!! Pioneer Question Time !! - Ask them here

[fluffyfreak]

UPDATE: I just downloaded the Pioneer version that became available on the 1st of July - before I was using the previous version - and so far I haven't experienced the problem. Interesting, I wonder what changed or whether it was just a bad build. Thanks for the update though I hope it doesn't reappear for you!

[robn]

the pirate will catch me shortly after i start decelerating. (i think the enemy don´t cheat for interceptions) At Speed 8000kms (no matter the speed) we enter in combat (Duel). (The enemy don´t cheat in combat, but now i believe he cheats!?)The AI ships in Pioneer do not cheat. This is quite unlike Frontier, where they cheat like crazy.

[robn]

But in frontier FFE the enemy don´t cheat for interceptions. maybe if we use Max stardreamer (x5)!?In Frontier they do cheat for interception. Well, they don't really intercept you at all - they just spawn on top of you.

[robn]

I´m not sure about frontier, but FFE i don+t think they cheat, because manual said the Enemy Use Autopilot to intercept, and the enemys spawn when you arrive at a system.The manual would say that, because its trying to create a plausible scenario to immerse the player in. But the game itself cuts corners to make it look like that. Which is fine, cheating is perfectly acceptable if the player can't tell. I'm not criticising it at all, just noting the difference.

[fluffyfreak]

@Vuzz & Biomechanoid Hi guys, if you can't get along then please don't respond to each others comments and posts so that we can keep these topics for those who do have questions. Ok? Thanks, Andy

[NeuralKernel]

A while ago there was a commented out part of the UI (an extra page under F3 I think) that showed the velocity for a circular orbit at the present altitude along with a descent to surface velocity and I think an escape velocity. I reactivated it in a version a while ago and found it very useful, is it still present in any form?

[nozmajner]

Yes, it's there. I routinely uncomment it.

[Guest]

You can find it, also, in the Scout+ mod.

[fluffyfreak]

There's some flaw with it that is the reason it's not available.I tested it a while ago but can't remember what the issue was - Brianetta pointed out the problem to me ... really cannot recall where I had the discussion with him.

[TheBob]

 But in frontier FFE the enemy don´t cheat for interceptions. Of course they do. Otherwise, if your ship has higher acceleration, they could only keep within firing range for a few seconds. The words you posted from the manual are quite correct: A slower opponent can catch up to you. It omitts, however, that he could never match velocities. Hence, if a slower ship tries to intercept a fast one, it will usually have a firing window of a few seconds. Enough to get a few missiles of and get lucky. Not enough for a dogfight.

[Zordey]

@Bio I haven't read back more than a handful of posts so I'm not sure what your question actually was but: In Frontier / FFE, enemy ships did 'cheat' to intercept you. As TheBob stated above a slower (or even slightly faster ship) stands next to no chance to catch up to your ship (and attain a similar relative velocity) if you are accelerating / decelerating (it would be possible if you were coasting [no thrusters for a long period]). Frontier cheated when you engaged the stardreamer by ignoring the pirates deceleration phase and just spawning the pirate ship within a few hundred km from your position at a similar relative velocity, thus allowing it to catch you. Yes in Frontier, pirates were randomly spawned when you entered a system (I often saw a pirate Imperial Courier after jumping into an archaic system and just went back to a save point and tried again)The coloured dots on the system map are not implemented in Pioneer (correctly anyway as far as I know)The Frontier / FFE manuals may contain plenty of factual elements, but they are a work of fiction designed to immerse the player in the Frontier universe, not describe how the behind the scenes game mechanics actually work.

[TheBob]

