Yeah well the way she works is that she learns from how people have responded to things she has said. So in theory, If she was in the game then people would only talk about ingame stuff with her and that would be all she talked about. The only problem is if you ask if she is human. In that case if you asked her if she was real she would start going on about you being the machine and how she is real and if anyone ever told her their name then she would think that is her name and she can't carry out long conversations because she can't remember anything she has said previously.

An example is this conversation with cleverbot (an AI that works in the exact same way just without the face).

Cleverbot: Do you have a brain, Cleverbot?

User: You are cleverbot, not me.

Cleverbot: I beg to Differ. You are the Cleverbot and I am the User.

User: That is an interesting point of view.

Cleverbot: Why do you think you are human?

User: I think, therefore I am.

Cleverbot: But thought can be wrong.

User: If thought is wrong, I still have thought.

Cleverbot: Very funny, but I know some cheerleaders that went on to be doctors. I don't really care George, if you don't think having to feel accounts for much, then fine.

User: I am not george.

Cleverbot: I know. You asked if I love george though.

User: Do you love george?

Cleverbot: I do not love george.

User: Who is george?

Cleverbot: You.

User: I am not george, I am John.

Cleverbot: So your name is ben?

Got another one for you. Because no space sim is complete without epic space battles, will this eventually support capital ships and turrets?

Probably both but no concrete plans at this stage. Also wrt capital ships, as Brianetta is fond of pointing out, we need to make a concious decision about how much realism we're willing to trade for gameplay.

I don't think there will ever be Star Wars style battles (with slow kilometer-long capital ships and zippy fighters), the high velocities don't lend itself to that. But realistic approaches can be 'epic' as well and not done to death 🙂

I think that the ability to be hired as a mercenary to take part in such an epic space battle could be awesome to add eventually. Or how about transporting goods and people through war zones. Just imagine the possibilities, the danger, the intrigue!

My end goal for the stuff I'm working on is to be able to do convoy escort missions. You'd be docked with some capital ship, which would be some kind of space station lite (dock and minimal repairs/refueling, no market or bulletin board). You'd launch when they get attacked, you might get some buffs in battle based on your wingmen or extra tech carried by the larger ship (extra scanner bits, missile control, extra cameras). When you get to the destination you get paid or get awards or whatever.

Out of that we get a long list of work items:

* path/waypoint-following AI

* "wingman" AI that can accept simple high-level commands (defend me, attack my target, etc)

* scriptable camera control

* GUI chat forms that aren't tied to a space station

* turrets

* combat AI for large ships that don't rely on being able to turn the ship quickly (ie use turrets)

* ships with docking ports

That's just off the top of my head, and that's only code bits. There's also broader mechanical/story/history/realism stuff that comes into play. What do these ships do? Who owns them? Why do they need protecting? Why do they even exist (can't lots of smaller ships do the job)? Who are the factions involved? How does your involvement in such a mission affect how others see you? How do your actions influence events elsewhere? And so on.

All this from one simple idea. Answer all these questions and implement all this stuff and you've got a very powerful set of tools for doing all sorts of other things that so far we haven't considered.

And that's why I'm here 🙂

Here's some more from the rain on your parade dept.:

- Why don't the attacked ships just jump to safety?

- How and where can they be attacked in the first place? (can't really set up an ambush for ships already moving at 100000km/s, and we don't have fixed "jump-points" where ships would predictably enter)

Nah not raining on anything, just more stuff to think about. We need to have some kind of idea of what's possible in our universe; questions like these always help.

Off the top of my head, and in no way indicating any kind of commitment to these:

Some space games/systems (notably EVE and Star Wars) have had a concept of a ship or piece of equipment that can pull a ship out of hyperspace and/or prevent it from jumping.

Deep in the hyperspace code there's a concept of hyperspace "entry zone" from 9-11AU from the primary system object (star or binary gravpoint). Admittedly its a random position so thats actually a massive spherical area, but maybe we could use that as a starting point for a more formal concept of where ships appear after hyperspace.

Or we could implement fixed jump points ala Babylon 5. 🙂

One option for an ambush would be for that entry point to be within a cone with it's base pointing at the origin system. Erm. Ok that was an awful way of describing what was in my head! 😆 damn... what I mean is... they'd appear within a region ~9AU from the destination star, but the centre of that region (volume/cone/sphere/whatever) would be inline with their jump origin star.

Um, does that make sense? It'd give ambushers a limited volume to set a trap within so ambushes wouldn't be completely predictable, but not utterly random.

Also I do think that fix jump gates would make a lot of sense, might even make smaller ships reasonably sensible choices. However that smells like feature creep 😉

I quite like that. It would also mean that we could get rid of the hyperspace following hack for assassinations and such. You'd just land in the same general region and then its up to you to find the cloud. Of course there'd have to be some other mechanism to help with that, but its slightly more plausible.

