship upgrade system if an item can be bought/sold.

As to the second though: That's much trickier to answer, mostly because I'm not convinced there's any good argument for the system that's been described in issue #717. Perhaps in the very long term we'd need a system that allowed for completely decoupled items that are built from data. However right now we have 99% of the things that people want in the game and the focus seems rightly to be elsewhere on implementing missions and fleshing out the galaxy, not to mention factions etc.

So the real cost of maintaining or extending the existing system is very small, these engines, camera for recon' missions, nukes for military missions maybe... that's a tiny handful of new things versus a complete rewrite of the entire system, and the rewriting of every system that defines the existing items to use any new system.

It might be cleaner from a code point of view, but after all that work I don't see how what you'd have would be better than what we've got.

EDIT - (unless of course we're not talking about a complete data driven rewrite, in which case adding some flags and allowing for Lua to add untradable items would probably cover 90% use cases)

Just my 2p though.

Andy

That's making the grand assumption that missions will only require engines, cameras and nukes. Lua coders shouldn't have to have the engine modified to support generalized ideas, so it follows that Lua coders should have some mechanism for defining custom equipment and cargo at the very least.

Nooooooo!

I would really regrett that.

It's not a grand assumption it's experience from previous work. You can often spend weeks rewriting something to be incredibly flexible, to offer up unlimited opportunity, you re-enter all of the existing 200+ items/models/animations/whatevers data and then... 3 new things are added which are used in just 1% of the cases and would have taken 15 minutes for a coder to add. Or worse, the 1 and only way that something is used remains the 1 and only way that something is ever used. I've seen it happen repeatedly and been powerless to stop it before.

If someone wants to do it then great, but without a concise and cohesive reason for doing it I don't see what the difference will be. There's a table with 40+ entries which will need to be rewritten to support this new system, for the sake of adding a few more. Adding all of the other military drives only took an hour or two of my time, and a lot of that was doing some maths on a piece of paper to work out the prices. That time is cheap for the amount of reward.

So what I see is a working system that is easy to support vs an unknown with limited benefits - more than anything it just feel like the kind of system described above.

I guess in principle I agree with the motivation, to drive the definition and creation of ingame objects from data, that would be nice. It's simply that I don't see the benefit in doing so in this case.

Did you ever play I-War? I quite liked their drive idea, think it was called the LDS or something. It "sliced up space and put it behind you" a bit like a warp drive or some nonsense... but it made it easier to get around in real-time.

Not sure I'd like to see it in Pioneer though, part of the fun and gameplay is that things-take-time and you need to plan ahead for them.

It's not time that made us consider in-system jumps. It's the fact that you'd basically never, ever meet anybody. Pirates are already out there, in space. Ever been caught by one? Didn't think so. They can't reach you before you dock, an the only alternative would be for them to to hang around space stations waiting for incoming traders. Like the authorities would stand for that.

Frontier got around this by teleporting pirates to your location. Pioneer just might have to do the same thing. At least we let you do it back!

Good point, so how about the I-War third way where you can travel for a limited time, and using generous amounts of fuel perhaps(?), in-system at some high fraction of the speed of light - or warping more accurately.

... but can we not call it warping, please, Star Trek is not something I want this particular game associated with! 😀

I-War is exactly what I was thinking about. I could condone the LDS because you need some mcguffin like that if you don't want to go all the way and include orbital propagation and a gravity simulation, which would clearly have been overkill for the first game, and in the second they pretty much had to go by what the first provided.

But since we already have orbital propagation and gravity simulation in pioneer, it would be a sad thing to see the flight model go the way of every other flight model in every other space sim out there. Space just isn't big if you even can jump around inside systems. Well, it would be sad for me, anyways.

EDIT: As for pirates, I suppose they would intercept your hyperspace arrival cloud before you arrive at the system. At least that' how I used to assasinate people in FFE.