Travel time, hyperspace, etc

[DraQ]

I read a bit more about these points, and I found that gravity doesn't really cancel out at any of the L points, only partially. It's just that the gravitational pull of the parent and child object modifies the orbital period of the satellite/whatever placed there, as if it was fixed to an invisible point. It's only a partial cancellation that makes the orbital speed required there to be about the same as if it would be fixed on the line drawn between the two bodies (1 2 3) or 60° along the orbit in each direction.

Indeed, that's why I proposed "true" equilibrium points (do they even have a name?) - they are easier to find than L1,2,3 too.
And yeah, they are self-regulating if used for arrivals and might reward player skill if used for outbound jumps (as better pilots will be able to time they jumps to happen closer to the actual point).

And when you arrive, you might start to fall towards one of the bodies immediately, so there's a need for navigation if you don't want to crash.

Well, you probably would have at least days until crash in most circumstances.

So if we are strict, neither of these points completely cancel out the two gravitational pull, so that hand-wave explanation would just go out of the window anyway.

Or go for equilibrium point and keep the handwave many Sci-Fi fans are already familiar with and have internalized.

And also I don't think it would be possible for a planet to be placed to an L4-5 point, at least a not minor one, since it's not really a negligible mass (even if it's a gas giant L4-5), and would perturb the other bodies, which would move the L4-5 points too.

Apparently it's plausible enough to be investigated by astronomers, for example as possible candidates for habitability if you have gas giants in habitable zone and once as explanation for actual observations (sadly concluded to be a false positive).
Sure, other bodies could perturb trojan planets out of stability, but if they were trojans of a gas giant, then the gas giant would likely either perturb would be perturbers and eject them out of the system long before they could do harm, or outright prevent them for forming allowing protoplanetary disc material to coalesce at L4-5 undisturbed. And we know quite a few hot jupiters and some in habitable zones.
Other than that, we have four known trojan moons in Sol already (around Saturn - Calypso, Telesto, Helene, Polydeucus). Their masses are unknown (apart from the tiny Polydeucus), but eyeballing it an Earth mass planet and massive gas giant (multiple Jupiter masses but below BD threshold) could have the same mass proportions as larger of those moons and Tethys/Dione.

We also might have had a Mars-size trojan of Earth that clonked Earth forming Moon after getting perturbed by Venus (which wasn't ejected in time by conveniently placed gas giant).

Anyway, I think that with massive number of generated systems Pioneer should always try to err on the side of interesting because making those systems interesting and diverse will always be challenge and also because it's sci-fi, not documentary, it's speculative by definition.
Frontier had Eta Cassiopea with two habitable trojans and one habitable moon so why shouldn't Pioneer try to make that systematic and have a chance of generating trojan bodies?

any opposing party, like pirates or assassins can also plan their nefarious acts better. And the police can plan their patrols and actions on those wrongdoers better.

Those two statements seem contradictory to me. Effective police action precludes effective criminal one and vice-versa.

So there's more opportunity for stuff happening between ships.

I think the best opportunity of stuff happening between ships would be if the crime system and NPC actions were changed to favor engagements close to planets and other bodies. It would make sense from realism PoV as well as pretty much anyone, especially system authority, can see ships duking it out in the middle of nowhere against 4K blackness of space from anywhere else in the system, but picking those ships out even from much closer if they are against some noisy backdrop (like a planet) is much more problematic.

I doesn't seem to me that an added factor of hemisphere randomness when jumping to a body would add that much to the game. Like if you just arrive at a certain distance + some randomness at your destination, then it's just the same point and shoot navigation , but for less time and distance. With these L4-5 arrival points, you can at least pick the destination and plan and optimize your trip a bit. Like one of the Sun-Earth L-points is much closer to Venus then any of the Sun-Venus points at some times of the year (Like 2-3 times closer). With that random arrival points, you (and anybody else) can't really plan that much, so you get to make less decisions.

You can still plan, just not with absolute certainty. For example if Uranus and Neptune are at their closest, then if you're going from Earth to Uranus, jumping to Neptune will be pretty much guaranteed to be a better option (even though you might not be able to tell how much better in advance).

(I think that a bandit would have a hard time intercepting you outbound, if he wasn't already close to you, since you don't need to decelerate to jump.)

First it's still easier to intercept someone flying to a known point in realspace than someone jumping here and now - you don't need to decelerate if you want to jump as soon as you exit the atmosphere either.

Second, like I said, pursuing someone through hyperspace could be done frontier style, with similar enough time and position of entry resulting in similar position of exit even if exact exit position is unknown beforehand. Without FTL communication fixed exit points don't give any advantage to bandits as they can't setup an ambush in advance. OTOH police can and will patrol at least some exit points in advance, because that's the reasonable thing to do and will keep the information of safe L points public, so jump==safety and since jumping works just as well from about everywhere, no tension.

Third, OTOH in the local context (planet, some satellites, stations, equilibrium points) bandits could easily coordinate their actions using ordinary lightspeed communication. For example if you aim for planet-moon equilibrium point while starting from a planet evading pursuer, the pursuer can phone buddies on the moon to be there before you are (they have it closer and up shallower gravity well) and blockade you. If you jump before reaching the point, the blockading ships can jump from the point itself giving them better drive efficiency and arriving at your destination before you, preparing an ambush.

Fourth, you *might* need to decelerate if jumping from a point, because otherwise you might not be there long enough for jump sequence to finish.

And on the other hand, if there's a fictional reason that you can't really use an L-point if there's a station or something large enough there, then it's also a decision for the system government. They can have either road, or station. Although this fictional reason would create the requirement of cleaning L-points up regularly, like road maintenance. So small systems might have less usable L-points, and uninhabited ones might don't have any at all until somebody cleans them up.

Hard to demolish a planet, though.

As far as I know, it's only fluffyfreak working on this. Me, nozmajner and fluffy (i.e. current active dev team) seem to be on the same page about how it should work, and I have not seen any convincing argument why not. Pioneer is still primarily a game, not a hard core physics simulator.

