SpaceSimCentral

Hehe flying bananas eh?I think that ship will get added around the time of this next one : In all fairness though, it could actually be a good idea to put a flying banana in the game if it can be tied to some crazy mission. It could be a commercial ship of an interstellar fruit company
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Well, in the 32nd century you can have realism mixed with a lot of handwaveium. In Star Trek they used "inertial dampers" to avoid being reduced to a puddle of inedible jelly during acceleration, and we just state that our engines run on some as yet undiscovered principle. It doesn't have to be totally realistic, just plausible enough to create a suspension of disbelief.
Well said Marcel. How great would it be if these 'handwaveium' devices could be removed from the ship Totally pointless but could be fun and help explain that these devices are hard at work keeping you safe ;)In the name of 'realism' I have been playing with the ship stats adding realistic mass and volume for every ship, as well as scaling them all correctly using the pilot as a reference. But using realistic values for capacity tends to turn most of the ships into super traders. Theres a few options to counteract this;We can reduce volume levels, saying a ship only has a certain amount of usable space inside, much less than it would look like.Reduce scale/size of a lot of ships so realitic mass and volume values can remain.Increase the size and or weight of all equipment, I have done this for the very largest of equipment, so perhaps this is the way to go, but it means big engines and weapons the size of a house But I suppose thats not too far fetched when you are in a ship thats 20 times or more the size of a house, like the flowerfairy trader.Now that I think about it, increasing size of things is probably best, as even modern battleships (water-based ships ) have engines larger than a big house.

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In Star Trek they used "inertial dampers" to avoid being reduced to a puddle of inedible jelly during acceleration
With all due respect, but a device that is in direct violation of the law of conservation of energy can hardly be called realistic. That's why I mean that you shouldn't get too realistic with pioneer. Realism in spaceship design would at least include following the laws of conservation of energy and thermodynamics, which are both comfortably sufficient to make spaceflight with the current ships impossible. That's nothing to worry about in point of game design, you just can't call it realistic (even in the 23. century, the basic laws of physics will still aply, unless they change at the occasion of the second comming, but I don't think you'd want that as part of your future history )

Well, the ships must be powered by zero point energy reactors so they have enough energy to, um, yeah. Also think about this, in FE2 one ton of hydrogen would get you to Pluto and back in a week, implying that your exhaust must be moving at relativistic speed. You lift off, point your nose skyward and pull away at 20g. The exhaust from your engines would blast the spaceport into a smoking crater! Can we please have this feature in the game? I agree that quasi-realistic gameplay is what Pioneer needs.

Hail Pionauts! Ships based on realism with plausible values would be great! Thankfully, this isn't a roll playing game with dice, tables and charts to bend our brains around - as the PC does all the number crunching. Am sure Pioneer will have a nice human interface with neat icons (heh) while all the grinding math gears are under the 'bonnet'.Don't you find that we get a sense of the way any computer game behaves after a while - an intuitive flow - you get a feel for it. Jamie

Hi guys, is anyone interested in testing out this new volume system?Its unlikely that I'll be able to add anything else to it before christmas, and since its in a working state it might as well be released for testing.

Pioneer Alpha 7.5 WIPWell here it is anyway, let me know what you all think.

