UncleBob's mission ideas

[UncleBob]

My scout mission script is comming along, almost finished, more or less waiting for the requested API extensions to wrap it up.So, I started thinking about something that I have missed very much in both Frontier and FFE: Planetary survey missions. You know, the kind that gives you a target some 100+ish lightyears out in the Pampa where noone lives, forces you to go places most people wouldn't go without monetary incentive.The overall concept is pretty clear: Have a long time available to completion, make a few jumps, get to the target, land, spend a bit of time, get back and get paid, be on the road for a few months, bring beer and friends anlong. Technically, I know how to do that by now. There's just a few things I'd like some input on.First, Survey missions are supposed to be long term, and long term missions should require a bit of planning. Pack enough fuel to get there and back, or equip a fuel scoop (comming to think of it, I don't even know wheather pioneer has a fuel scoop). Make sure your hyperdrive is serviced before you go, but there it pretty much ends. There should be survey equipement, but I'm not quite sure how to realise that best. I'm thinking of survey equipement as a ship upgrade, or as cargo, or both. Only ship equipement would be kinda lame, unless it's limited to a certain amount of uses. Or Survey equipement could be cargo that you jettison on landing, the more you drop the shorter you have to stay to get results. Or there could be a survey lab to equip your ship with, that uses survey equipement like a hyperdrive uses hydrogen. The problem in the last case, of course, is triggering the thing (i.e. starting a survey). It could be made to use up a gunport and be triggered by the gun, I guess (you know, Antenae and stuff... ). Or I guess it could start working all by itself when landed on a planet you have a survey mission for. Come to think of it, why not? What would the community prefer?Second, These survey missions are inherently boring. Sure, you get to see new places, and you get good money, that's one nice side to it. But without a little surprise here and there it'll get old pretty fast, especially so because these missions will take a bit more time than a delivery run. So, what options are available to spice up the expierience? Pirates in remote uninhabited systems are stretching credibility a bit. A few illegal settlers, ok, but that has to be really limited. Running into an unregistered mining operation by some shady corporation maybe, as long as the system isn't too remote. Secret gouvernament research lab, imaginable. Some aliens every know and then would be an obvious choice, but they'd need a ship model. Imaginable at some point in the future, I guess. The player could at times discover some alien artifacts on a planet he surveys as a little bonus (erm... do we have alien artifacts in pioneer?) Other than that, not much comes to mind. A hyperdrive breaking down unexpectedly and needing some stuff to repair it could be interesting, but I'm not sure how the "gathering materials to patch it up" should be implemented as long as gathering materials isn't implemented on a general scale. It's not like something has to happen on every survey mission, more like about every tenth or even less, but something should happen every now and then, and it should not get too repetitive. Any Ideas are welcome.

[s2odan]

Some nice ideas there
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, I don't even know wheather pioneer has a fuel scoop). Make sure your hyperdrive is serviced before you go, but there it pretty much ends.
Yep there are fuel scoops, and a planned addition is the inclusion of crew which would have a rudimentary ability to service the drive on the go.
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The overall concept is pretty clear: Have a long time available to completion, make a few jumps, get to the target, land, spend a bit of time, get back and get paid, be on the road for a few months, bring beer and friends anlong. Technically, I know how to do that by now. There's just a few things I'd like some input on.
Well there could be many variations of survey missions, some might have a specific target, but another company may simply be interested in systems with lots of resources and might say we'll pay you X(varies with conditions) amount for any information on these worlds... wherever they are. I would think a mission like that would probably not have a time-limit.Perhaps we could even have missions where you are paid to captain a real exploration ship (large ship ).
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Or there could be a survey lab to equip your ship with, that uses survey equipement like a hyperdrive uses hydrogen.
Perhaps it could depend on the type of survey mission, some might require a detailed mineralogical analysis which might require a landing wheras an orbital scan might suffice for others?
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Any Ideas are welcome.
Well you have some good ones already, I think the motherlode of finds should probably be an alien ruin, perhaps it could be a ring-world
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but I'm not sure how the "gathering materials to patch it up" should be implemented as long as gathering materials isn't implemented on a general scale.
Ah I have a rudimentary mining branch which lets the player land and gather minerals if they have the correct ship upgrade, its pretty crappy but could work quite well here :)Minerals are assigned to planets based on their metallicity value which is all done by seed, they also have a mineral abundancy value generated from seed.

[UncleBob]

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Well you have some good ones already, I think the motherlode of finds should probably be an alien ruin, perhaps it could be a ring-world
I think the Devs will slap me if I request code for a procedural ringworld. like really, really hard...

[Brianetta]

s2odan wrote:
I think the motherlode of finds should probably be an alien ruin, perhaps it could be a ring-world
Expect to have to travel thousands of light years to find one.