Well, I can make a few:

• Drive using L-points as exits would effectively eliminate the need to ever fly longer distance than from the nearest L point to the destination. So no need to fly from, for example, Earth to Mars as you can just warp into an L point in Mars-Phobos system and deorbit gracefully, no need to fly from Jupiter to Mercury if you can just warp to Sun-Mercury L point and so on. I remember someone criticizing my extra time compression step for being effectively a cheat despite ti not really affecting game's internal dynamics, only player's experience outside of it - please explain how something making conventional interplanetary travel universally inferior option in terms of both mechanics and player experience is not. Meanwhile my solution would only obviate flying to really distant targets, ones that would take long time to reach even at max time compression.
• Drive using L-points as exits would become increasingly more useful in small tight systems like satellite systems and planetary systems of M and K dwarfs - precisely ones where we would (presumably, I certainly would) prefer player to fly conventionally as distances there are small and delta-v expenditures modest. OTOH such drive would become increasingly useless for reaching truly distant targets if they have no satellites or if jumping to satellite L-points is not allowed. If you are on a planet orbiting a sunlike G dwarf at 1AU and want to reach a research base on distant,iceball orbiting this star at, say, 200AU, then you're out of luck since L4/5 form equilateral triangles with primary and secondary, so you'd still emerge 200AU from the destination, no closer than you were to begin with, and would be better served just burning same amount of hydrogen for acceleration (and going for dinner IRL). Meanwhile my proposition is completely useless for close distance travel, but becomes more and more useful with increasing distance (as you emerge at more or less fixed distance but the travel distance varies - it's primarily a game, not a physics simulator, after all).
• Consistent mechanics is a strength in itself both because it makes for consistent fiction and because it avoids confusing player. I propose system where jump mechanics works exactly the same at all times.

Making fuel consumption depend on where you start the jump drive would complicate things terribly for the player

Well, I know that making a system that behaves in two completely different ways depending on whether the jump is intra- or intersystem would confuse the player and be twice as hard to learn than one offering consistent behaviour.
Adding arbitrary exceptions to memorize, like whether or not some L-points count when attempting to root out undesirable behaviour (like jumping instead of flying between closely orbiting moons) will make it even worse.

and add a lot of work to be implemented, and clutter tings up: I assume one would have to have many different max-range-spheres in the star map, depending on what distance from the planet you start your drive at. I assume most players plan their trip when landed and going through the commodity market and BBS missions.

Just current one showing range in ideal conditions (equilibrium point), optionally another showing current range, but chances are player won't be be watching the map when flying towards the jump point.
What would be needed is some HUD display, but it can be textual - drive efficiency percentage on the drive button itself (so basically either red button displaying SURF, ATM or OBJ, depending on the nature of obstruction if the jump is impossible (detailed hud message if player tries to press the button anyway), or one displaying percentage and switching colour based on whether jump is possible with current fuel supply) and maybe fuel needed to jump to destination from current position and current vs optimal jump duration.

Other than that the basic UX would be to select jump point on autopilot, fly there, bam.
I think it's hard to top, only one extra hoop to jump through compared to the current state of affairs.

Lastly, I don't oppose L4/5 display on the map, I think it's awesome and can serve many purposes as far as missions are concerned, I just think and can show that L4/5 just don't work in any jump related context (see above) and that any system with predefined exit points has its problems.

Just to be clear I'm only talking about in-system jumps using Lagrange Points.
I think it's easy to understand why, because between stars we can just about resolve the biggest of gas giants but only if they transit the host star or if we observe them for a number of years, so the idea of picking a Lagrange Point around one of their moons from a distant star system is just a bit silly and easily explained away as being technically impossible.
Remember that the mass of a star system is basically 99% Star, 1% Gas Giant(s) and the rest of the planets, ice giants, asteroids etc is just a rounding error.

True (and I've always liked this saying).

OTOH you clearly have orbital maps of explored systems in the onboard computer, so you don't need to acquire insignificant targets very far away - you know where they are exactly.

And don't worry, I don't mind ranting, I'm not easily offended and I prefer it when people speak their minds and clear any issues than let them fester. :)

As for the L point display I would use orbit colour.

[impaktor]

This is a reply to the corundscale / DraQ's post in #3564

Ok, at this point I'm seriously fed up. Whenever I post anything, it gets interpreted in the worst manner possible, usually as malicious intent on my part.

Although exaggerated, I can see why you'd think that but it's not my/our intention. To be fair, I've only raised my voice twice since I started in pioneer, once against joonick after a lot of aggressive behavior from him [1], and once yesterday after you continued to pursue and push for your agenda that no one on the dev. team shares, and goes against what fluffyfreak has started to implement. I let your first post (in #3564) slide, because I don't want conflicts, or attack anyone, or make others sad / "fed up".

As for the "Whenever I post anything..."-part, I only know of one other occasion, where laarmen and nozmajner expressed their annoyance (that I also share), that you (unintentionally, I assume) tend to sound like the project leader when you write.

Whenever there is any sort of controversy that would call for some further discussion, it gets quickly and quietly resolved in favor of whomever has the most weight to throw around, seemingly without even cursory examination of the arguments against it, and certainly without as much as honoring them with any sort of response, no matter how objective or well construed they might be (like L4/5 of a distant planet being just as distant from both the planet and its sun, so not really helpful for in-system travel - the discussion you mentioned ended with an unaddressed post of mine directed at, among others, you).

I have addressed your criticism against using L4/L5 from my point of view and why I don't like planetary jumps, and I believe nozmajner and fluffyfreak has done the same. You are obviously not satisfied with the answers given, and there's not all that much we can do about it. And to be fair, when there is difference of opinion it is the person who "has the most weight to throw around" who gets to decide.

Why do you expect anyone who isn't already a regular contributor to want to contribute code to the project if they are refused the opportunity to take even the most minor part in shaping its vision? As in "having their feedback actually considered and responded to in a constructive manner".

In my opinion we have been giving feedback to you in a constructive manner throughout this thread, and elsewhere.

Sure, people with most contributions should have the last word, but what's the point of having an open source project if anything coming from outside is automatically dismissed without as much as a word?

