Orbiter Online - Milestone 0 Goals Thread

[Face]

Scenario 2:
2 players hang in LEO with xx$ on account. Player 1 remains in realtime. Player 2 bookmarks his current state (including items and money!) and gives out all his money to player 1. Then "loads" his bookmark and syncs with player 1's bubble again. Player 1 has 2*xx$, Player 2 - xx$. Player 2 repeats until sun fades, getting infinite money for both.

Erm.. no.

As soon as Player 2 gives all his money to player 1, a simple fast-forward-merge for the entities "money" is not possible anymore. This is where I said conflicts need to be solved... and Kaito's idea is nice in this regards. If Player 1 syncs up to Player 2 in your example above, he would end up with no money at all as soon as he "enters house" of Player 2.

For clarification: with economic stats I mean stats of all players involved, too.

 

[Coldron]

I agree with Urwumpe with the fact that FTL will ruin some good things that comes with 1x time.
I allways dreamed to have fun in cooperative way of playing in Orbiter.

Maybe someday in future to add Gate jumping or just make it as Research base task to implent faster/bigger ship to haul stuff back and forth. Few people would work in Mars end and few in earth/moon.
Maybe have 4 fictional Corps to keep up the competition on building bases or what not, but no FTL plz :thumbup:

 

[Face]

Maybe someday in future to add Gate jumping or just make it as Research base task to implent faster/bigger ship to haul stuff back and forth.

In a sandbox approach, it would be indeed possible to add gate or FTL later on by means of special vessels.

Two thing are obvious for me, though:

• A time-bubble server with time-trace and economics-merge will take longer to implement than a fixed-acceleration server with FTL stuff.
• A time-bubble server can be more generic than a fixed-acceleration server.

regards,
Face

 

[DarkWanderer]

As soon as Player 2 gives all his money to player 1, a simple fast-forward-merge for the entities "money" is not possible anymore.

You anyways end up in a paradox.
You either save the state of your items with the bookmark (sim time), either the whole world's items and economy (which is nonsense just by resource consumption).

If you do it first way:
Scenario 3:
My friend waits me at the Asteroid belt. I buy a Mining Drone, go to him, unload it. While he operates it in realtime, I load my bookmark, then buy another drone, go to the AB and install it. Voila - I did twice the work in the same time (and possibly collided with myself on the way).

If you choose second way
Scenario 4:
I and my friend sync at Earth's orbit and drink beer. Then we desync and go to mine heavy water deposits on Moon. Then after 1 year simtime we both land on Brighton Beach, sell results of our work and (ATTENTION!) buy new ships. Then we meet each other on the orbit of Saturn (our old ships are unable to reach Saturn), and I sync to his time.
The universe collapses, because I end up sitting in an old ship, while being in Saturn orbit.

So I'm sorry, but your concept contains a mistake in the very basis.

 

[orb]

Scenario 3:
My friend waits me at the Asteroid belt. I buy a Mining Drone, go to him, unload it. While he operates it in realtime, I load my bookmark, then buy another drone, go to the AB and install it. Voila - I did twice the work in the same time (and possibly collided with myself on the way).

You can't collide with yourself because it's another bubble, and you did this work on two different bubbles.

Scenario 4:
I and my friend sync at Earth's orbit and drink beer. Then we desync and go to mine heavy water deposits on Moon. Then after 1 year simtime we both land on Brighton Beach, sell results of our work and (ATTENTION!) buy new ships. Then we meet each other on the orbit of Saturn (our old ships are unable to reach Saturn), and I sync to his time.
The universe collapses, because I end up sitting in an old ship, while being in Saturn orbit.

You aren't on Saturn's orbit after syncing to bubble you left. If you were on Earth's stable orbit before you left, then you are still there after syncing.

 

[Face]

If you choose second way
Scenario 4:
I and my friend sync at Earth's orbit and drink beer. Then we desync and go to mine heavy water deposits on Moon. Then after 1 year simtime we both land on Brighton Beach, sell results of our work and (ATTENTION!) buy new ships. Then we meet each other on the orbit of Saturn (our old ships are unable to reach Saturn), and I sync to his time.
The universe collapses, because I end up sitting in an old ship, while being in Saturn orbit.

