Discussion Bringing bases alive

[Andy44]

When you guys say "AI vessels" do mean real vessels that you can intereact with, or just meshes flying around which appear and disappear at some distance from the base or viewer?

A real vessel with AI means a vessel with an autopilot, which you can hop into and take control of, right?

 

[Dambuster]

When you guys say "AI vessels" do mean real vessels that you can intereact with, or just meshes flying around which appear and disappear at some distance from the base or viewer?

A real vessel with AI means a vessel with an autopilot, which you can hop into and take control of, right?

Well for my earlier post, I meant that even having just flying meshes (which you could dock/UMMU with, if that's possible) would be amazing. Whilst 'real vessel with AI's would be best, that does seem prohibitively complex from what I've just read here (although, per ardua ad astra ).


Also, aside from flying meshes/AI vessels, increased UMMU interaction with bases/vessels/the environment would help turn Orbiter into more of a 'free' game, which might be nice.

 

[jedidia]

It should be pretty straightforward to set up some sub-orbital and LEO flight routes. Perhaps Earth to moon as well.

Might be possible in an orbital context, allthough "pretty straight forward" is not my term of choice for such an undertaking. Then again, I'm a rather lousy coder. So, if you can get it to work, I will enjoy it!

 

[tgep]

Ok, here's my 2 cents. I'd like to have a way to load animated bases directly into every scenario at boot up.

Example:
Lets say I want to leave Earth and fly to Mars Base Alpha. I boot up Orbiter, look through my scenarios to choose the ship of my choice, and begin my flight.

As it stands now, if I don't have the Vessel\Base already in the scenario, I have to create a new vessel ( the animated base ) and land it on its base pad on Mars then line it up so that all the landing pads match.

It would be great if you could somehow write the Vessel\Base into the Base Config file so that it appears each time you boot up Orbiter and not appear as another spacecraft but a base. It would give us greater flexability in creating really complex scenarios. I think it would also spur more developement of animated bases with Ummu capabilty.

 

[jedidia]

To define it as a base is impossible with the current Orbiter core. It simply doesn't offer that flexibility. Maybe martin will do some improvement to this system in the over-next release, but Orbiter was never meant for that kind of stuff, so I don't know how much he would like to do that.

However, your major problem can be solved with this:
http://www.orbithangar.com/search_quick.php?text=default+scenario&submit.x=0&submit.y=0

It lets you set up a default scenario file in which you can define vessels that should be loaded every time Orbiter is run, no matter what other scenario you choose to start.

 

[wehaveaproblem]

Yeah, tgep, the way Orbiter handles bases in the cfg file limits application in the current release. I've actually run into another problem regarding that and mesh transparency with the WLC. But as Jedidia says, the only way to make vessel bases appear is using the default scenario addon. I plan to release an AIA Universe default scenario once the lunar base is done. This will have all the animated components (vessels) for WIN and Toehold, along with some random Airbourne and ground based traffic.

 

[ar81]

Radio transmissions are just a list of different scripted conversations.
MFD should be able to determine what is the situation of the craft and then trigger a conversation.

If what you want is a ressemblance of AI with dynamic text chatter, you might need to detect the type of sentence, which belongs to the realm of detecting language structures.

However there are basic scripted conversations that you may see in FSX. They look somehow natural, but they are standard ATC. How about starting with an ATC MFD that emulates FSX?

 

[tgep]

However, your major problem can be solved with this:
http://www.orbithangar.com/search_quick.php?text=default+scenario&submit.x=0&submit.y=0

It lets you set up a default scenario file in which you can define vessels that should be loaded every time Orbiter is run, no matter what other scenario you choose to start.

Thanks for the Link. I'll give it a shot with Mars Base Alpha. If I can get it working properly, I may take a whack at modifying Claviuse Base to include an elevator with an attach point that your vessel rides on to be lifted up to launch position after the dome opens.