s20dan m3 instead of tones ? why ? 1 tone per unit is much more sense than something like density. Look how goods are transported by sea, its in containers so in EF2 it was done good 1 T per container. Changing it to spare units will make mess in cauculations. What should be changed is few ship iteams like autopilot, scaner, radar mapper, ecm system those things are most programs or electronic boards so it cant weight 1T Rockets weights are silly too but please leave item in commodity market it sopouse to be in containers. For example 1T of liquor means lots of bottles with alcohol 1T of fruit and veg means lots of fruits packed to 1T container, 1T of animals is for example 1 or 2 cows or 1 bull, 1T of computers means lots of PCs ECT ECT so why would anybody change that? Things are transported in containers not boxes or bags even if so then those boxes and bags are packed to containers that way its easier to stack and transport. You can drop stuff to cargo bay like few candies to pocket. Also you will not transport 3 boxes of candies from Berlin to Moscow not mention from 1 planet to another so u take 1 big container to make bigger money. In game there is not mentioned how big is containers but how much they weight so this is little funny, for example 1T of animals how anybody will measure 1 animal or few animals to weight perfect 1000kg For me there would be more sense to make containers count not weight so 1 container of animals makes more sense for me Maybe in game 1T means something like trailer hmm but it makes no sense cuz trailers are hauled by trucks so I bet 1T means 1 tone. As i mentioned earlier it makes no sense for ship items. Game should have other system for ship items and other for commodities in market. Hmmm Maybe someone will make few ship items weightless for example scanner and auto pilot 0T that way it would have sense. There should be cargo space for example 10 cargo space means that 10 containers can be transported by this ship. There is no need to mention how big are those containers just that it would make sense. For example eagle ship looks like there is no place at all to transport containers but if they would be enought small then yes but imagine container that holds 2 cows... eagle ship is to small :] I dont like ideas like cargo compression like it is made in X3 game. I am no scientist but I doubt that there would be any way to shrink cow or human or any living being like it was made in comedy movie "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" even iteams like iron plastic ect. compressing atoms maybe would be possible by storing info about item in electronic way but then we would need machine which can build/reproduce things but original item must be destroyed same goes for live beings. Teleporting would work in the same way so shrinking and teleporting makes no sense. good that elite 1 2 and FE dont have this stupid ideas like in modern games. I liked how things was transported in game "darkstar one" but better way would be robot or robots that would transport containers to ship and not hauled behind ship. In modern games its easier to do things like in x3 containers are sucked to ship :\ I didn't like it at all. When cargo got no free space then containers damaged ship and repairing was very expensive so there was need to calculate if it would fit in ship lol I writed about it on x3 forums but x3 players like it the way it is... o_O stu.... hmmmm weird people. Funny it was to first see how 1 container will take space then fly over it and ship just swallowed container for example 1 Container would take 30 units of cargo space so if ship got only 20 then it taked 20 and left 10 I dont remember exactly if that 10 was left od just disappeared or ship was damaged because of no free 30 unit of space anyway how silly was person who put that idea to game! I hope that someday there will be made game with my ideas not only how things should be stored in ship and gathered from space but ideas that fills my brain Oh and to be precise as it comes to gathering containers from wrecked ship when they would be ejected and not completely damaged while ship explosion, that container would be pushed by explosion so it would move into space not stopping like it was done in x3 reunion... I dont remember how it worked in frontier elite 2 cuz I played long long time ago and I play pioneer to short to got idea about that. First ship should maintain same speed and direction as that container then robot should be send and try to attach to that container then by maneuver engines it should be slowly inserted to cargohold. It would be funny if container would spin to fast for robot to attach to it lol Hmm robots would be very durable in collisions and just impact container then start to slow its spinning. For me it would be much fun to gather containers from space. I bet 90 % of players would not be annoyed by this kind of realism because if someone play FE 2, FFE and Pioneer he must like realism, other way he would play games like x3, Freelancer, Darkstar One ECT or even much worst "space" games ("space" lol more like underwater games )Sorry for my flood of thoughts [attachment=347:oocl_shenzen.jpg]

Cosm1cGam3r wrote:
s20dan m3 instead of tones ? why ? 1 tone per unit is much more sense than something like density. Look how goods are transported by sea, its in containers so in EF2 it was done good 1 T per container.
Not sure what that argument is meant to demonstrate. Though there is an upper limit (which could be much higher on fictional, future containers) not all shipping containers are the same massHowever, it makes sense that in the future we will not abandon the concept of containerisation, so items in pioneer might have a standard cubic meterage thats consistent with all items, only the masses would be different... or it might logically have more in common with the airfreight industry which has several different standard sizes for containers.Needs are no doubt even more exotic in the future so you might see drastically different container masses also because they do different things like cyrogenic storage or nuclear containment.
Cosm1cGam3r wrote:
What should be changed is few ship iteams like autopilot, scaner, radar mapper, ecm system those things are most programs or electronic boards so it cant weight 1T Rockets weights are silly too but please leave item in commodity market it sopouse to be in containers.
While an autopilot might simply be software you buy a license for (assuming pioneer ships are already FBW machines) and therefore mass free, you have no idea how much hardware might also be involved with ships items. A powerful ECM system, even for a smaller ship could conceivably weigh several tons... A scanner is also no doubt more than just a spinning projection on your hud and so on.the rockets are utterly useless and always have been, but a 1 ton rocket is not necessarily "silly" either depends on a lot of things, a Genie nuclear tipped rocket from the 50's was nearly half a ton, and that was designed to be used from relatively lightweight jet interceptors. but currently... but who uses rockets, very little bang for your buck. a rocket pack, with many smaller rockets would be more useful but still not really in the kind of combat we've seen so far in pioneer. Guided missiles are far more useful, and 1 ton for those is pretty good... even a relatively feeble modern day AA missile like the Phoenix is half a ton, certain SAM's can weigh a *lot* more. eh, I'm having a hard time following the rest of your post so i'll snip it there.