Erm... no. You earned the money anyway, so this entity can be fast-forwarded. No conflict with your buddy's economics arise, because he never influenced your part of economics with his actions. So you'll end up sitting in your hard-earned ship, while being in Saturn orbit, nothing collapses.

So I'm sorry, but your concept contains a mistake in the very basis.

Maybe I should outline it better, so you can understand what I mean. Thanks for putting up scenarios, though, please let them come...

regards,
Face

 

[DarkWanderer]

You can't collide with yourself because it's another bubble, and you did this work on two different bubbles.

I synced to my friend's "bubble" on both flights.

If you were on Earth's stable orbit before you left, then you are still there after syncing.

And with an old ship? There's no player interaction then, because everywhere exists only one "king" and bunch of players which have "just started playing".
What's the sense of playing the game at all, if I must lose everything I acquired to join someone?

 

[Urwumpe]

I also don't think time bubble universes work well.

If I play faster in time, I will get punished in the short term when dealing with players that play slower: My transactions will be scheduled for the slower player, so he has no negative effects and ensured income, while I have to wait until he does his actions, for receiving money in the past, that was missing for me until he paid.

Even if you would introduce shadow budgets, which give you potential money, with the risk of the money being not existing (forcing powerful economic crashes in the game), the fun factor would be gone. In the worst case, you would have people abusing the shadow budgets by gathering debts until the bubble explodes. You can't send out causality cops then for reverting all transactions that followed from this source until the damage is fixed again.

There can only be one time per server, all else opens a huge can of worms, which I can't even slightly imagine how to solve it.

And coordinating between multiple servers with multiple times would also be a PITA, so you eventually will have to reside with one time per universe.

The only meaningful system I see:

• One time line. This also makes it easier to script plots into the MMORPG.
• No time acceleration at all, constant real time.
• Multiple characters per player, only one active at a time. This way a player can switch between somebody on the 5 year asteroid mining mission and somebody sitting in the sun in Havana, compensating for the hardships. maybe there could be special limitations based on a karma system for this, I am not sure yet, since I didn't think long about it.
• There should be soft mechanisms for preventing casual players from going on long-term missions and then never use the long-term characters again, making them just useless for the mission. Maybe some kind of guild system could be good.
• Alternatively, when using the karma system, you could allow trading characters for karma points - if somebody wants to go offline for a while, you could just "rent" the character to somebody else or sell him completely to another player. Maybe this solves some many problems.

 

[Arrowstar]

Here's an idea that I've had for a bit, though its implementation may be complicated and some of the ideas I've been reading above are also quite plausible, as well.

In any event: since travel between bodies is the big problem everyone has, what if such maneuvers worked like this: a player will plot his journey on TransX or IMFD. The MFD tells the player where, approximately, he'll end up relative to the destination body when he arrives. So the player executes the appropriate burn. At this point, why not simply put the player around the destination body with the same orbit he or she would have when they arrived if they did it in real time?

Few problems with this approach I see:
--We still have FTL, though the "challenge" aspect is still here as one is required to perform all maneuvers (injection and capture burns) to get somewhere;
--It would probably be necessary to force players to use either TransX or IMFD;
--The results of the TransX or IMFD plotted journey need to get into the server somehow

Using this approach, you get rid of the pains of interstellar travel while still maintaining a universal timeline. Everything else, deorbit, re-entry, landing, launch, aligning planes, and docking with stations, would have to be done in real time.

Feel free to rip this to shreds, I contribute it as a discussion point.

 

[DarkWanderer]

Erm... no. You earned the money anyway, so this entity can be fast-forwarded. No conflict with your buddy's economics arise, because he never influenced your part of economics with his actions. So you'll end up sitting in your hard-earned ship, while being in Saturn orbit, nothing collapses.

What is "part" of economics? If I give him my money, and he buys a ship on both his and mine money - whose economics is it?

Maybe I should outline it better, so you can understand what I mean. Thanks for putting up scenarios, though, please let them come...