[fluffyfreak]

UncleBob wrote:


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Well you have some good ones already, I think the motherlode of finds should probably be an alien ruin, perhaps it could be a ring-world
I think the Devs will slap me if I request code for a procedural ringworld. like really, really hard...
I'm already working on it [url]https://github.com/fluffyfreak/pioneer/tree/Vavatch[/url] a lot of work though, currently can only handle something up to about 6 times the diameter of Earth, needs massive refactoring, optimisation, reduce memory overheads etc.Expect it sometime in the next 3 to 4 months as I only get to work on it occassionally. You can currently land on the inner surface though and watch the day/night roll across the surface For testing that branch creates an Orbital within the Sol system. If it ever gets into the game proper then that won't be the case!AndyEDIT - Oh yes, and it WILL eat all of your RAM and probably exceed the 32-bits address space if it does, edit the solar systems Lua file to reduce the diameter of the Vavatch entry. Obivously that's also something that won't make it into the final build!

[UncleBob]

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Expect it sometime in the next 3 to 4 months as I only get to work on it occassionally. You can currently land on the inner surface though and watch the day/night roll across the surface
Impressive. But that's way too valuable to find on a chance mission. This would need a scripted storyline resulting in its discovery. By the way, how does the autopilot handle this little miracle? I'm thinking about storylines for different professions anyways, EV Nova style (that game has a ridicoulously high replay value simply for all its story content). Actually, I'm thinking a bit further, in the direction of procedural storylines (because, you know, programming is something I'm better at than writing...). As far as I can see, it might be a bit tedious to realise with LUA, but not a technical problem. But the game is in a too early state to start stuff like that. There has to be an official background story and established factions in first, or someone will do most of the work twice.

[fluffyfreak]

UncleBob wrote:
Impressive. But that's way too valuable to find on a chance mission. This would need a scripted storyline resulting in its discovery. By the way, how does the autopilot handle this little miracle?
Well you can't land on it using autopilot, and there's no cities or anything, and orbiting still works which it shouldn't due to it's low (relative to a planet) mass. That's all part of what needs refactoring. However it does mean that at the moment you can autopilot to the various distances and then manually land on it :)I expected that there will be a few, far enough out and within some specific volumes. The remnant of some civilisation, or perhaps part of some active civilisation akin to the purpose the Thargoids served, that sort of thing. When it's ready for inclusion all of that can come up for discussion though.

[robn]

fluffyfreak wrote:
When it's ready for inclusion all of that can come up for discussion though.
It might be better to start that discussion now, unless you're keen on the idea of doing a hell of a lot of work only to find that it won't be included. And just so we're clear, that's not me stating an opinion on its suitability at all. That's for another thread

[fluffyfreak]

robn wrote:
It might be better to start that discussion now, unless you're keen on the idea of doing a hell of a lot of work only to find that it won't be included. And just so we're clear, that's not me stating an opinion on its suitability at all. That's for another thread
Oh don't worry I'm going to finish it anyway even if everyone hates it I realise that it might not be suitable for Pionner but I started it as a bit of a personal challenge and figured that I'd offer it up once it's ready so that people can have Orbitals if they like/want Orbitals in Pioneer.It's tricky because I view them as a sort of inevitable conclusion for any sufficiently advanced species that wants to live on world-like objects but has an ever increasing population, going through the intermediary stages of space stations / habitats and hollowed asteroids etc. They're not even amongst the most extreme ideas going.So I view them as probably out there if there are, or have been, aliens that were advanced enough. On a technical level, by the year 3200, I don't see why they'd be beyond humans to build in the real world, but for game play reasons I don't think they should be part of the human factions in the game unless one has been found and inhabited. Perhaps as the base of the non-Earth Empire faction?At the moment the strongest argument against them is technical, a full Orbital with ~1g surface effect gravity and ~24hour day is ~6,000,000km across. That means a lot of data to be generated and rendered. I have a bunch of ideas for reducing this to manageable levels but it's always going to be a bloody big object hanging like a bracelet in space.Andy

[robn]

UncleBob wrote:
My scout mission script is comming along, almost finished, more or less waiting for the requested API extensions to wrap it up.
#760 implements these and will be in tonight's build (and of course alpha 16). See the SystemBody codedoc for details.

[UncleBob]

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So I view them as probably out there if there are, or have been, aliens that were advanced enough. On a technical level, by the year 3200, I don't see why they'd be beyond humans to build in the real world
I'm not sure if the Pioneer verse has matter conversion. Niven might have had a few quirks in his book, but I think he's totally right that such a project could only be realized if you can produce the needed materials out of thin air if needs be.
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#760 implements these and will be in tonight's build (and of course alpha 16). See the SystemBody codedoc for details.
w00t!

