Thoughts on a Mining Machine

[impaktor]

I was thinking about what it would take to implement a mining machine into pioneer. This is what I came up with as an implementation path:

1. Start easy: Add equipment to EquipmentMarket and translation system.
2. Add something into an OnJettisonEvent somewhere (or equivalent on c++ side?) that starts a timer when a mining machine is jettisoned by a ship landed on a planet surface. (At the moment the jettison button is unclickable when landed) Or have some special dialogue box to control loading/unloading of mining machine?
3. We need some way to find back to the deployed machine. Like being able to see it on the planet sphere in SystemView, together with cities (and in future military bases, mission sites, and more), so that autopilot can target it.
4. A mining machine keeps track on how long it has been deployed and how mineral rich the planet is. Thus it knows how much mineral to give the player when he/she comes back for it.
5. When the ship has landed "close enough" to the mining machine it adds itself and minerals back to the cargo hold. Or how else will the player control that the mining machine is loaded?
6. We need a model for what a mining machine looks like. Initially a black box as a placeholder, until we know it works.

I realized that that was more than I have time for at the moment, so this one is up for grabs. And discussion of course.

[FluffyFreak]

1. Yep

2. Maybe have something on object(s) that says if it can be jettisoned when landed?
2a. Let the mining machine object deal with it's own timings etc.

3. If it's an object of it's own type then we just need to add displaying it to the appropriate screen and filter it but see #5

4. Yep

5. There should be a mining screen/tab in the ship info with options choosing to collect it, it's spoils or both when within range.

6. Yep, whitebox it to start with, can fill in later.

Likewise in too deep with a million different things going on.

[impaktor]

Regarding Player controlling loading/unloading of machine:

I was thinking: it is not inconceivable that there will be other equipment as well where the player needs to interact with it through some pop up window or some kind of interface in order to use/turn on/turn off its function.

For instance a ship could have a hydrogen to military fuel converter (maybe a 100:1 ratio for H -> Military Fuel (price ratio looks to be 60:1)). This would make fuel scooping with Military drive possible. For such a thing, sure we could add some extra button in Cargo Manifest, but eventually buttons, functions, gauges, and space will start to collide, depending on what the ship has installed. Might be best to click on the equipment and "use it" by a pop up window specifying how many t H to convert, for instance (or load/unload mining machine). So what ever is used for Mining Machine could then easily be used to interact with other ship equipment.

Did I just write the same ting twice?

[impaktor]

After mining machine is in the game: Prospecting

Make it so that planets have varying ore concentration, of various metals. The player will have to do some low orbit / medium altitude flying to find these spots. That means there will be some mineral scanner (comes with the ship?) that has some range that forces the player to fly over some nice scenic landscapes, giving the player an incentive for doing this in the game I think.

How this would work? I can think of different levels of how ambitious / time consuming implementing this might be:

1. Needed: mineral scanner, and mining machine use some function that returns ore richness. Just a function that uses the seed and coordinates of the planet to return some value. Procedural generation isn't my strong suit, so I might be wrong when I imagine this is a case where Perlin Noise would be handy? "Ore space" is basically a "clear sky" with some "clouds" of ore. (Perlin noise is used in procedural cloud generation).
2. Simple: Display a number representing the average "ore richness" below/in front of ship.
3. Medium: Like 1, but keep different metals separate, and display ore richness for each.
4. High: Some kind of semi transparent overlay showing a heat map (Predator!) over the surrounding landscape with different colors/intensities for different ores and their concentrations.
5. FluffyFreaky: ;) Hook in the getOreConcentration with terrain generation, so that it depends on terrain? Mountains are better/richer?

Possible side effect: Will all rock planets have ore deposits? Uninhabited systems are now described as "some mining operations" (or similar) in sector view, and then the player expects there to be a rocky planet to actually mine.

[impaktor]

As pointed out on IRC just now by nozmajner and ecraven, one probably don't want to get pure metal from the mining operation, but just ore. Then the player could sell the ore to a refinery that extracts the metal, and trade that.

Personally, I'd avoid the player doing the smelting, as that feels too much like minecraft. By shipping it to a refinery, we're tapping into the core trading that is pioneer/frontier. And maybe refineries aren't available on all worlds, so opens up for more travelling, trading, and exploration.