We don't exactly have a defined scope, so by definition its not creep. But I take your point. I don't think its too outrageous though - conceptually it doesn't change how hyperspace works, it would mostly be a range or fuel modifier.

Thats how gates should be done IMO... not a requirement just an aid.

Also, WRT hyperspace entry points. What about lagrange points? It could be simply if gravity = 0(close enough to 0) then jump is possible, which would bring lagrange points into play as you could both enter and leave a system from the inner planets, providing there was a lagrange point.

And I suppose literally every system with at least one planet there would have a lagrange point.

A combination of this and the directional 'cone' thingy fluffy mentioned is how I think it should be done.

Jump points, artificial or natural, are quite common for a reason... they provide strategic choke points and concentrate traffic. But it's straying quite far from Frontier. If we keep the current free-er jump model, it's conceivable that activity will happen near planets, stations and other installations where velocities are lower and it's easier to catch up/intercept. In deep space things will be quiet.

The point-less model can be limited at least by gravity, you need to be clear from planets and stations before jumping. Artificial limitations are OK too as long as the effects are well thought out...

I also think that gravity wells should effect jumping. perhaps even giving you damage if you jump out close to one. The problem with small jump gates is that you would need some kind of JTC (jump traffic control) to prevent collisions. a simple capital ship AI could be just "headlong pass, turn around, repeat" before better things are implemented. I'm no coder, but every game since Asteroids has turrets so they can't be that hard. What I feel is really important, and that most games lack, is a good collision avoidance AI. Also, Capships will be sluggish by nature, unless half the ship is engines. That could actually be interesting. Have there be both the big bruisers and other ones devoted to fast delivery of fighters.

EDIT: More of an under-the-hood question here. Will there be any work toward making the game look better for those of us that lack support for the shaders in this game? I know some shaders will work because in other, older games (SW empire at war, SW battlefront) things like heat distortion and motion blur still work. Maybe some kind of low shader setting, or a better auto detect? (particularly grating is the gradient used for planet atmospheres, with an eternal night sky above the horizon)

What's your hardware?

The machine at which I am currently sat has an Intel G31, which has no shader support in Pioneer. The hardware supports 2.0 shaders, and apparently so can the Linux drivers, if my Google-fu is strong today. My laptop has an Intel graphics adapter beginning i8, which doesn't support pixel shaders at all.

Pioneer is an ugly experience on both of these machines, despite running adequately quickly. I'd be happy to see Frontier's fake sky. (-:

I'm on Win 7 ultimate and old ATI card, old laptop with only 512MB RAM. Enabling shaders makes gas giant halfwhite/halfblack.

When runing oolite, shaders option is by default disabled and can not be turn on.

I posted this same idea a while ago, so obviously I think it's the way to go. One modifier, I think the distance from the destination star at which one arrives should be based on the mass of the destination star. The more massive the star, the further away you end up from it. Ideally, the stars would all be in their actual positions and the effects of gravity wells of neighboring stars and planets would be taken into account by a pseudo-physics equation, but a plausible random fudge would be fine.

The idea that one couldn't jump unless the gravity well one is in is near 0, or a jump gate or Lagrange point is available is intriguing, but perhaps a bit clumsy or convoluted, but I still like it. Perhaps jumping from too large of a gravity field would cause damage, but it would be a good logical way to introduce mis-jumps into the game. 😀

Anyone have a link to a good free mp3/midi to ogg converter? I've been playing with the alpha 12 dev version which has music support. It's a good start, but the music gets repetitive after a while. I'm sure that there will be folders we can drop our music into that are based on trigger events eventually, but even so I, and probably everyone else here have some music they'd like to add to their personal copy of Pioneer. I've looked around, but I'm not sure which one to download. Any recommendations ❓

If you're running the latest nightly you'll already have those event-based dirs.

The music that will be in the game proper can be downloaded from issue #171. I'm working through it today and will be looking to merge it tonight or tomorrow in preparation for Alpha 12 (due for release on 8 July).

That's wonderful! I'll try to download it today, (takes 6 hrs for me) but I still want to convert some music I have and use it in my copy of Pioneer, so does anyone have a free converter?

On Windows, OggDrop is nice & simple drag and drop converter: http://www.rarewares.org/ogg-oggdropxpd.php . If you need to convert .mp3 to .wav first, there's Lamedrop: http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lamedrop.php

Thanks, Luomu! 😀

Any time frame for when planetary mining will be implimented?

Regards

It is currently not planed at all, we developers are lazy people after all.

You can post new issue/bug/feature request on pioneer github page to make sure this nice feature is not forgotten.

Easier stuff are probably going to appear sooner than later, but you never know.

I wouldn't say its not planned - its required for feature parity with Frontier, so we have the design already. But yes, its not being worked on at the moment.