Well, the problem is just that your concept brings up too much problems upon solving just one.
If you won't object, since the concept is not ready - we won't consider it as the main design.

 

[Coldron]

It just doesn't feel right to travel other planets in blink of an eye.
The fact is that we have only our solar system to play with.
Like forming base in Mars and start mining there would take only few hours and that would leave us shortly not having any more goals to reach.
Im sure we aren't in hurry cos we like Orbiter as Simulator and challenge?

 

[DarkWanderer]

There can only be one time per server, all else opens a huge can of worms, which I can't even slightly imagine how to solve it.

I think we've reached the consensus here.

• 
  <..>
• Multiple characters per player, only one active at a time. This way a player can switch between somebody on the 5 year asteroid mining mission and somebody sitting in the sun in Havana, compensating for the hardships. maybe there could be special limitations based on a karma system for this, I am not sure yet, since I didn't think long about it.
• There should be soft mechanisms for preventing casual players from going on long-term missions and then never use the long-term characters again, making them just useless for the mission. Maybe some kind of guild system could be good.
• Alternatively, when using the karma system, you could allow trading characters for karma points - if somebody wants to go offline for a while, you could just "rent" the character to somebody else or sell him completely to another player. Maybe this solves some many problems.

Well, selling characters is a way against the idea of "RPG" (how could you sell yourself?), but this may be a solution if we won't manage to avoid free time problem. Let's see.

<....>
Few problems with this approach I see:
--We still have FTL, though the "challenge" aspect is still here as one is required to perform all maneuvers (injection and capture burns) to get somewhere;
--It would probably be necessary to force players to use either TransX or IMFD;
--The results of the TransX or IMFD plotted journey need to get into the server somehow

Well, as you have noted, this is already an FTL, and - since every ship has it - the worst kind of it So there's little difference in terms of realism.

Talking of challenge, we may make the gate entry more complicated - i.e. making it work only if approached in narrow angle window, with closely maintained speed vector and timing.

I agree with Urwumpe with the fact that FTL will ruin some good things that comes with 1x time.
I allways dreamed to have fun in cooperative way of playing in Orbiter.
Maybe someday in future to add Gate jumping or just make it as Research base task to implent faster/bigger ship to haul stuff back and forth. Few people would work in Mars end and few in earth/moon.
Maybe have 4 fictional Corps to keep up the competition on building bases or what not, but no FTL plz

How about assembling the gate yourself?

Im sure we aren't in hurry cos we like Orbiter as Simulator and challenge?

Well, we're open to ideas. If they work

So, I hope this question is clear. Let's begin with actual design?..

 

[Face]

If I play faster in time, I will get punished in the short term when dealing with players that play slower: My transactions will be scheduled for the slower player, so he has no negative effects and ensured income, while I have to wait until he does his actions, for receiving money in the past, that was missing for me until he paid.

Even if you would introduce shadow budgets, which give you potential money, with the risk of the money being not existing (forcing powerful economic crashes in the game), the fun factor would be gone. In the worst case, you would have people abusing the shadow budgets by gathering debts until the bubble explodes. You can't send out causality cops then for reverting all transactions that followed from this source until the damage is fixed again.

I see how you come to this conclusion. I have to formulate my vision more clearly in order to discuss it better... working on it already...

• One time line. This also makes it easier to script plots into the MMORPG.

This is an interesting point. Scripting plots in time-accelerated environment would indeed be problematic.

In any event: since travel between bodies is the big problem everyone has, what if such maneuvers worked like this: a player will plot his journey on TransX or IMFD. The MFD tells the player where, approximately, he'll end up relative to the destination body when he arrives. So the player executes the appropriate burn. At this point, why not simply put the player around the destination body with the same orbit he or she would have when they arrived if they did it in real time?

Few problems with this approach I see:
--We still have FTL, though the "challenge" aspect is still here as one is required to perform all maneuvers (injection and capture burns) to get somewhere;
--It would probably be necessary to force players to use either TransX or IMFD;
--The results of the TransX or IMFD plotted journey need to get into the server somehow

This has been brought up before. The problem here is with celestial bodies in wrong position to each other. Trajectories in Orbiter take celestial body movement over time into account.