Cosm1cGam3r, I think you have given us a good example to counter your own argument. If you look at that cargo ship you'll see that the containers are all the same size. If one of those is filled with water, it will weigh more than if it's filled with computers, etc. I agree that an autopilot should weigh nothing, but a scanner is a physical object, like a radar dish , so it should have some mass, imho. Btw, I have a thought on atmospheric shielding that I haven't seen mentioned. Rather than hull plating, I think of it as a type of force field that deflects atmosphere around the ship. It would account for the fact that many of the ships aren't exactly aerodynamic and it weighs the same on large and small ships.edit; Ok Coolhand ninja'ed me there.

Cosm1cGam3r, looks like Coolhand and Marcel have answered your original question quite nicely.Btw equipment weights have already been changed, although I only played around with them for a very short time. For example, Unguided rockets now weigh 100KG, Guided rockets weigh 500KG, Smart rockets 1t, Naval Rocket 3t. They are still all the same size but thats easy to change.Autopilot also is 500KG, I had toyed with giving it 0 mass, but I agree with Coolhand's following point:
Coolhand wrote:
While an autopilot might simply be software you buy a license for (assuming pioneer ships are already FBW machines) and therefore mass free, you have no idea how much hardware might also be involved with ships items.

Marcel wrote:
....and it weighs the same on large and small ships.
Damnit, I thought I had changed Atmo shielding to increase in mass with the mass of the ship. I think it was something like Hull-mass/3, which means it would weigh one third as much as the dry weight of the ship.I also did this with Cargo bay life-support but using Volume as well as mass.But I just checked this and the changes are not in the WIP build, I must have reverted them or perhaps accidently broke the changes. It never worked very well anyway as on the equipment screen it only ever showed the 1t mass, instead of the correct mass.But if anyone wants to see that just let me know and I can post an .exe with that change.
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Btw, I have a thought on atmospheric shielding that I haven't seen mentioned. Rather than hull plating, I think of it as a type of force field that deflects atmosphere around the ship.
Well to have that, we dont really need to change anything. As like you mentioned it already weighs the same for all ships.What did you think of the idea of having atmo shield scaling to ship size?

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What did you think of the idea of having atmo shield scaling to ship size?
Actually, I hadn't noticed that you'd done that. I was thinking of FE2. Also, I haven't gotten the wip yet because it's too big for me to get at home on my dial-up. Anyway, it's a good idea. Whether hull plating or force field generator, it just makes sense.

Speaking of shielding, did not the Frontier manual mention something about reflective armour being developed by the navy?

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Actually, I hadn't noticed that you'd done that. I was thinking of FE2. Also, I haven't gotten the wip yet because it's too big for me to get at home on my dial-up.
No worries, I forgot to include that change in the WIP. I'll make a minimal version later that will only be a few MB in size which will include that change.And btw, the download is not on SSC, its hosted by Tom's Pioneer.net site, so you should be able to complete it ok.
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Speaking of shielding, did not the Frontier manual mention something about reflective armour being developed by the navy?
Interesting.. hm maybe it could be a shield that takes no space or volume, as it is directly applied to the hull?Has anyone actually tried the WIP? Come on people, I dont have time to make it and test it all, I have many other things that I have to do. Obviously I have tested it, but One person can only do so much. I need to know of any weird things that are bound to happen for other people. There are also a few ships in the WIP build that need to be tested on 'inferior' pcs, that is PCs with poor CPU and or Graphics Cards.

Sorry, working on it. I know from expierience how annoying it is if you work your arse off and then no-one seems interested.Two things right away, one unrelated to your work, actually: lower-case i is shown either has capital i or as lower-case l. The two are identical in the font used, which makes them indistinguishable, resulting in a bit awkward reading.The other thing, related to what you're currently working on: Ship information screen shows total capacity and free capacity in tons, while it should be showing m^3 now. I'm not sure yet if only the unit is wrong or if indeed the wrong data gets displayed, I'll have to chekc up on that a bit more. Just starting to really test now.Used capacity shows a pretty high number of tons (maybe uninitialised variable?), while all-up weight shows a NEGATIVE pretty high number (most probably uninitialised variable, I'd say). Also, mybe you want to rename "Hydrogen" to "liquid hydrogen", to conform with "liquid oxygen" (The density is the liquid density, in any case, which makes sense).Oh yeah, side note: The lanner textures are messed up again. The reason for this, as we know by now, is that some GPUs have trouble with non-squared texture sizes. Obviously someone forgott to replace the texture files with the sqared ones.

