Pioneer dev forum

Posted: **Thu Nov 12, 2015 8:55 pm**

Snipping these from the originating PR:

implementing distance from planetary body before jump is allowed. I would make it much more restrictive than in Frontier - maybe 2 planet radii or more?
Yes, this was in the works. Just hasn't been done yet. (In part due to discussions on how/why/consequences of too early jumping). Should be straight forward to implement, please see #2399, once we have decided roughly how it should work. Biggest issue I think is how the player will know jumping is now allowed/safe (a LED on the dashboard?).

reducing the jump range - current jump ranges in Pioneer are about an order of magnitude greater than in Frontier
This has also been decided to do, to at least cut range in half. Maximum range for the Earth start ship should be around 10 ly. Please feel free to nerf it, but in a way that big ships still retain a reasonable range (fully loaded big ship with good drive should still jump 10 ly I guess?)

And I'm going throw in the in-system-hyperjump as a 3rd point to explore/discuss.

Some of this is going to add time to travelling, like being required to get out of the atmosphere and to meet other hyperspace requirements.
However some could also reduce travel time like being able to do in-system hyperspace jumps, subject to some restrictions of course :)

So, I'm am in favour of all of these things:

Hyperspace usage restrictions - #2399 didn't need moving into bloody Lua, we should have merged it.
Nerfing jump ranges for ships.
In-system hyperspace jumps.

Discuss!

Posted: **Thu Nov 12, 2015 9:39 pm**

I agree that there should be limits to entering hyperspace.

Also with in-sys jumps. Would allow for some deltaV nerfing, if we decide to want that, and would actually do away most of the "long starring at starfield" moments.
I usually mention Lagrangian points when there's talk about this, because those could be natural choke points / hubs for space traffic, so they would allow the player to meet other ships. (disclosure: inspired by the I-war games, and it worked nicely in I-war 2 in my opinion). I wrote a more detailed note about this, because my brain was itching, if somebody interested. True I think and overthink stuff all the time, especially when I can't sleep .:) One problem would be to make the AI know about these routes I guess.

Jump range nerfing seems to be a good direction too. This is like the only point where Elite Dangerous got close to having something nice, although it can feel arbitrary in that game. The problem is that we have much much more variety in ship mass, dry and loaded mass, and some ships already have very low ranges even with the largest drive.

And about the main point of the mentioned PR #3508: I haven't tested that new level of time-accel, but based on the comments, it seemed to rob all sense of scale from the game. Both for travel and hyperspace. I fully agree with fluffyfreak, that travel should take some time. And I don't think a 3 and a half minute trip to Pluto (33 or so AU) is that excessive or boring. And usually you only need to do about half of that after hyperspacing somewhere anyway. And even then, most of that time is spent around the planet on low time-accel setting while landing/docking. (I timed some different runs.).

Sometimes I really enjoy that Pioneer isn't a fast paced pewpew rollercoaster, but reflects more on the actual scales involved. It's an extreme example, but once I set the autopilot to go to Tranquility base from London, then switched back to my IRL work for a sec, and got sucked in it. After a while I realized that Pioneer is still open, and my ship was like already half-way to moon. I left the game on real-time time-accel. I was positively surprised, because I know how fat the Moon is, and it was an awesome feeling that this trip can be done in a couple of hours in Pioneer, and it really enhanced the sense of scale too. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we aim for gameplay where one can leave the game on it's own for hours and go away doing something else, I'm just saying that this was a one of a kind, but very nice experience with it.

Also if I remember correctly, there was some kind of local traffic script in Scout+ that didn't bothered simulating all the AI ships in the system with buying and whatnot, but generated some random (semi-random, not sure) traffic close to the player. Wouldn't something like that be useful? Like giving a range to sensors, so you can't see ships too far, simulate ships a bit beyond that range, so the player could follow them. Maybe keeping a table with ships and destinations, travel speeds, and only show them (on the sensors) when they are close enough. Does this makes sense?

