one old, long not asked question

Unfortunately, every star in the game is 100,000 km in radius, regardless of what the map file dictates. You can see this by flying to the original I-war2 stars and observing the distance the autopilot LDS cuts out. I tried to get by this by making a really big planet at the system center, but of course it showed up black since the light source was inside! (Though it could simulate the event horizon of a black hole...) Setting the body type to 1 didn’t work, since setting a planet’s body type to anything except 2, 3, or 4 results in an invisible planet (though you can still crash into it). Head to Dadga’s planets (body type 6) to see what I mean. Maybe it’d be better to use the environment code to place an indestructible ship with a big light attached for the hyperspace sim.

If I recall, EricMan64’s mining scenario had a Jovian moon of just a few km across. The approach autopilot did strange things close to it, but it displayed OK.

How’s the scale going to work in the hyperspace sim? If the planets are in the 1-kilometer range, then the player will need LDS to navigate this system, considering the distances between the stars.

I don’t use that save type program. I edit my csv files by hand. Calculating locations will be no problem. We can use 1 unit in clusters.ini = 1 light-year, making the Middle States about 20 light-years across, about average for an open cluster. (Nice foresight!)

In my source csv’s, I tossed in some random numbers for the orbital positions of planets and stations so the systems wouldn’t look like spirals (which was annoying). So we’re going to have to synchronize maps to put our planets in the right places.

Here is a prototype of the capsule jumping idea. Check readme.txt files for details about what you see.

www.i-war2.com/epic/files/WarpTwo.zip

Included in the zip is a "Capsule Jump.doc" file that goes into lots of detail about how I imagine this simulation to work.

I use the save_type program to quickly generate new clusters, or quickly modify the current cluster. It also calculates lots of other information needed for Epic. I cannot afford to give it up. But, you could change a copy so that it does not put planets and stations in spirals if you like. The spiral pattern exists because it is very very easy to see if the program is messing up without needing to cross check a single calculation.

What I was hoping we could do is incorporate the calculations into save_type. Then when the cluster is regenerated, an extra system is built from remembered data - and matches the rest of the cluster exactly. But that is kind of future.

The basic idea for the hyperspace sim is the old game asteroids. Extream newtonian flight model. No slide slip. Need to rotate ship to "dodge" objects. Fairly high velocity moves. With slingshot gravity action around objects.

All the stars and planets would be placed within a few hundred km sized cluster. I guess a good first test would be to find out just how small the planet objects can be. The sim really only needs stars, and something to represent lpoints. So we could use a textured planet for a star. Scale of planets and stars do not need to be preserved, because this is the wierd science of hyperspace. The real goal is to build a challenging fun newtonian experience.

It is also possible that the whole thing could be created with sims using POG. That is how the prototype works.

-Gtrout

Do you need small planet models for this? With the texture libraries I have, I could crank out 50 in a day. Match anything you need.

SecondChance figured out how to get lights to appear, so stars can be point lights at any scale you wish.

Would this help?


<font size="1"><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="black">"Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede-- without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of Civilisation... of the massacre of Mankind."
--H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds</font id="black"></font id="Book Antiqua"> </font id="size1">

I updated the warp prototype to allow better, faster testing. It still needs some work. Now, instead of using the cluster file to create a field of objects, it has a warp_field.ini file.

This way experiments can be done until we figure out what is fun to play. And then then consider how to merge that with the middle states.

This mod is UniGUI compatable. And it works with or without epic. Just open UniGUI, and select Warp Init. Then open again and press Warp Start. You should find yourself speeding toward an asteroid (a lame representation of a star).

There is an end point on the far side. And another possible end point above. Somehow you need to steer around the asteroid to get to your end point. It would be cool if the values in the warp control area could be changed around until it is possible to sling shot up to the top end point.

You can restart from UniGUI at any time. The warp mod does not end. You have to quit the game (prototype code...)

Known bug: If you get to low speeds, sometimes a wierd divide by zero happens and your ship will be destroyed... other than that, it works great!

Hi Shane:
I expect some ghostly planet effects would be cool. I am kind of expecting the gameplay to twist around a bit. Lets wait till that gets a little closer to correct, so no rework is needed.

-Gtrout

I threw together a “hyperspace� system with 1k radius planets representing each system in the cluster, and a star a billion kilometers away (because all systems have to have one, right?) I set the light to 0 and used just fill, but then the planets were all black. Gotta think of something else to light this place eerie-like. Do the point lights project light? They can light their own systems.

The planet-stars showed up perfectly at tiny scales. I got the positions of the stars from the clusters.ini file. When I made my LWS files, I assigned each system a random value for their vertical position (so they all wouldn’t line up in the sky) and decided to carry those numbers over to the hyperspace sim. Theoretically, if you flew into one of those stars and took a picture, you would see the other stars in the exact same position in the sky as in real space from that system. I don’t want to add in the systems’ planets until I know where they’re going to end up.

The whole thing’s 200 km tip to tip. (100k was too crowded) It was a two and a half minute flight at 1400 m/s, though we can make our hypership as fast as we want.

How about instead of the ship in hyperspace dependent on what you’re flying, it could be dependent on what kind of capsule drive you’re using. (Freighters and other civilian craft can only get a grade 1 or 2, military ships can get grades 1 through 4, and scouts can get all the way up to a grade 5.) The ship could then be the capsule drive “bubble� in the hyperspace system. That way we only need 5 models to represent any number of ships the player might fly.

Who needs black holes? As a blue star, Epitaph (somewhere you do not want to end up) has three times the mass (read: gravitational pull) of its closest competitors (Akra and Al Wadi), 25 times the mass of half of the stars, and just under 100 times the mass of the rest of them. And it’s in a central location. It must be nearly impossible to jump out of that place. You’d have to use Omayyad’s pull very cleverly to escape. No way to just power out of it without a scout ship.

And the warptwo.zip file had good ideas, but no scripts. Is the AI going to be subject to all this hyperspace craziness? How will all this integrate with the whole chessboard/fleet system?

Uploaded a fixed version. Back for comments shortly.

-Gtrout