How far out do those himal GO?!!!

[Song]

In early systems, you'll often see Himal disappearing off into the outer system, and sometimes coming back.

However today, while trying to see how far an Osaka packed full of fuel can go before running out.....I saw a group inbound...when I was at 51,000 ls north-north east of a small station above Starton Eridani (which was in the NorthEast/NNE area of the sector). Fifty. One. Thousand.

Now, There are several things we know about Himal:

1. They fly interceptors. That is, a very light, very small ship.
2. They do not have a hold full of fuel, and especially do not carry 60+ rods of it, which is about how much I used to get out this far. (I went the wrong way, and have been trying to get directly north of my starting point, which after 30-40K ls, takes a while)

So....anything in the XML that actually says how far out they go?

The only other things I've seen are Hornets, Vikings and Corsair Is....which have been chasing me from time to time.

I'm kinda curious about this. Also as to what they're doing out here.... To get back, they have to go back at least 50k ls to get to an outer-system base....that's a round trip of over 100,000ls.....which is more than a Light-day.


EDIT: Ok, this is getting ridiculous. 2-3 more Interceptors just went past inbound for eridani. Estimated distance from outer system: 110,000 lightseconds.

Where on earth are they coming from out here?

[Prophet]

That is very bizarre. The himal interceptors use the event handler evStdZoneEncounterBehavior so they shouldn't be more than 300 ls from their home station. Perhaps they were just spawned, and the spawn code uses the playership as the origin vector. According to the handler they should ignore all enemies and fly straight to their home base.

[Song]

Could well be, they certainly ignored me every time I saw them. Oh, and I think i just took the record for "greatest distance travelled manually outside the system"



In reality, I'm a little under 250,000ls away from the edge of system (to be fair, let's say 1500ls less), but still, it is not an insignificant distance.

I started out heading North-East-Ish and then curved back after about 100K LS so i could measure the distance more accurately. So all in all, I've travelled about 2-3K LS more than that...on the way back, I'll note when I pass the edge of the system, and so work out how far out I actually got.

Oh, and spot the bug with the target arrow. I am pointed AWAY FROM the target. It flips over somewhere between 160k and 190K LS, I think....not sure, because I missed it going out. Might get to see it flick back on the way home

Not, I think, that this is a bug that many people are going to encounter. Just a hunch, you know......

(And yes, I went for custom equipment for the trip back, rather than sticking to the standard Osaka stuff. That thruster may not increase my speed (sadly), but it looks pretty, and gives a little bit more acceleration. Next time I'm building a custom playership just to use the thruster pack, and to go for out-of-system distance. Maybe even an FTL drive for the trip home.....this sits in the background while I code mines and rockets )

[Prophet]

Here some code bits that you may find helpful:

Code: Select all

(sysVectorDistance gPlayerShip Nil) ;; measures distance from star

(objMoveTo gPlayerShip Nil) ;; moves the player back to the star

(objSetVel gPlayerShip (sysVectorPolarVelocity 90 100)) ;; accelerates your ship to the north (90) at the speed of light (100).

I can confirm that the target pointer does disappear when you're ~176000 ls away from the target.

[Atarlost]

Keep going forward and see if space is toroidal.

[digdug]

bah, I got bored at around 5 million ls of distance.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/720869/rangetest.jpg

I have to try with a faster ship 8)


[EDIT]

woah!!!

at ~21.746.000 ls space start to flicker like crazy with rainbow colors ! it's epileptic !
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/720869/rangetest2.jpg

[EDIT2]
flickering stops at a distance of 43 million ls and normal space resumes.

flickering restarts at around 67 million ls and stops at 87 million ls

woah^2 !!!
stars stop moving at ~89.540.000 ls

more flickering colors at 130, 150, 200, 230, 280 million ls (stars are still stuck) and so on

until the counter get stuck at 2.147.483.648 ls (2^31)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/720869/rangetest3.jpg

[Song]

I'm fairly certain that was not done at standard ship speed

Dig<---You've actually got it to show a negative value!


Hooray for bored people screwing with the game engine

[Bobby]

I've got some refinements to Digdug's results.

