Tracking NPCs

General Discussion
1

On occasions when I run into an NPC and one of us doesn’t immediately decide to kill the other, I often try to follow them as they move around to see if they’ll reveal a JP I don’t know about. The issue is that if they’re a geosurvey ship and they’re orbiting a body while surveying it, I’m not technically in orbit of that body if my ship is using the “Follow” order. Then when the construction tick ticks, the enemy and the body are moved out of my sensor range and I have to manually direct my ship to go track them down.

Is there any way to avoid this? I could reduce the construction period, give my ship bigger sensors, etc, but those only work if the body in question has a fairly small orbit. Is there something I could do with sub-pulse (don’t actually know how subpulse works)? Or would this take code changes to address?

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I think sub-pulse can solve this problem EXCEPT when you lose track due to a construction tick triggering orbital movement. I’ll post this in the suggestions thread too, but the code for updating ship locations during orbital movement (which already handles ships in orbit just fine) could count anything that’s within 0km (or 1km for that matter) of a body as being in orbit and move it with that body.

3

One option is moving orbital movement out of the construction phase into the normal increments

It only takes 0.03 seconds in my game with 650 systems (including NPRs) and 42,000 system, bodies.

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That would be sweet! Having a more ‘natural’ movement for system bodies would both look nice and reduce exploits, like waiting for a body to move to avoid having to travel through defenders missile/STO envelope.

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Now I am considering it, there are three options:

  • Start of increment
  • End of increment
  • Start of sub-pulse

I think sub-pulse is overkill, as it would happen 48 times in a 1-day increment.

The difference between Start and End is that Start will allow the player to see where the body was during the movement, detection and combat phases of the previous increment, while End shows where the body will be during the movement, detection and combat phases of the next increment.

Start/End probably only matters during combat, so for planning purposes it is likely to be better to know where it will be during the next increment (so End). In any event, at combat timescales the distance moved is likely to be small.

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