Limited range for intra-system transport commissions?

Bodasey commented 2 years ago

From Bodasey's minor series...

Observed behaviour

There are no transport commissions to Poseidon Station and Pluto Research Base from "inner planets" (until Saturn here) There are also no transport commissions from there to the inner Planets

Expected behaviour

There should be some from time to time

Steps to reproduce

play freight delivery in the solar system

My pioneer version (and OS): July stable? deduction from long-time observation

btw: how has in-game Neptune got ice rings? In reality, they are of very dark material, hardly visible - I'd say better leave them.

neptune-ring-offcenter

impaktor commented 2 years ago

I'm marking this as a "feature request", to distinguish it from the more serious bugs on the tracker. This issue sounds like a good first project for anyone wanting to dive into the DeliverPackage.lua code.

Keeper1st commented 2 years ago

Looking at it, yes, there appears to be a distance cap of 20AU for local deliveries on line 270 in DeliverPackage.lua. That means it's even possible depending on orbit times not to get a mission from Saturn to Neptune as over time they could get nearly 40AU from each other (but obviously that would mean every inner-planet destination is in between them, so you'd still be getting missions in that direction, toward the Sun, but likely never have anything to Neptune as there'd be no stations within 20AU of it).

You can easily edit that line in a text editor. You just have to decide what your limit should be. I'm not sure what the actual maximum distance between Neptune and Pluto can get because of Pluto's eccentric orbit. If it were on the same plane they could potentially be about 80AU end to end, but obviously this is highly calendar dependent.

Maybe check a few generated systems as well to see what sort of distances you get, then decide on a good "local" cap. Do you want every possible in-system destination available, or just things that aren't going to take you years to reach?

impaktor commented 2 years ago

One of my earliest pioneer-branches was longrange-delivery, aim was to have delivery missions that would require many jumps, and take the player a long distance. "I guess we're not in Kansas anymore"....

Never finished it.

Keeper1st commented 2 years ago

Oh by the way, if you want to increase the range from 20AU on DeliverPackage, you might want to do the same with CargoRun which has the same distance limit for in-system contracts.

robothauler commented 1 month ago

I think because of #5707 the maximum distance for local missions could be increased. The question is, to what reasonable distance?

Bodasey commented 1 month ago

No Limits!

It's the player's decision where he wants to travel and take time for it, and also to estimate if he can accomplish a mission in time.

(Also keep in mind that our solar system could be a small one; Fomalhaut b is about 120 AU from it's star, and if planet 9 exists, even our solar system would expand up to 900 AU - was it possible to make such bodies reachable by a hyperjump?)

fluffyfreak commented 1 month ago

was it possible to make such bodies reachable by a hyperjump?

We've discussed making in-system jumps before but it's never been done because the slow and difficult travel is part of the point of the game for some. For others they might like the idea but it's just never been picked up.

pioneerspacesim / pioneer