It's not "automatically dismissed". We have answer and discussed this over quite a lot of pages. In doing so, we have converged towards an implementation, granted, it's not the one you wanted, but I think you'll have to live with that, and although you might see that as being "dismissed", it was not automatically done so.

Also, no one wants to jump directly to planets - for obvious reasons - but I don't see any reasons against treating all the bodies like stars as far as hyperspace targeting and jumping is concerned and I'm pretty certain no such reasons were stated in the discussion thread.
Feel free to provide any evidence to the contrary.

In my first post of this thread (any many of the following) I list what I like with using Lagrange points. nozmajner and fluffyfreak also like them, and implementation has begun. It is therefore quite strange to see you pushing for jpab, who is unaware of the decisions made, to implement planetary jumps, which goes directly against what all the devs decided.

[FluffyFreak]

Also, as I'm the one implementing these test, they are tests.

The code will be final/near final quality so that if things are to peoples liking then they can be merged but mostly this is to test in-system jumps and what they do to gameplay.

We can then iterate on the idea if it's still fun but has problems - or if it's mostly reviled we can abandon the idea altogether and try something else instead.

There are currently two branches that I'm working on related to different travel ideas.

• in-system-jumps
• it-slices-it-dices

One is the in-system jumps, the other is a sort of fast-as-light drive where you'd jump to fixed speed (aka c) and wouldn't be able to steer or do anything else until you stopped, aimed at your target and engaged the drive again, a bit like warp drive or something.

I'm not hurrying with these since I have other things to do with my time but anyone is free to contribute to help get them up and running so that we can try these ideas out and then discuss future directions.

I will not, at this stage, be deviating from the plans we've discussed because these are being implemented to TEST those ideas and THEN iterate on them to try other options out.

At that LATER iteration stage I hope that people who want to try certain ideas will implement them themselves since I will have done the neccesary initial work on getting in-system jumping working.

Currently I am doing other things and will get back to Pioneer soon (within a couple of weeks).

Andy

[bszlrd]

I wasn't sure if I can add to this conversation, and I wasn't going to, but it seems I'm a stupid hippie enough to do so:

Why do you expect anyone who isn't already a regular contributor to want to contribute code to the project if they are refused the opportunity to take even the most minor part in shaping its vision? As in "having their feedback actually considered and responded to in a constructive manner".

• There are new contributors who got stuff in Pioneer recently, which actually shapes the vision. Like a completely new kind of mission for example.
• You are missing a way to shape the vision of Pioneer. Why not trying to implement your version of in-sys travel even in a hackish way, so we all can actually test and evaluate at least some if it's game-play consequences? Exactly like Fluffyfreak does. And he actually noted several times before that it won't be anything final, it's only for testing and evaluating the point we converged on.
  
  True, it's not the same as your idea, but until you tested both ideas, it's just a minds-play anyway for both ways. So convince us with something we can try. Also nobody can really expect that somebody else will implement their ideas for them. Fluffyfreak started to do the dirty work, to see if the idea is feasible. I know him enough to be sure that if that idea won't play out good game-play wise in the end, he won't be overly attached and defensive about it.
  
  I know I would try implementing my idea if I had the necessary skill and knowledge to do it, but I don't. I sure participated in the thinking part, as all of us. And now I'm sitting on the side of the track and try to help where I can, even with some minor graphical stuff right now (not to mention that most likely I will pick up the boring work of re-balancing all ships for it).

And this part is more like ranting from my hippie/teacher kind of mind, and not really on the topic of in-sys jumps, but I had to get it out of my head. Sorry if it's too much:

Whenever there is any sort of controversy that would call for some further discussion, it gets quickly and quietly resolved in favor of whomever has the most weight to throw around...

• I can't really remember too much real controversy since I'm participating in the project. Apart maybe from what joonics said in the end, and as Impaktor mentions, it mostly came from joonics aggressively pushing for changes without much real reasoning or discussion. And even then he was able to "shape the vision" with his improvement for the market interface. (Which was an improvement, even if half-assed, and I did pointed out some ways that it could be improved upon, but not objected it even then.).
  
  Or we can count that time when there was quite a disagreement about having 3D cockpits a couple of years ago. And in the end I convinced the de-facto (eg: who did a lot of heavy lifting back then, and is still heavily respected by the other members of the team) leader of the project thatiIt could be a worthy addition. (I wasn't the one who wanted it in the beginning, because the amount of work it would put on the art side, but I got convinced too that it would worth it). So the work on it started by Fluffyfreak, and got to a point where the asset side can be approached by me. And actually I expected that I can work on it much-much faster, but it turned out, that I overestimated what can be done for it in a given time. So it's progressing at the speed of a rheumatic snail, and I'm not proud of that. And I never demanded, or will demand that the implementation should progress further with screen display stuff for it, or interactivity, saying that "it would make it easier to me to work on it, since I don't have to rework stuff". I will (and am) slowly chip(ing) away at the asset part to a point where I'm hoping that those cockpits look good enough to inspire somebody to reignite the implementation part. And I'm willing to rework them for that stuff. If that re ignition won't happen? Then we will still have some nice optional static cockpits to enhance immersion.
• Those who "has the most weight to throw around". You are referring to those people who did a lot of work for Pioneer in the past, and some of them still doing that.
  And not only did a lot of work, but actively communicating about the project and other stuff. I am usually present on #pioneer even if I don't work on stuff related to Pioneer for example. And I know that Impaktor also does the same, even maintaining a backlog, so he can react to stuff that happened when he was away. Same goes for lots of other contributors, some of them responsible for a lot of stuff which is already in the game.
  And with that communication and endless discussion we got to know each other, know the skills and interests of the others, and influence each other's vision about the game constantly. There are disagreements here and there for sure, but we know each other enough that we know that none of us would willingly push the game towards a direction that would make Pioneer worse.
  In short we as people tend to agree with people we know and respect, and you can't really expect anybody to not do that.
  