1. The stars don't stop, they do however stop scrolling in the vertical direction, so if you are flying up or down they don't move, but they do if you go sideways. EDIT: they move the wrong way.

2. The flickering is actually more like a long series of multi-colored stars, so it only flickers at warp speed. It's equally blinding at a standstill though.

3. At some point the targeting arrow went sideways and just stuck there. EDIT: it still points the right way (at least I think it does, I could have gotten lost), but is put at the wrong place around the screen.

Eventually the target distance counter just got stuck displaying "-21,447,483,648".


EDIT 3?: This time I flew straight right and some point after the counter got stuck I got Arco's warning message (this isn't your fight, don't make me destroy you, etc), so I tried it again with the same result, then I went left and he warned me again, huh? I'm pretty sure there aren't three Arco Vaugns, two of them stupendously far away, and at my speed I would probably just jump over them anyway...

[Song]

Heh. The target arrow sometimes jams forward, sometimes jams sideways, and sometimes flips round and works again.

my own warpship is working now....although I don't have the acceleration you guys have. 500,000ls out, and several minutes, and I got 2 thrust-packs going flat out on 1000-shot bursts..... Which should get me up to full speed eventually, and looks REALLY nifty.


And docking is definitely not an option.

EDIT: And at VERY high speeds, some stars appear to move UP the screen (the rest move down).

EDIT2: The map is malfunctioning! I'm travelling so fast the map thinks I'm going backwards!
EDIT3: As speeds got higher, the map was fixed. i think it was having to move the map lines faster than the screen refresh, so the movement was reversed. I've got a third thruster pack.....this is getting fun

Edit4: At the time that the stars stop, particle effects go haywire. My thrusters are working, and showing up on the LRS.....but the ship appears to be on fire.....



(My ship has a massively high top speed, a little below the ship digdug used, but uses 5 massive high-recoil rear-facing weapons with x999 repeats on them to accelerate up to speed. The flame style particles are malfunctioning now and are causing the glitch. )

[SparcMan]

I'm surprised no one has tried to break the game in this way before.

[Prophet]

Amazingly, the game seems to never break, it just starts shooting pretty colours and tries to get you lost. Maybe Q is out there just toying with the silly mortals that stray so far from safety.

That would be an interesting idea to have a god-mod borg cube attack players that stray waayyyy too far from safety.

Or maybe Domina scoops you up and pluncks you back in the system with a slap on the wrist and says 'What are you doing out here? I told you to fly into the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. You think I like waiting for eternity to end? hurry up!' /slap

[IceMephit]

Or maybe Domina scoops you up and pluncks you back in the system with a slap on the wrist and says 'What are you doing out here? I told you to fly into the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. You think I like waiting for eternity to end? hurry up!' /slap

That would be funny!!! I'd do it just for laughs.

[Song]

Or maybe Domina scoops you up and pluncks you back in the system with a slap on the wrist and says 'What are you doing out here? I told you to fly into the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. You think I like waiting for eternity to end? hurry up!' /slap

That would be funny!!! I'd do it just for laughs.

Be aware that stopping at nearly a hundred times the speed of light is a really difficult thing......I tried to stop my ship at ~150 million LS out. Took me a LONG time (out to 330 million or so), and I lost sideways stability (when you have a massive amount of thrust, ANY sideways thrust will make a huge difference). Had to use the map to regain control....lining up on a vertical line and trying to keep in the bracket between the 2 lines on either side of it.

True, my method of using massive thrust packs encourages issues like this, but I maintain that it is A. SLIGHTLY more realistic and B. Considerably cooler-looking than jut ramping the thrust value up in the mod.

[Jeoshua]

Heres a perfect idea. Once you pass the heliosphere, you would naturally be exposed to high amounts of ionizing radiation from galactic winds. Maybe at this kind of distance (which would be around 50k LS) the player's ship should be subjected to radiation and momentum damage. If you're immune tho, maybe there could be Oortean objects out there... [/url]

[Aury]

Heh, there's a bug in eridani that trigger's one of Arco's lines to randomly fire if the player goes too far out & overflows the range indicator. [I made a modded ship that goes 2000000000000000c or so, with some equally insane thrust]

So if you get far enough out, you get messages like:
"Don't make me destroy you"

So awesome.