Posted: **Sat Nov 14, 2015 7:59 pm**

The problem is that we have much much more variety in ship mass, dry and loaded mass, and some ships already have very low ranges even with the largest drive.

All are all for nerfing range. I guess the question is how strongly should the drive depend on the mass?

In-system jumps

I'm not ecstatic about in-system jumps, but I tend to resist changes in general, so I should see how this would play out. I think Lagrangian points would make perfect sens, they would:

Make pioneer stand out more compared to Elite Dangerous, and many other space games
Lagrange points feel more hard "sciency" and "correct" / "spacy".
Create a natural hub of traffic between star ports and L-points.
We would still require travelling astronomical interplanetary distances.
Give strategic importance to L-points, for military and pirates.
There are a lot of L-points, I guess only the Star-planet ones should be considered? Can you jump from 12AU-> Juptier's Trojan point, then to L-point of Earth-Sol? Not Earth-Moon?
Fake reason for jumps to Lagrange point: Hyperdrives don't work well in high gravitational fields, thus jumping into systems far from the massive star. Lagrange-points have the grav field cancel out.

Hyperjump safety rules

We need to decide on what mechanic causes the altitude restriction of low altitude hyper-jumps?

Distance to city?
Distance to surface?*
Distance to surface, and depend on planet mass?
Depend on atmosphere pressure?

* My choice, because I think from a game play perspective it's what makes sense. That way the player knows that once I get to X km I can hit that button. Otherwise I guess there should be a distance count down, like "Y km left to safe hyper range"

Why is it bad to jump too low?

Political reason: Noise / toxic (ozone) gases (i.e. OK from non-atmospheric planets?)?
Physics reason: Mass of planet makes the jump exit point uncertain?
Emergency jumps are possible. I.e. it's not impossible to hyperjump from 10 meters above the station. Just very bad.
Emergency jumps are not possible.

From a game play perspective I initially imagined it's more fun to have an "emergency jump" capability when in a pressed situation. But then you wouldn't be running (flying) for your life, with pirates/police on your tail, to get to that X km altitude to finally spin up the engine, you'd just jump out (and take that fine).

So I assume we can as a starting point agree upon the following:

Jumps are allowed immediately (or very short distance) from orbital space station (maybe first after having cleared the entrance).
Jumps are not allowed from (too close to) surface starbase on planets with atmosphere

We need specifically to decide:

Are jumps allowed from non-atmosphere surface stations?
How will the player know when jump drive can be engaged? (A light/LED indicator in the cockpit? or with current UI: hyperspace icon red?)
What will happen when jumps are initiated too early, other than getting fined? Be dropped in a bad position in the target system?
Will it even be possible to start the jump drive too low? Maybe only possible military (or "hacked") drives?

Ideally (#2399):

robn wrote: As noted in the above discussion, hyperspace rules might be different in different systems. Or maybe they won't be a physical restriction at all but some local convention. Or maybe some particular faction have magic tech that can get around some physical restriction. All of these are situational game mechanics, which entirely belongs in Lua.

and:

laarmen wrote:About the whole "defining the Hyperspace rules from Lua", it is already done in #1719, implemented as methods of the hyperspace engine. And really done, not "I plan to, sometime in the future" ;-)

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2015 1:26 am**

Are jumps allowed from non-atmosphere surface stations?

I would make this planet/mass dependent and not atmosphere dependent. The closer you are to a high mass body the more "noisy" your jump gets, resulting in really unfavorable exit points xxxAU from where you wanted to go. I believe that will add some great game play options: When running from police/pirates, do I try to get farther away from the planet but risk getting shot in the process? Or do I jump now and end up so far from the goal that my fuel will run out? You could make that "noisiness" of a jump a function of:

distance from planet

mass of planet

engine tech

This also brings planet physics into play even more. You would actually care about the mass of a planet you are going to, knowing that it will take a bit of traveling before you can jump away from there. Especially if you know you might run into some problem with police/pirates there.