  You expect to shape the vision of the game by writing long opinion posts and critiques. In a manner like you are a project manager or something, and an active member of the project, whom the others know well. And you expect that your opinion has the same weight as somebody who contributed countless lines of code or polygons and pixels to the project. And their contributions pushed the game forward.
  But we don't know anything about you or your abilities, skills and knowledge or aptitudes apart from that you like to think and write a lot about space games. And that you want to shape the vision of the game big-time.
  But I never saw anything from you that actually shaped the game even a little bit, apart from the increased time acceleration PR, about which everybody who tested it agreed that it shapes the game in a wrong direction, and wants to sidestep a bigger issue (very few things happening in the game) instead of moving towards fixing that issue itself.

Why don't you try working on smaller stuff? You mentioned tail-sitters a lot a while back, and nobody ever objected. Why not implementing them for example? I do have some things in mind in respect to that, so you could expect feedback from me, but also I'm willing to provide and rework the assets for tail sitter and variable ships. Just to name one part. True it has a forest of problems to weed out all around the game, but hey, that's how software development works.
Or write a mission to get to know the lua side of things?
Or that auto-refuel/puffer tank for propellant stuff you mentioned? (Although I for one have some opposition for that both from realism and game-play aspect to be honest, but I don't know what the others think)
Or gears for the engines, alternating between good ISP/good thrust?



And this part is not at all for bragging, but to show how I became part of the project (and correct me if I remember something wrong). And I'm sure everybody has a somewhat similar story:
I came to the project in a similar manner, starting small. I just posted a couple ship to see if it's good enough, and they were accepted. So I did another, and started to think about the game more and more. The visuals of Pioneer was quite more diverse back then, and I'm talking about model and texture quality more than design. So I thought, I could do the work to pull that together a bit more, even offered that I do that as an "art lead" or something. It was dismissed (why an art lead to an open-source project), but that didn't discourage me from contributing.
And my quality and volume of contribution over time seems to "earned" me that my opinion counts for the others in the project when it comes to visual things (even though I'm rarely content and want to push my next stuff further).
Heh, I actually got asked to "fill that position" back then, but I doubt my opinion would weight a gram if I'd just went around putting out critique sans the work I did to back it up.

I did discussed, brought up, asked for/about stuff and features, but never been pushy about them (I hope I wasn't). And I did asked for smaller things that could directly aid my asset work, and most of them got implemented, even if some of them is not yet used (like normal mapping, or idle animations). But similarly, I doubt that any of them would have been done if I was just asking for it without the work.
I even implemented some simple UI stuff, I was able to with my meager coding knowledge, like deltaV or thrust display for the F3 screen. And I always try to support any new WIP feature from the asset side of things.

And also I help out any art contributor that comes by. I also offer my critique and feedback, but that's backed with what I already done and present in the game. Sometimes I feel that I might ask for a bit too much in terms of quality, which can be discouraging for new contributors. Partly because doing one step right will help you a lot down the line, but on the other hand any real aspiring artist needs to push him/herself more and more if wants to grow artistically. And if one doesn't want to grow artistically, then most likely won't stick around much anyway. (This is not only true for Pioneer, as an art teacher I see it lots of times, when one doesn't want to push, and then after graduating, leaves the field). Just look at the forum and count how many ships got to the texturing phase, not to mention any game-readiness.

True, my rate of contribution slowed quite significantly last year, due to real life stuff, but even then I'm still chipping away on stuff, and try to post about them when I have some meaningful progress. (Like even I didn't mentioned it in the forum, only on IRC since it's technical stuff, but I finished the two LoDs for the Bowfin).

[DraQ]

As for the "Whenever I post anything..."-part, I only know of one other occasion, where laarmen and nozmajner expressed their annoyance (that I also share), that you (unintentionally, I assume) tend to sound like the project leader when you write.

I don't want to usurp a position of project leader, but I do think there is not enough talk regarding general vision, especially given that often having to explain your own point of view to someone else makes you understand it better.
I've been hoping to provoke some discussion to either give Pioneer more sense of direction or communicate this direction better to everyone with any interest in the project.
I'm making those long posts in hope for a response.

Admittedly I do have a lot of ideas (for stuff that seems to be a natural step for pioneer somewhere down the road, rather than some extremely demanding but mostly unrelated outgrowth of core gameplay - at least so I hope), but I'm pretty certain that so does everyone else. How do you think combat should ideally look, what else should there be in planetary systems to make them more interesting, etc.

I'd hope to see everyone's idealized vision, then see those visions bashed together (with major regular contributors getting decisive voice when it comes to resolving any conflicts or including/rejecting ideas), the result split into blocks of features that belong together, then everything prioritized and split into bite-sized chunks as much as possible.

I have addressed your criticism against using L4/L5 from my point of view and why I don't like planetary jumps, and I believe nozmajner and fluffyfreak has done the same. You are obviously not satisfied with the answers given, and there's not all that much we can do about it.

I don't recall my most important points being addressed and they are objective in nature (if they have, just point me in the right direction and I'm shutting up), so it's more of being not satisfied with the lack of answers and a bit desperate due to no one caring about inevitable problems I'm trying to bring up:

1. Most of the time there will be L-points available in close enough proximity of player's destination to completely trivialize actual travel (planet-moon points, extreme example - Mars-Deimos), that's jumping directly to a planet.
2. In cases where in-system jumps would actually come in handy sometimes there will be no suitable L-points to cut down on the travel time (far orbiting planet, no moons) as the distance from L4/5 to the planet is the same as the distance between planet and its sun so it's of no help when starting somewhere around the star and going out (and player is pretty much always going to be going out, because jumping into a system puts you in a pretty comfortable distance to anything orbiting closer in than you, even without in-system jumps).
3. Any steps taken to fix 1. (not allowing jumps to moon L-points) will automatically exacerbate 2. (by eliminating all usable outer system L-points) and make the entire mechanics pointless by removing cases where it would improve the gameplay.
4. No attempt to fix 1. will fix it completely (because inner systems are just so crowded that convenient planet-star L-points are going to be plentiful, especially the smallest, most numerous systems around red dwarfs).

