Orbital position calculations

[AbuDhabi (OP)]

This is extremely helpful.

Are you saying it is not terrible that pathfinding does not do any prediction for where the target they're headed for is going to be considering their speed?

[Nathan_]

The single biggest reason for the chase the planets implementation is its simplicity, no need to create extra hassle when not needed.

[Bgreman]

Are you saying it is not terrible that pathfinding does not do any prediction for where the target they're headed for is going to be considering their speed?

For the vast majority of the game, it doesn't matter.  Your ships move so much faster than the planets that you're not really losing much by direct chase.  For the portion where it does matter (extremely slow, conventionally-engined commercial vessels in the early game), you can work around it by placing waypoints.  That's what you have to do when trying to intercept enemy task groups, and I haven't heard anyone complain about having to manually work out those intercepts.  In fact, that's a major part of games like this.

While it would be nice if the game predicted planetary positions and moved toward those, in most cases, it just doesn't matter.  So I wouldn't call it "terrible," so much as "inconvenient."  If you have an alternative implementation ready to go, why not submit to the Pulsar 4x group?  The base functionality of Aurora is unlikely to be changed, especially in marginal cases like this.

[Steve Walmsley]

For the vast majority of the game, it doesn't matter.  Your ships move so much faster than the planets that you're not really losing much by direct chase.  For the portion where it does matter (extremely slow, conventionally-engined commercial vessels in the early game), you can work around it by placing waypoints.  That's what you have to do when trying to intercept enemy task groups, and I haven't heard anyone complain about having to manually work out those intercepts.  In fact, that's a major part of games like this.

While it would be nice if the game predicted planetary positions and moved toward those, in most cases, it just doesn't matter.  So I wouldn't call it "terrible," so much as "inconvenient."  If you have an alternative implementation ready to go, why not submit to the Pulsar 4x group?  The base functionality of Aurora is unlikely to be changed, especially in marginal cases like this.

It's also partly because a lot of the potential intercepts are far from simple. If your destination is a moon orbiting a planet that is orbiting a star that orbits another star which in turn orbits a third star (while taking lagrange points into account), then working out an intercept course is tricky. I found this when I had to do exactly that calculation in Newtonian Aurora (because constantly changing course is expensive in fuel) and also allow for acceleration and deceleration of a ship that is constantly losing mass (and therefore changing acceleration rate). As noted above, it isn't often an issue so it seemed like a look of effort to solve a minor issue.

Steve

[AbuDhabi (OP)]

It's also partly because a lot of the potential intercepts are far from simple. If your destination is a moon orbiting a planet that is orbiting a star that orbits another star which in turn orbits a third star (while taking lagrange points into account), then working out an intercept course is tricky. I found this when I had to do exactly that calculation in Newtonian Aurora (because constantly changing course is expensive in fuel) and also allow for acceleration and deceleration of a ship that is constantly losing mass (and therefore changing acceleration rate). As noted above, it isn't often an issue so it seemed like a look of effort to solve a minor issue.

Steve

That makes sense. Thanks.

[MarcAFK]

Wow, you waited for the wrong time to reply on this one, Steve's actually made this exact change in the next patch :p.
Thank you steve, and thank you belasco commune for playing tag with those silly Russian Oscar class destroyer commanders.

[Steve Walmsley]

Wow, you waited for the wrong time to reply on this one, Steve's actually made this exact change in the next patch :p.
Thank you steve, and thank you belasco commune for playing tag with those silly Russian Oscar class destroyer commanders.

Actually I made the change for ships/missiles intercepting moving fleets. There is still no intercept movement for planets for the reasons I mentioned above.

And you're right it was the Belasco Commune that persuaded me to finally sort this out

Steve

[AbuDhabi (OP)]

What exactly happened with the Belasco Commune?