How will the player know when jump drive can be engaged? (A light/LED indicator in the cockpit? or with current UI: hyperspace icon red?)

As long as there is no fully featured cockpit yet, I believe it would be most natural to have the hyperspace icon turn green (or switch from red to "normal") as soon as jumping is not influenced by the planet any more.

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2015 9:34 am**

I would make this planet/mass dependent and not atmosphere dependent.

Sounds reasonable to me.

The closer you are to a high mass body the more "noisy" your jump gets, resulting in really unfavorable exit points xxxAU from where you wanted to go.

I think this also sounds reasonable. But I am worried about how the player will get to understand how much further he/she needs to ascend before that button will turn blue (or green, or not-gray). What I think would be not-so-good, is if the player needs to sit and thrust upwards looking at the hyperspace button not knowing if it will flip any second, or if he/she needs to go 10 times higher still. Or not knowing how bad a jump at this point would be. Jumping into a system 10000 AU out is pretty much equal to death.

Ideally, there could be some indicator showing how much higher they need to, I don't know where that would be put though. Also, would there be an indicator showing how much "noise" a jump now would result in? Like "Noise from mass disturbance: 90%", then when at 5%-0% you're pretty safe to engage?

Actually, a lot of information like this could be crammed in if clicking the hyperspace button opened up a small window for confirmation, showing a table at what the "jump fidelity" would be at different altitudes, and what the minimum legally allowed jump height is. Also, having this would make jumping a bit more "serious" requiring multiple inputs (F7 + confirmation), rather than just a single key press.

This would also give us a nice excuse to put in a cool hyperspace "Engage" button. Or the more Piccard-ish: "Make it so". (I'm half-joking, but only "half".)

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2015 10:01 am**

OK, this is too big to put as an "Edit" of my previous post above, so here goes:

My mock-up (I bet others can do it better) of what I suggested in my previous post

Code: Select all

+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
|                  CONFIRM HYPERJUMP                              |
|                                                                 |
|    At current altitude of 56 km mass disturbance: ~4%.          |
|                                                                 |
|    Altitude    Mass noise                                       |
|    100 km      < 1 %                                            |
|    50  km        5 %                                            |
|    20  km       20 %  <- recommended minimum                    |
|    15  km       30 %  <- legal limit                            |
|    10  km       50 %                                            |
|    5   km       85 %                                            |
|                                                                 |
|                 Start hyperdrive?                               |
|                 [ABORT]  [ENGAGE]                               |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+

I imagine the hyperspace-button would turn OK/green/not-gray once the player has passed the legal limit and the minimum recommended (recommended and legal limit is always the same? Then they should be the same for all factions?)

If this sound like a good idea, we need to know:

what is the typical range of planet masses are we dealing with
and what should be the minimum jump-altitude for each typical mass (make a table)
i.e. what is minimum jump-altitude for the biggest planet, and for the smallest? And roughly the ones in between.

We could then plot that, and figure out what mathematical function gives something similar. Then I assume that the "noise" decreases inversely with distance squared, so we just multiply the minimum rage with that for each planet.

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2015 1:46 pm**

My mock-up (I bet others can do it better) of what I suggested in my previous post.

I like your idea of providing the player with actual information and not have him/her stare at the Hyp-Button. However, having another window pop up would interfere with flying itself, which may be a nuisance if you are dodging shots, evading other ships, etc. How about making that information visible as a slider bar, or as overlay text table (along the lines of what you suggested), or even a combination of both (with the "Current" column working like a slider bar):

Code: Select all

+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
|                  HYPERJUMP CLEARANCE                            |
|                                                                 |
|    At current altitude of 56 km mass disturbance: ~4%.          |
|                                                                 |
|    Altitude   Current    Mass noise                             |
|    100 km       ||        < 1 %                                 |
|    50  km       <>          5 %                                 |
|    20  km       ||         20 %  <- recommended minimum         |
|    15  km       ||         30 %  <- legal limit                 |
|    10  km       ||         50 %                                 |
|    5   km       ||         85 %                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2015 2:38 pm**