Ok, a fair point has been made by FluffyFreak that you could target a different planet, but outer parts of the systems, where some faster travel mechanics would actually be handy are too sparse and too slow for that to be useful.
Taking Sol as an example, if the planet positions are just right you can cut the travel times to Neptune by going to Uranus L-point and having to travel manageable >10 AU instead of dreadful 30. But that's a fluke, most of the time planet positions are not going to be right and given orbital periods of outer planets player won't be playing long enough with a single character to see them change significantly. In a larger system the distances will get large enough for travel times to remain awful even if jumps are technically advantageous - less awful than not jumping but far more awful than simply not taking any missions going there - Frontier's Alpha Centauri anyone?

I'm not speaking opinion here. I'm speaking facts. I don't think that L-point geometry or the way planetary systems are built can be considered my agenda.
Distances are distances and physics is physics.
If Pioneer is going to stick with realistic attempts at physics and astronomy it's going to live with the consequences, including consequences of any mechanics referencing real-world physical and astronomical concepts.

And to be fair, when there is difference of opinion it is the person who "has the most weight to throw around" who gets to decide.

I'm not against major contributors having the decisive voice - after all they have put the most into the project.
But is asking for the ideas themselves and arguments to have to stand or fall on their own and be judged by their own merits too much?
How about we try to pretend that any idea, critique or argument here is devoid of any sort of information identifying its proponent and only if the result is not conclusive resort to determining who has the most say regarding Pioneer?

In my first post of this thread (any many of the following) I list what I like with using Lagrange points. nozmajner and fluffyfreak also like them, and implementation has begun. It is therefore quite strange to see you pushing for jpab, who is unaware of the decisions made, to implement planetary jumps, which goes directly against what all the devs decided.

I was pushing for a flexible solution - one that would allow things to change at rather negligible cost (for example single virtual one-liner method that simply returns a boolean).

You are missing a way to shape the vision of Pioneer. Why not trying to implement your version of in-sys travel even in a hackish way, so we all can actually test and evaluate at least some if it's game-play consequences? Exactly like Fluffyfreak does. And he actually noted several times before that it won't be anything final, it's only for testing and evaluating the point we converged on.

You're right, but OTOH I don't really want to do anything without getting some consensus - it feels a step further than just sounding like project lead - more along the lines of actually trying to force the project in my own direction without consulting anyone.
Plus I don't want to waste time coding something I can be told straight away that won't be welcome (as in a proper feature, not just some light derivative coding like with my attempt at time compression) - for example I think I recall some opposition against my fuel tank ideas, even though it should be trivial to implement.
And I'm not sure I have the skill to pull some of the changes off, for example tail sitters, especially if it would also include modifying the art assets - I'm not who you'd call a proficient 3D artist to put it mildly.

But of course you're right.
I will address the rest tomorrow, now I really need to get some sleep.
Good night everyone (and thanks for the "stupid hippie stuff", really, it helps a lot and clears many misunderstandings).
:)

[bszlrd]

Some quick thoughts I can slip in while working on non-Pioneer stuff (eh, it got more expanded, which underlines the energy part I mention there):

First, I don't think there was any time any of the developers dismissed/opposed an idea because it wasn't posted by a regular contributor. So

How about we try to pretend that any idea, critique or argument here is devoid of any sort of information identifying its proponent

doesn't really matter, because nobody here dismisses any idea or opinion based on the one who put it forwards. Well, to be totally honest, it happened some times, because the proponent wasn't really doing much, a but had lots of ideas to share, and doesn't really seemed to care about the ideas/opinions of others.
And as the Russel's Teapot arguments has it: if you have extraordinary claims, you have to provide extraordinary facts/proofs to back it up. And by fact/proof I mean actual tangible work that demonstrates the things one is claiming. Going into the details of said conversation and clashing words won't cut it. Tricking others into implementing parts that can help you backing up your stuff isn't really a nice way of doing it. And I'm really sorry if it wasn't your aim, but it sure looked like that. I'm sure it would have been taken quite differently if you just asked for planet targeting, and explaining it with: "it is for your way of in-sys travel you would like to implement as a proof of concept to show, but it's a bit hard for you to do that part/the implementer is already in that area of code, so it's easier to do that port for him".
As it was mentioned a lot of times: talk is cheap, doing is what matters. And if you (not specifically you, but in general) do a lot of talking, and do only a little, then it sure seems odd, even tiresome, if it's a regular occurrence. Like responding to your posts sometimes takes a lot of time and energy I could have put into modeling or texturing something for example. It won't be that much of a problem, if there were some actual work behind the talking. I don't know, how involved it is to code such a feature, like in-sys jumps, even in a very rudimentary and hackish way, just to see if it's a good thing to have. But until there's no way of actually trying it out, what's the point encouraging an elaborate discussion about it's details? As I said, it's just mind-play, which robs time and energy from stuff we can already work on.
And I'm sure that starting to implement any big feature would be done in isolation, just dumping it to the tracker after you worked on it for months. At least it should not. If you are that hell-bent to change the way travel works, start some preparatory work, make a post about it, detailing your aim, and the way you plan to implement it. And a list of what steps are need to be done, what you can and willing to do about it and how, and what's needed for it, but it's out of your reach. As you did it with the increased time accel, which sure got opposition, but it was no way an automatic dismissal, and it did sprout explanation and discussion.
Pioneer isn't a traditional project with clear-cut roles and positions, because of it's open source and free-time project nature, where contributors come and go all the time. So you better don't try "usurping", because that won't do anything other than distancing the contributors. And also we are not in a hurry by any means.
There's an expression in my language: "bedolgozni magad", "work yourself in". Which means that when you get into some kind of workplace or community, you go the extra mile and make yourself an asset to the place, which then won't drop in their right mind. Sure it won't work for any place or company, but so far it seems to me that our community is a place where you can really do that. All contributors I saw staying for long did exactly that. This is why I'm suggesting that you should start with some smaller stuff, and work yourself up to be a regular contributor, instead of just contributing ideas. We are not short on ideas, we are short on hands implementing ideas. And I think your ideas and opinions would weight a lot more if we saw work to back it up.