 What i say is in frontier i can select a ship (dots in the map) and intercept it with AUTOPILOT. That's hyperspace clouds. They're static, they don't move. I know the Frontier manual mentioned the possibility to target and intercept far off ships, but that was never implemented. Be aware that Frontier was released unfinished by a panicking publisher. Many of the features mentioned in the manual are not in the game, and frankly I am a bit surprised that you never noticed that, loving the game so much as you profess. And some people disagree with this, but what they say has not convinced me Do I really have to show you the math to convince you? Without Autopilot (Manual Flight) i think the bad guys don+t cheat. It doesn't have any effect on the AI whether or not you are using the autopilot. For what it's worth, the Autopilot also cheats for you. I was a pretty solid manual flyer back in the day, but the Autopilot managed to beat me every time. And that was although I was turning my ship around and using main thrusters both parts of the way, while the Autopilot for some weird reason insisted on using the Retros for deceleration. By all logic, I should have been a lot faster. But there's theory and physics, and then there's the technical limitations of a 286 processor... Here's how it works: A computer cannot do two things at a time (well, multicores can, but those weren't in fashion back in the day). What they can do is do things so rapidly one after another that you think it's doing it all at the same time. But between every frame there's time that passes. This is called a timestep. When a program runs in realtime, this timestep is usually long enough to do everything you need, including moving a dozen of planets and ships around. But if you crank up time acceleration, an unfortunate thing happens: at 10'000x time acceleration, a program suddenly has to calculate what happens within 10'000 times the time that has passed for the processor. That's 10'000 times as much calculations. This is a serious problem even on todays machines. Depending on time acceleration and complexity of the program, this leads to loss of FPS. The image on the screen starts to become a slideshow, because the computer has to calculate too much and needs too long to calculate it, so that the next image only appears on the screen after significant fractions of a second. What do you do to prevent this? You drop precision. Instead of calculating what happened say every 0.1 seconds of the time that passed, you take larger timesteps. a second. a minute. In case of Frontiers' technology, probably an hour or more. This leads to extreme imprecisions, which would make you crash into planets, or (as was quite frequently the case in Frontier if you happened to have a planet in your way) through it, because at one timestep you were in front of the planet, and in the next timestep you were already past it, the intermiediate space lost to the unrelenting limits of your hardware . It can be smoothed with interpolation, but again a 286 doesn't provide the necessary horsepower to do that in a reasonable time (operations can become quite a bit complex when interpolating, and Frontier needed most of its cycles for the 3-d engine anyways. 3-dimensional trigonometry is such a draw on a processor that people developed a seperate peace of hardware to make it work fast enough). So what do you do? you cheat, because it's the only thing you can do. "So, the whole thing is too inprecise at 10'000x time acceleration to reliably establish position and velocity? well, screw that, we'll just run it until the player is close enough, and then we'll magically beam him into the right spot for the landing, slow down TimeAccel, and let the autopilot land. Noone's really going to notice it anyways, everything's happening too fast". And this is how they made Frontier work on their hopelessly inadequate hardware. They cheated, because there was no other way to make it work. And so, the autopilot in Frontier (and FFE) are cheaters, because they couldn't function otherwise. It's not a shame, or a bad thing, or something that needs to be shushed. They had a vision, a vision too big for their hardware, and they found a way to make it happen, and we're all glad for it.The Autopilot is still cheating, though. Get used to it.

[Zordey]

250 posts in 43 days... thats gotta be some sort of record?

[TheBob]

he almost beat the autopilot by 6 minutes, using main thrusters and he fail, his words.maybe he can beat the autopilot!? In Frontier, it's impossible because the autopilot cheats (the shorter the distance and the higher the time acceleration, the more it matters. It is possible to get the upper hand on reeeeeally long flights. A few kilometers will be crossed by the Autopilot at max timeaccel in... 0.0 seconds. Try it!).In Pioneer, it's really difficult because the Autopilot is pretty good. You might be able to get the upper hand manually by selecting a better planet and base aproach, but that's about it.

[fluffyfreak]

Can I ask that instead of arguing about it, some details of which is well know fact as a result of disassembling the original code, that you start a new thread rather than keep filling this one with off-topic discussion? If you want to discuss what the original auto-pilot did then I recommend you go to Tom Mortons website, grab the GLFrontier version and source code and take a look for yourselves, maybe even record a video if you want. This stopped being a question long ago and has become an argument.

[TheBob]

Sorry, you're right.

[fluffyfreak]

No, Pioneer != Frontier. We don't use any of the source code from Frontier, or the same algorithms, they are implemented completely independently.So seeing what Frontier does tells you nothing about what Pioneer does. We've reached similar goals by travelling different routes and where Frontier had to make simplifcations and approximations we're often able to do it fully.

[Pinback]

As Fluffyfreak has stated "Do try to stay on topic". If you feel the need to discuss Frontier then they are other area of the forum for it.

[fluffyfreak]

Technically is important though because they're arguing about how the games work, and Pioneer does not, and never has, worked the same as Frontier. How it looks is superfically like Frontier in many places, and yet it is very different in many other areas too. If you're after something more like Frontier then you want Genesia. Pioneer was never trying to be Frontier although many would have liked that, even Tom Morton has commented and said that using the Frontier ships was a bad decision, Pioneer is trying to be what we think Frontier would have liked to be if the technology had been available when it was released. These are two very different goals, and they're something I've talked about in many threads and comments extensively in the past. I'm not trying to say it shouldn't be discussed, I'm saying that it shouldn't be discussed in this HELP thread.So if you guys do want to discuss it, just create a new thread and discuss it in there.However, please do be aware that whilst there are superficial (on the surface, skin deep, graphical) similarities that doesn't mean you can assume that the games work the same intnernally. Frontier had to run on very limited hardware, Pioneer would NOT be able to run on that same hardware because it does a lot of things that Frontier could not afford to do because of the technology available. Now, any more posts in this thread on the topic of Frontier VS Pioneer and I will be asking a moderator to move them to this thread I've created for you to discuss these things. This thread is where people come to post questions where they need HELP, not for arguing or general discussion. Stay on topic.

[Pinback]

Right Rocketeer :banned: I have moved one of your post to the Frontier v Pioneer thread as it is "OFF TOPIC" . And if I continue to get any more of it in this thread I will just delete the posts if you or anyone else feel the need to whinge about it then use the Frontier v Pioneer thread.