UncleBob wrote:
Sorry, working on it. I know from expierience how annoying it is if you work your arse off and then no-one seems interested.
Thanks
UncleBob wrote:
Two things right away, one unrelated to your work, actually: lower-case i is shown either has capital i or as lower-case l. The two are identical in the font used, which makes them indistinguishable, resulting in a bit awkward reading.
This one has cropped up before, ah here we go:
KingHaggis wrote:
Just tried Alpha 7 on my home PC and the letter "i" is all screwed up. It shows as a letter "l". I.E.: "slmulatlng evolutlon of the unlverse", etc.....
We never found a fix for it, I think Kinghaggis installed it onto a different computer and the problem went away. It could be Graphics card related... I have no idea. You could try replacing the font in the WIP with the font from the older versions, just to check if that works, but I doubt it..
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The other thing, related to what you're currently working on: Ship information screen shows total capacity and free capacity in tons, while it should be showing m^3 now. I'm not sure yet if only the unit is wrong or if indeed the wrong data gets displayed, I'll have to chekc up on that a bit more. Just starting to really test now.
Do you mean the F3 screen? If so I still haven't really touched that as there is a bug that I haven't figured out how to fix yet, something to do with converting from Floating point to Integer, as you will see the numbers for used and free capacity are way off. (1000 times too high or more)But yes eventually it will show capacity in volume and then will show Mass in tons, as well as having an updating display of ship acceleration.The only really accurate display of ship values at the moment is the one in the bulletin board that appears on the bottom left of the screen. But again that still shows capacity in tons, I just need to change that label from 'capacity' into Mass.Is there a link for these textures as they obviously haven't been included in the source? Once I have a copy of them Ill add them so this shouldn't happen again.Anyway, thanks for taking the time to test it out Uncle Bob. I look forward to hearing any other criticism or ideas that you may have.Cheers.Dan.

The thing with the messed up font (i showing as l) can be fixed by using this file:http://www.sendspace.com/file/rk4lr7Simply extract it and replace the files in your Pioneer folder with these new ones. Gives you a better to-look-at font, the letter i bug is fixed and you get better looking icons. Courtesy of Jamie Grant .