About the clashing of visions of Pioneer. Nothing and nobody keeps you from starting to put your vision into a design document for Pioneer. But don't expect anybody to start taking it seriously until you show the willingness of actually working on it. And expect opinions and critique on it all the time, that's the clashing you mention. Honestly you seem to be quite defensive about your ideas (heh, I guess we are looking like that too, and I'm sure some of as was defensive, including me, but I already explained my reason for it above, and with my other posts). But defensiveness won't do anything good, and could do a lot of harm to the project.
And even if you show the willingness to work, there's no real guarantee that the others would adhere to that vision, but I doubt that any conversation would go bitter if the ones who put out the big words also put out the big work.
And if you do want to start a thread about the vision of Pioneer, please don't go into the minutae detail in the beginning, but start with the big picture. And start from what's already in the game and build on that. (else you would be better off starting a lot of stuff from scratch, and you can't expect that to happen with Pioneer)

[[Damnit, I'm already a bit angry, because I'm stupid and hopeful/naive enough to type out stupidly long answers to your stupidly long posts, and now I might miss seeing a friend because I lost my sense of time doing the typing. So my suggestion is gather your general thoughts if you want, but don't bother sharing it until you got your hands dirty with some small part of the game, because nobody will really care seeing another player suggestion that's been said a lots of times before.]]


And for in-sys travel and other stuff mentioned in this thread or elsewhere:

• Most of the time there will be L-points available in close enough proximity of player's destination to completely trivialize actual travel (planet-moon points, extreme example - Mars-Deimos), that's jumping directly to a planet.

  I don't think that's that trivial. Sure with current deltaV levels, it's pretty much landing in the backyard, but that isn't that much different for your proposal too. And if properly balanced, jumping to Mars-Deimos L5 will still need navigation, no to mention larger systems. Properly balanced, an area akin to Earth-Moon still can have three in-game days or so of travel, we get to have more realistic engines, and orbital mechanics are much more entrenched in the gameplay.
• Your proposal, jumping to any planet with a distance threshold would blend the already quite homogeneous systems even more. And the smaller the threshold are, more blended it becomes. If it's larger, then it will tend to be quite similar to what's currently in the game. The L4/L5 way of doing it seem to create much more landscape and difference among places. Sure, Mars would be a place you can quite easily get to, but good luck going to Venus or Mercury. And if there's something valuable there? Then you should look for ships that have better deltaV. Or nudge a moon in orbit to create an L point.
• Does your proposal allows for targeting moons? If yes, then it won't make much more difference than going to L4/5 points. Assuming the threshold is based on mass, moon exit points should be quite close too. If the parent bodies mass overrules that and you can't jump to a moon, then there's nothing against excluding planet-moon L4/5 points from traveling to either.
• Being able to only jump to sun-planet L4/5s still create much more landscape than jumping to only planets with a threshold. Sure there will be planets that are hard to reach in some parts of their (sure sometimes quite long) periods. But hey, there are parts of the world down here that are quite easy to reach all year around, but some others are almost impossible in some times of the year or even any given time. Also another way to differentiate ships.

• but outer parts of the systems, where some faster travel mechanics would actually be handy are too sparse and too slow for that to be useful.

  Physics aren't really interested in making the world convenient for us, as far as I noticed. And there's difference in making the game play out better, and blend the whole game more blurry while at it. There's a saying I heard in an art class back at college: If everything's important, then nothing really is.
• Why is it a problem that some places are harder to reach than others? Instead of making reaching everything almost similarly difficult, why don't we put something worth traveling for in the hard to reach parts instead? Like what if rare-earth elements are easily mine-able from Jovian moons or asteroid belts for some reason? Where you don't have to worry about environmental questions that much. (they are a bitch to obtain here on Earth, and I'm sure they will have lots of use in space travel (if not already) among other things, because they are already in a lot of stuff like magnets, lasers, nuclear batteries and even in some steel alloys)
  
  More off topic:
• Another important question about travel is price of the fuel/propellant (which is the same right now, and this point drifts off-topic, ignore if you like). It's like peanuts currently, which makes sense from one pov, since H2 is like the most abundant element you can find, and easy to produce too. But it makes travel quite trivial, especially with the way refuelling at ports work now (I started to work on fixing them, but my coding skills are a bit short to finish it right now, so I need to learn some). Also But: sure, producing hydrogen is trivial, but storing it is another method. Just check the SLS/Orion launch footage from last year. The rocket actually slowly burns on the launch pad, because it's constantly leaking Hydrogen. It turns out H2 thends to leak through solid stuff if it's not cryogenicaly stored, or compressed. Both assume elaborate storage equipment. This is why I was opposing your idea of a puffer tank+propellant in the cargo hold area. Bladders are out of question if you ask me, because they won't seem to ba able to hold H2 dependably, and I wouldn't want a Highly flammable gas in any bladder in my cargo hold (ask the crew of the Hindenburg). On the other hand having separate container for each unit of H2 seems quite wasteful to me, since you get to keep the tank after it's emptied, being dead weight. It would be a better in my opinion to have dedicated storage area for propellant (wings, proper tanks in hull), and any additional fuel comes with it's cost of storage. You might also be able to buy additional propellant tank equipment (my wild uninformed guess is that this is already possible with the .lua-equipment module). That would offer more hydrogen for less storage mass (increasing propellant capacity). And you can store any additional propellant in separate per-unit tanks, if the situation calls for it, and deal with it's consequences of mass too (don't you dare jettisoning during blastoff, the police and locals might not be too happy about it).[/i]
• As I've already mentioned, I'm willing to provide the assets that are needed for tail-sitters. most of the ships are made in a way, that they should be able to support it without much reworking. But an the other hand I'd argue for making them hybrid, because a belly sitter is much more convenient to load and unload most of the time. But my guess is, that's not the most complicated part if it, but getting the autopilot to know about it and use.
• Yes, combat is shit. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks about how to fix it. I've even wrote some detailed stuff about it's direction, but I never really bothered sharing it, because I don't have much for backing it up, and nobody with the skills to work on it seems to want to do it right now, so I don't see any point talking about it too much.