My turn! :)

Hyperspace:
Minimum distance enforced by mass of planet, can be communicated to player by them pressing F7 to "charge" the hyperdrive and having some simple visual indicator like a progress bar with 3 lines drawn on it.
You need 3 lines to represent the Minimum (Red line) jump distance, Recommended (Orange) and No-Restrictions (Green) with the distance from the planet displayed with each line.
Something like this mockup I just threw together.

It might be that we need something between Mass and Distance. Like a blending of the two, a minimum distance might be useful for very small planets where the Mass would set the minimum too low, like, on the launchpad.
However we might not want to use just Mass/Distance for big worlds where it might get set, subjectively, too far from the planet.

Atmospheric jumps should just be impossible for some quasi-technical reason.

I don't think it's necessary to have some kind of jump-anytime-anywhere-it's-an-emergency option, there should just be hard limits on what the technology can do, and best ways of using it.

In-system Jumps:
I do like the idea of these, and constraining their usage with Lagrange points is an excellent idea as it can create choke points with strategic value.

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2015 4:01 pm**

Apparently my post above is confusing about what I mean to happen so hopefully this is clearer.

Using the hyperspace drive should mean adhering to some fixed limitations like:

You cannot jump within atmosphere.
You must be past a certain distance/mass restriction.

Once you've met those basic limits though things become more nuanced.
So for example you're leaving Earth, you get out of it's atmosphere, you need to reach 200km above it's surface before a jump is even possible.
You do those and are 201km above the Earth, at that point a jump would be inaccurate, risky even, you really need to get to at least 300km before it becomes acceptably accurate and safe.
If you waited to 600km though then a hyperjump would be as accurate and free from risk as it's possible for you have.

So basically I envisage some hard technical limitations, with a smooth blending of risk & jump accuracy once you enter a region where the drive does start working.

Hope that makes more sense.

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2015 10:04 pm**

Nice mockup.

Wouldn't distance from surface would be a bit arbitrary? I mean 100km from the surface of Earth is peanuts compared to the Jupiter, but quite larger relative to the Moon or especially Phobos. Shouldn't it be tied more to the gravity of the planet? I mean the gravitational force the ship is currently experiencing.

In E:D spool-up time of the drive is affected by any mass near, even small ships. Although that's more for giving the ships a bit of leeway when they want to get the fleeing ship. But from another point, this might work like this, if: the spool-up time is affected by the distance/gravity. The deeper you are in the gravity well, the closer to infinity is the spool-up time, dropping significantly as you climb out from the well. E.g at 100km from Earth it would be 100 days, at 200km it's 10 days, at 300km it's one day, at 400km it's 24 minutes, etc. I don't know how this could be explained in-universe though.

How about tying fuel use to it, proportional to the gravity, apart from preciseness? The deeper you are in the gravity well, the more fuel the jump would use. Like a fuel use multiplier. So it's not just a question of exactness, but cost too. And the map could display the worst (lowest altitude where the drive is engage-able) and best possible fuel use for the jump. If so this info might be useful on the HUD too though.

And/or maybe travel hyperspace time could even be affected in a similar way. (Am I being carried away? :D)

This would go along with the L-Point thing too, as they are equilibrium points. And maybe they are easier and safer to aim for, instead of the closer spheres of a planet.

A legal limit makes sense in my opinion, like how drunk driving is handled. It's not impossible to drive a car (at least under a certain amount of alcohol), but it's quite strongly discouraged because how dangerous it is (to the ship, or to others, like toxicity/radiation or even navigational hazard, as Impaktor said).
The question is, how it is enforced? A fine will be waiting for you if you get back to the system? Also would a close jump cost a bit of reputation?

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