SpaceSimCentral

Brianetta wrote:


UncleBob wrote:
Say, has anyone ever succesfully set down on an asteroid? I'm sitting there alright, but altitude is still shown as 29m and I don't get a landed message (and my survey doesn't start, of course. Just my luck that the first code test happened to pick an asteroid as the target!)
I have. It's not easy. Are you actually landed, or just buried in the surface? You can only land if your wheels are pointing toward the middle of the asteroid, which can be a real bugger to judge.
i managed a rough landing on phobos just yesterday

Huh? something ate my post, it seems... so here goes again:
Quote:
Are you actually landed, or just buried in the surface?
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.

UncleBob wrote:
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.
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.

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

UncleBob wrote:


Quote:
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.
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.
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.

Quote:
Running delivery missions in sol with the starting ship my autopilot kills me about half the time.
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.

@robnOn 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.

robn wrote:
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.
Will this autopilot allow for flying to other ships?

fluffyfreak wrote:
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.
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.

fluffyfreak wrote:


robn wrote:
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.
Will this autopilot allow for flying to other ships?
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.

robn wrote:
These 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.
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

fluffyfreak wrote:
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.
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.

Quote:
We're moving away from the general "intercept AI" concept towards allowing ships to make short in-system hyperspace jumps.
Nooooooo!I would really regrett that.