[DraQ]

As it was mentioned a lot of times: talk is cheap, doing is what matters. And if you (not specifically you, but in general) do a lot of talking, and do only a little, then it sure seems odd, even tiresome, if it's a regular occurrence. Like responding to your posts sometimes takes a lot of time and energy I could have put into modeling or texturing something for example.

Well, writing them does too, so why not try to make it constructive?

It won't be that much of a problem, if there were some actual work behind the talking.

It's not that I haven't put actual work into Pioneer.
Not much, but I started with fixing the planet temperature overflows in system generation and by adding some code to account for other stars in the system contributing to planet temperatures (crappy and inefficient, but I can't see much better ways of doing this without major overhaul of how planetary systems work internally) to fix cases where habitable or icy planet was orbiting a red dwarf which was nearly grazing a giant. Both changes have been merged. I did some tweaks to life occurrence to roughly base it on the time it might have to evolve in given type of system.

The thing is that those contributions were all straightforward bugfixes, they were no-brainers, however when trying to bounce ideas for actual new gameplay elements or changing the old ones (which I think needs some sort of collective approval from main contributors before any work is done) off someone no one seemed terribly interested.
And I don't want to spend time and energy implementing something no one else wants in Pioneer just to have it rejected and/or come off as a guy trying to push his vision at the expense of everyone else's - besides, isn't that how this joonicks guy left?

But until there's no way of actually trying it out, what's the point encouraging an elaborate discussion about it's details? As I said, it's just mind-play, which robs time and energy from stuff we can already work on.

Working only to discover you've been working on the wrong thing also consumes time and energy with nothing to gain.

As you did it with the increased time accel, which sure got opposition, but it was no way an automatic dismissal, and it did sprout explanation and discussion.

I'm ok with that, although I still think Pioneer, in its current state, needs it. But if it turns out to be pointless in the end, all the better.

We are not short on ideas, we are short on hands implementing ideas.

But why are so few of those ideas up for people to see?

And expect opinions and critique on it all the time, that's the clashing you mention. Honestly you seem to be quite defensive about your ideas (heh, I guess we are looking like that too, and I'm sure some of as was defensive, including me, but I already explained my reason for it above, and with my other posts). But defensiveness won't do anything good, and could do a lot of harm to the project.

I will happily (ok, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement) take any critique, as long as my ideas are attacked in a constructive manner (explain why they suck, not just that they do).

And if you do want to start a thread about the vision of Pioneer, please don't go into the minutae detail in the beginning, but start with the big picture.

Ok, guilty as charged. I tend to focus on details way too early and too much.

• I don't think that's that trivial. Sure with current deltaV levels, it's pretty much landing in the backyard, but that isn't that much different for your proposal too. And if properly balanced, jumping to Mars-Deimos L5 will still need navigation, no to mention larger systems. Properly balanced, an area akin to Earth-Moon still can have three in-game days or so of travel, we get to have more realistic engines, and orbital mechanics are much more entrenched in the gameplay.

  It is different for my proposal because I was aiming for effectively noised-up default jump-in distance of around 10AU applied to arbitrary target with some, mostly flavour adjustment for mass. As for more realistic engines, the problem with L-point jumping is that any environment that's cluttered and close enough together to provide interesting gameplay grounds for weak conventional drives will also be full of L-points obviating a lot of conventional flight. I'm not sure if we are on the same page here, but I consider routine jumps between Mars-Deimos L4/L5 and Mars-Phobos L4/L5 a bad thing.

• Your proposal, jumping to any planet with a distance threshold would blend the already quite homogeneous systems even more. And the smaller the threshold are, more blended it becomes. If it's larger, then it will tend to be quite similar to what's currently in the game. The L4/L5 way of doing it seem to create much more landscape and difference among places. Sure, Mars would be a place you can quite easily get to, but good luck going to Venus or Mercury. And if there's something valuable there? Then you should look for ships that have better deltaV. Or nudge a moon in orbit to create an L point.

  Yes, I propose something that's close to what's current in game - adding nothing to inner system or general close range travel but providing way to reach outer bodies in reasonable time.
  Close range travel (in case of Sol anything inside the orbit of Saturn and any travel within satellite systems) would be purely conventional, aiming to minimize gameplay (and worldbuilding) impact of exotic drive tech apart from where it is really necessary for things to work. I'd leave providing landscape to further refinements of system generation and local traffic.
  
  Building an interesting gameplay landscape is a nice counterpoint to my proposal, but I'm afraid this will cut too deeply into basic newtonian gameplay in exact places where it will remain viable regardless of delta-v reductions.

• Does your proposal allows for targeting moons? If yes, then it won't make much more difference than going to L4/5 points. Assuming the threshold is based on mass, moon exit points should be quite close too. If the parent bodies mass overrules that and you can't jump to a moon, then there's nothing against excluding planet-moon L4/5 points from traveling to either.

  Yes, but see above.
  My original proposition aimed to spread out potential exits more in space via added noise while ensuring not colliding with the target - rough sketch: base radius of 10AU -(1/m) + rand*(1/m), with both (1/m) multiplied by some empirically adjusted constants, but the first iteration would probably use exit point mechanics already in place (so somewhere around 10AU from the target regardless of target), only then I would add further modifications.
  Adjusting jump cost based on gravity and adding nav points would be the last thing and it would first require modifying gravity to account for multiple bodies instead of just one.

• Being able to only jump to sun-planet L4/5s still create much more landscape than jumping to only planets with a threshold. Sure there will be planets that are hard to reach in some parts of their (sure sometimes quite long) periods. But hey, there are parts of the world down here that are quite easy to reach all year around, but some others are almost impossible in some times of the year or even any given time. Also another way to differentiate ships.

  Physics aren't really interested in making the world convenient for us, as far as I noticed. And there's difference in making the game play out better, and blend the whole game more blurry while at it. There's a saying I heard in an art class back at college: If everything's important, then nothing really is.