If you won't object, since the concept is not ready - we won't consider it as the main design.

I have no problem with this, it was never meant to be the "authoritive main design". Just don't throw something overboard yet because it is not ready. Because this attribute can be applied to every concept here .

regards,
Face

 

[Juanelm]

Orbiter Online, awesome!

Here is a possible solution for the time problem:

I think we all agree that the best option would be to have no time acceleration, although this brings the problem of long trips. How about this:

1)Set the Orbiter Online universe on another solar sistem- one in which planets are not that far from each other. (Anyways our solar system does not have that many planets you could realistically land or settle in.)

2) It might take a few weeks to travel from one planet to another, but each person could have multiple vessels he could manage, so while one is on its trip to a planet he could do other trips with other ships. (Like Urwumpe's idea)

3)Each person might start with just one ship, and thus it would not be practical to travel to other planets. However, that person can travel in the home planet and to its moons in a relatively short time. Once you get enough resources there, you can buy more ships to make it easier to go to other places.

Having a long trip to a planet makes it much more realistic in the sense that your heart will really be pounding during that reentry, you don't want to lose that trip! Contrast this with getting to Jupiter in an hour; the sense of reality would be lost, it would be too easy to do things.

This would be a technically easy solution (I think), and it would truly be MMO; there would be many ships (multiple ships per person), and most of them would be concentrated on the main planet and its moons, so there is a greater chance of interacting with other people.

What do you guys think of this?

 

[BHawthorne]

You do make some valid points. We're all trying to get ideas on how to shorten flight time though some alternate method of engines or FTL or whatever else, when we can just design the system and the location of the planetary orbits to conform to whatever would be reasonable for flight times. This throws out the need to come up with strange new engine design types or sci-fi alternatives. We just design the solar system to be freindly to real time play in a new system that isn't Sol.

 

[Hielor]

You do make some valid points. We're all trying to get ideas on how to shorten flight time though some alternate method of engines or FTL or whatever else, when we can just design the system and the location of the planetary orbits to conform to whatever would be reasonable for flight times. This throws out the need to come up with strange new engine design types or sci-fi alternatives. We just design the solar system to be freindly to real time play in a new system that isn't Sol.

I think that making a new solar system just for this purpose in which everything is smaller would really be no different than having ships with high accelerations, since that that point you've thrown realism out the window anyway.

 

[Urwumpe]

I think a realistic solar system (ideally so) would be better, since it gives some more connection to the game.

and if a longer mission takes 5 years, then it is like that. since such missions usually offer the highest gains for the highest risks, it could be quite possible that players want to have a character on board... as PNP roleplaying gamer, I have only little objections to switching characters, and even more sinister, as regular clan character player, I am used to making new characters every other month. You are not Clanner for dying old.

 

[jinglesassy]

how about you just make it so everyone has there own control of there own time acceleration and make it so that if you are within say 100 km of another person you are forced to 1x until you leave or dock and when docked both players have to agree to time acceleration this way you dont have to make a new star system and no faster then light travel or make 2 options this one and the small star system

 

[Juanelm]

I think that making a new solar system just for this purpose in which everything is smaller would really be no different than having ships with high accelerations, since that that point you've thrown realism out the window anyway.

I think its possible to have a solar system smaller than ours that is still realistic. At least in terms of physics it would be 100% realistic.

EDIT: I think you understood wrong. The idea is not to modify our solar system and make it smaller; the idea is to make another whole new solar system with other planets, that is smaller than ours.

 

[orb]

how about you just make it so everyone has there own control of there own time acceleration and make it so that if you are within say 100 km of another person you are forced to 1x until you leave or dock and when docked both players have to agree to time acceleration this way you dont have to make a new star system and no faster then light travel or make 2 options this one and the small star system

But time acceleration also applies to all planets, moons, and unmanned spacecrafts like spacestations and .
(and 100 km isn't that much in spaceflight)