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Is there a link for these textures as they obviously haven't been included in the source? Once I have a copy of them Ill add them so this shouldn't happen again.
There is: http://p66.web.officelive.com/Documents/lanner_textures_test02.7z
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Do you mean the F3 screen?
Yeah, that one.
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something to do with converting from Floating point to Integer
??? Pioneer is written in C++ right? I never had any conversion problems from float to int in C++. Maybe the float value is in a wrong unit? The whole thing still smells more like uninitialised variables, since the values don't seem to be consistent and pretty random.
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Anyway, thanks for taking the time to test it out Uncle Bob. I look forward to hearing any other criticism or ideas that you may have.
Having just had my first combat in a beginner Eagle (no scanner, no nothing), I have a few suggestions for the combat AI and HUD. Not really related to what you're working on currently, and probably not on your plans yet, but I'll post them here anyways.First, it is virtually impossible to loose a one-on-one, even if your ship is far inferior, majorly because the AI has a terrible aim. It needs a rough chance-to-hit calculation to decide when to fire. I was majorly sitting ducks without using any thrusters, and the AI still hit me only randomly every now and then. Currently it seems to fire whenever its ship is pointing in your general direction, even if it is out of range. This leads to the AI always having overheated weapons in the instant it has the best chances to score a hit. I'd suggest a) checking range as a first fire-decision parameter, and then run a rough calculation of to-hit chance based on relative velocity of the target. If you want to go advanced (and I'd strongly suggest you do), put in a second order chance-to-hit calculation that checks wheather the chances for a hit are likely to get better within the next half second, and if so, let it hold its fire for another bit. Also, let it check for your ships current heading: If there's no gun facing its way, let it keep a steady course and concentrate on aiming, instead of already flying evasive maneuvers while there is no threat.The second trouble is, it's virtually impossible to win a one-on-one if your ship is far inferior. No, no contradiction there. If you end up in a one-on-one without strong weapons against a vastly superior opponent, the battle can take ages, if it ever stops at all. I spent about 15 minutes chasing an Eye with my minimally equiped eagle. The AI barely ever hit me, it wasn't a threat at all. I hit it again and again and again, however, because its ship could take so much punishement the combat couldn't really be resolved. I was locked up with an enemy that could never destroy me, and on the other hand it would take an unknown amount of time for me to destroy him. I eventually got bored and reloaded the game. The best solution is, of course, that a superior enemy just takes you out without much hassle (i.e. HITS you). If I had a radar mapper I would of course have had a means of seeing my "progress" on destroying him, so the situation was partly my fault. But the whole episode gave me plenty of opportunity to study the weaknesses of the HUD. Well, if you can call it a HUD at all, that is. I know that Pioneer is based on Frontier, but that's no reason to adabt the minimalistic hud design. The Hud has to contain information about relative velocity of the target (closing velocity and rel. velocity in the three axis) and its distance, and a target-lead-indicator (i.e. where to point your gun). The last one might be possible as an upgrade, but the first two are absolutely essential in order to make any meaningfull decision during combat. Look at the Evochron series or "I found her" for pretty good hud-designs (especially the former, which has great newtonian combat). In any case, the information has to be near the target on the screen, not somewhere in a corner. This is essential information, and in a combat you don't want to take your eyes off the target to look at it.Also, of course, the good old "press T and click on a target"-method from Frontier is highly impractical. Make a target list and a few keys to browse through it (the autotargeter from Frontier was a great reliev, but still highly impractical, and actually immersion-breaking. With all the high-tech and whatnot, it seems weird that the people of the 32. century aren't capable of programming a sensible scanner-to-user interface...)Also, Joystick support should be implemented rather sooner than later. Basic three-axis for pitch, yaw and roll should be sufficient, as the other functions can be comfortably mapped to any buttons on the joystick (I actually played JJFFE with my X52. A bit of work for mapping all the stuff, but well worth it for the vastly increased control).All in all, I'm still amazed at how far this project is developing. Never saw such speed and determination in an open-source game, keep going!

Another thing that just became obvious, related to the mass/volume system again: The autopilot (especially landing autopilot) is already getting in severe trouble. I don't know if it currently even takes the mass of the ship into consideration, but it can't land a heavily laden ship without wrecking the gear (unless you have shields, that is). Landing my Viper by autopilot every time results in a not too satisfying heavy "clonk" when I stuffed it up a bit too much... The thrusters are able to handle the load (the ship is decelerating on the way down), but the autopilot doesn't give it enough distance before beginning the final descent, resulting in rather high "touchdown"- (read: impact) velocities.Another stray thing that just caught my eyes, my missiles are enthusiasticaly firing their thrusters when I engage the main engine... :lol:Also, the textures to which I posted a link above don't seem to work in Alpha 7 anymore. Although the model displays correctly in the mesh-viewer when installing them, Pioneer would crash in Universe creation. No idea why...

S20dan, I was planning to download it at work tomorrow, but since I have today off I'm giving it a try. I'll let you know what happens on my inferior pc and graphics card. 4 hours and 36 minutes remaining...

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I know that Pioneer is based on Frontier, but that's no reason to adabt the minimalistic hud design.
But maybe the maker never intended Pioneer to become more than Frontier. I've said it about 3x before, I would love to see Pioneer become "more" than Frontier. But if it has never been the intention of the creator, and never will be the intention of the creator to let Pioneer evolve beyond Frontier, then you just can't call the HUD a weak point of the game as it's exactly the same as in Frontier.That's why I would love to see two versions of the game. But if it's the creators goal to make one perfect clone with better graphics, then let it be so. After all, it's his game. I'd still be happy in that case but I would be hysterical if one day we would have more detailed HUD's, freelook, X52 joystick support (I have one too), an option to build miningstations and drivable surface vehicles. But then, maybe the Elite Frontier purists would be disappointed. I guess it's very hard to please everybody.It would be easier to wish for things if you knew the plan for Pioneer. What it will become eventually. If it's going to be nothing more than an Elite clone (a very good one), then I can stop wishing and dreaming and start enjoying the game as it is. I think it's also very hard for a developer to start working on something when each day, there are 10 different people with 10 different requests. You'll have to make a list eventually of what will be and what won't be in the game to let people know and so the developer can stick to that route without going crazy with the requests.I won't say it again now by the way. I'm sure it becomes old after a while and most of you get my point now . This is just the way I would have done it.