  Why is it a problem that some places are harder to reach than others? Instead of making reaching everything almost similarly difficult, why don't we put something worth traveling for in the hard to reach parts instead? Like what if rare-earth elements are easily mine-able from Jovian moons or asteroid belts for some reason? Where you don't have to worry about environmental questions that much. (they are a bitch to obtain here on Earth, and I'm sure they will have lots of use in space travel (if not already) among other things, because they are already in a lot of stuff like magnets, lasers, nuclear batteries and even in some steel alloys)

  Again I'm not see we are on the same page here but I see in-system jump as primarily the means of allowing travel to bodies that are currently impractical to reach. Otherwise there doesn't seem to be much point to having in-system jumps in the first place - mechanics for travel between inner planets and around planets and their moons is already in place. The same mechanics already makes reaching some places problematic or impractical. If that's the goal, then the best in-system jump mechanics is no in-system jump mechanics or at most allowing jumping to stars (or stars and gas giants).
• Gas giants in general seem like something that should be reachable by default as they provide a lot of potential gameplay ground with their ring and satellite systems, atmospheres, gravity wells and lots of hydrogen. They are like miniature, travel-friendly solar systems.
  

  This is why I was opposing your idea of a puffer tank+propellant in the cargo hold area. Bladders are out of question if you ask me, because they won't seem to ba able to hold H2 dependably, and I wouldn't want a Highly flammable gas in any bladder in my cargo hold (ask the crew of the Hindenburg). On the other hand having separate container for each unit of H2 seems quite wasteful to me, since you get to keep the tank after it's emptied, being dead weight. It would be a better in my opinion to have dedicated storage area for propellant (wings, proper tanks in hull), and any additional fuel comes with it's cost of storage. You might also be able to buy additional propellant tank equipment (my wild uninformed guess is that this is already possible with the .lua-equipment module). That would offer more hydrogen for less storage mass (increasing propellant capacity). And you can store any additional propellant in separate per-unit tanks, if the situation calls for it, and deal with it's consequences of mass too (don't you dare jettisoning during blastoff, the police and locals might not be too happy about it).[/i]

  
  True and modular tanks are all around a better idea than mine, with only two concessions:
  • Puffer tank idea is very simple to implement.
  • It would allow for trivial, if hackish, implementation of fuel rationing.
  Other than that my idea was mostly an unhappy marriage between Pioneer's abstraction level and what would generally make sense.
  For example if you need specialized tanks for hydrogen fuel, you should no longer be able to scoop hydrogen into empty cargo hold.
  Other than that I'm all for modular tanks, provided that there is no auto refueling in ports and that integral tanks only occupy unusable volume of the hull.
  
  Some misc points:
  • Graphene might make a good membrane, there is also the option of going back to water propellant (and only harvesting fusionables from gas giants)
  • Hydrogen price could vary wildly within systems - dirt cheap around gas giants, somewhat expensive on inner planets.
  • Resale of propellant and maybe option to adjust the amount of propellant to allow liftoff when docked should be available options.

As I've already mentioned, I'm willing to provide the assets that are needed for tail-sitters. most of the ships are made in a way, that they should be able to support it without much reworking. But an the other hand I'd argue for making them hybrid, because a belly sitter is much more convenient to load and unload most of the time. But my guess is, that's not the most complicated part if it, but getting the autopilot to know about it and use.

Then it actually becomes an option for me, because I know I won't be able to modify the assets well enough, even if the modifications would be simple.

Yes, combat is shit. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks about how to fix it. I've even wrote some detailed stuff about it's direction, but I never really bothered sharing it, because I don't have much for backing it up, and nobody with the skills to work on it seems to want to do it right now, so I don't see any point talking about it too much.

But maybe your ideas will attract someone with the right skills? Sharing ideas would allow pairing people with things they would be most comfortable and qualified to implement.
For example I had an idea of making red giants puffy and convective using one of the terrain types that was used for asteroids in the previous versions (because it looked exactly the part), but I lack understanding of the terrain system and asteroids have since been altered a lot removing occurrence of this terrain type, so I probably won't be able to do it.
OTOH the person working on the asteroids would probably know exactly what this terrain type was and how to modify astronomical bodies to use it right away.

[bszlrd]

Ok, my suggestion is that this thread will only be any more constructive and productive, if we stop arguing with each other. I'm sure I could address most of the stuff you mention, but I won't bother, since then you could address that, then rinse and repeat until we are doing it at the Restaurant at the End of The World, while Dent and the others are sitting at the next table, and a long forgotten god suddenly appears next to a sobbing robot.

There are arguments for both sides, and we could talk years away figuring out the thing. And even then a factor we didn't even consider could pop up when the thing is implemented, which will throw both solutions out of the window, who knows. (Please don't say that it's impossible. There are always surprises, good or bad, you can't really be certain. Sadly our mind is very good in tricking ourselves into confidentiality, especially when we are involved deeply in something. See the plot of like every movie ever. There's always a thing that stick out so much, everybody would have done it differently, but the director and script writer, producer missed altogether (or didn't care, if it's a bad movie))

I think it would be far better, if we wait for what Fluffyfreak has in the oven right now, and test and stress test. After that we can talk about what's next. And we are not in a hurry anyway, we have the luxury of doing proof of concept work in my opinion.
And true, it's better to properly discuss a concept to avoid un-needed work, but that's not always true, sometimes you have to do some work, then step back to see how it plays out. (another art analogy, which is very true).
(And as a side note/analogy: for a project I did exactly that. I did a lot of work figuring out the shading of a character for an animation project of mine, doing the whole thing in material nodes in Blender. In the end it worked, but was a bitch to set up and use it in actual production, not to mention tweaking the end result in post-production. So I took a deep breath, thought through the whole thing from a distance, then I went in, ripped the whole thing out and re-implemented it in a post-production/render node setup, even if I was quite reluctant to do so at first. And it turned out that it's far simpler and easier to control that way, but even then I didn't really thrashed the previous work, because all the knowledge I got from figuring it out easily transferred over to the other way, and I would have a far harder time figuring it out without that work.)

Other side note: I did a simple tail sitter setup for the Mola, if you want to try poking on that, I'll make a thread for it.
Edit: I'll upload my notes on combat and stuff to my user page on the wiki in the coming days, if anybody is interested, they can be checked there.