[Brianetta]

fluffyfreak wrote:
At the moment the strongest argument against them is technical, a full Orbital with ~1g surface effect gravity and ~24hour day is ~6,000,000km across.
A fellow Banks nut (-:

[fluffyfreak]

Brianetta wrote:
A fellow Banks nut (-:
Yup but actually Banks is just a maths nut To generate an outward force at the surface equivalent to 1g, whilst also having a 24 hour day/night cycle requires an object to spin at 0.0006944 rpm and be ~6,000,000km in diameter :DThere's a formula embedded in the code that also needs hooking up so the interface will change from being like a planets to something more like a definition for an Orbital, i.e. day/night cycle in hours, desired inner-surface gravity will give you an object X large and spinning Y rpm. Add in a desired width (edge to edge) of a section and it'll get as close as possible to that and then divide the surface into plate sections appropriately. For an Orbital the size of Earth the rpm is clearly visible even at normal speed! Scary.

[fluffyfreak]

UncleBob wrote:
I'm not sure if the Pioneer verse has matter conversion. Niven might have had a few quirks in his book, but I think he's totally right that such a project could only be realized if you can produce the needed materials out of thin air if needs be.
They actually require less mass than a planet. The typical one I've been assuming wouldn't require more than 50% of Earths mass. Of course you might have to mine and process about half the planets in the solar system to acquire all of it in the correct forms you needed... details, details...EDIT - Of course by Niven you mean a Ringworld don't you, hmm, yes. Still not impossible but would probably require the dismantling of every body in the solar system!

[UncleBob]

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Of course by Niven you mean a Ringworld don't you, hmm, yes.
I thought that was what everyone was talking about... ?anyways, you jacked my thread!

[Brianetta]

fluffyfreak wrote:


Brianetta wrote:
A fellow Banks nut (-:
Yup but actually Banks is just a maths nut To generate an outward force at the surface equivalent to 1g, whilst also having a 24 hour day/night cycle requires an object to spin at 0.0006944 rpm and be ~6,000,000km in diameter
I'm aware; I've read him. It's extremely anthropocentric, though: the chances of aliens either using a 24 hour day or requiring 1G is somewhere between negligible and vanishing.(You also called it an Orbital, which gave it away) (-:

[fluffyfreak]

UncleBob wrote:
I thought that was what everyone was talking about... ?anyways, you jacked my thread!
smaller ones yes... oops, I should have said YOINK! ... there, now it's mine On topic:I do like the idea of survey missions. You could even have some that are purely exploratory, lets say, a bonus for being the first to visit and land on particular types of worlds that might be suitable for colonisation?I suppose at the moment most of humanity is within a small volume but even a long way out there are always "small scale mining and prospecting" which seems a bit like a bug. If there's that much mining going on the Earth's would rapidly be buried beneath hundreds of kilometres of material imported from all of these outlying mining systems!You could pick up a job from the agency board asking you to visit and land on several worlds across several star systems a reasonable distance outside most of human space. The pay would be good to cover fuel etc, the job would be dangerous because many systems means many possible pirates and potential for crash landings etc, and finally the chance of finding side quests or artifacts would be higher than just plodding around known systems.

[UncleBob]

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You could even have some that are purely exploratory, lets say, a bonus for being the first to visit and land on particular types of worlds that might be suitable for colonisation?
You're basically talking about freelance exploration. That will certainly become a topic once the planetary generation is fully fledged out (you know, planet composition and stuff). Doing it before that would only mean doing it twie.
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a long way out there are always "small scale mining and prospecting" which seems a bit like a bug.
I think that's temporarily. I suppose the "settling algorithm" will undergo some severe rewriting when factions and stuff come into play.

[Brianetta]

fluffyfreak wrote:
If there's that much mining going on the Earth's would rapidly be buried beneath hundreds of kilometres of material imported from all of these outlying mining systems!
I'm sure they're not mining for Earth. Perhaps they're prospecting for relatively rare materials (such as gold, gallium, tungsten, carbon) for use in the construction of future space stations in that system.
fluffyfreak wrote:
...and finally the chance of finding side quests or artifacts would be higher than just plodding around known systems.
That's counter-intuitive to me. While any artefacts would remain undiscovered only in unexplored systems, the number of artefacts would be, for all practical purposes, zero. Unless you mean alien artefacts, in which case you'd better be a long, long way from Sol. In that case, the odds of stumbling upon the one system with such an artefact is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to it, and that's assuming you stop and search every system in a straight line on the way.Basically, if you ever find something at random, it's going to seem like the game handed it to you deliberately. The only way that would have believable odds would be the FFE way: Clues, and a mission chain. In a single word, plot.

[fluffyfreak]

Brianetta wrote:
Basically, if you ever find something at random, it's going to seem like the game handed it to you deliberately. The only way that would have believable odds would be the FFE way: Clues, and a mission chain. In a single word, plot.
Actually that was more what I meant, being sent to a system to "survey" it with a knowing nudge wink wink bob's your uncle and do-please-investigate-the-3rd-moon-cheers!