[freespacefanatic73]

I noticed sporatic posts asking about the proper distancing to place Cap ships from Jump Nodes in fred. This chart i came across shows the distances for a good portion of the ships on the list. I decided to post a link so more peeps would know about it. 

http://fredzone.hard-light.net/

  My hat is off to the person who put the chart together, cause it beats the ole method of playing musical Cap ships in fred. 

[karajorma]

Ah, cool. I'd forgotten that this was available in FREDzone.

Sutehp and Cetanu are the guys to thank but unfortunately neither has been around for ages.

[jr2]

...anybody wikify that?

[freespacefanatic73]

...anybody wikify that?

I second that motion 
Please Wikify it!

[diceman111]

...anybody wikify that?

I second that motion 
Please Wikify it!

WIKI WIKI WIKI WIKI !!!!!!!!!

[jr2]

Anybody can Wikify it, you know... just put in a note about the fact that you want someone to clean up your mess, if you're not that good at it... it's easier for someone who's good at it to edit your post, then to create it all by themselves. 

[blackdragon]

Adding ATM to
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/jump_distances

[Goober5000]

Broken link.

Also, jump in distances are frequently different than jump out distances.  And some of the distances in the table aren't correct.  (I've tried them.)  We need a few people who can re-test them.

[blackdragon]

Fixed the link.

How about if I just get the nice framework down and then, the incorrect values can be changed? Or is this a bad idea?

[Goober5000]

No, that's an excellent idea. I'm just sending out an FYI so people will know what needs to be done.

[Dark Hunter]

Why have I not heard of FREDZone before? It looks like it has some very useful stuff in it. (Some of it outdated, true, but still...)

[karajorma]

Not been paying attention? It's not like I didn't link to it in my FAQ.

(Although it appears I have linked to the 3D actionplanet site somehow despite grepping and changing all those links )

[TrashMan]

I dispute the validity of those numbers....

How were they attained?

And how can a jumping in (coming from teh node) be anything less than 0? You jump out from the center of the node! How far your acceleration brings you has no bearing..

Jumping out for a Deamon 2300m? This can't be right...

[karajorma]

The distances are how far your acceleration brings you of course.

Those numbers are very important to a competent FREDder as it's much better to have a rough idea of those distances than to have to work them out every time you have a ship jump in.

I'm sure they could be improved but if you feel that they're wrong, get the right ones.

[blackdragon]

Two questions:

1.  How are we going to keep track of which distances have been tested and which have not?  Should I take all the unknown data out, mark it somehow as untested, etc ?

2.  How would I test this sort of thing? 

[karajorma]

A more pertinent question is which distance are you measuring? Distance to the centerpoint of the ship? Distance to the front? Back?

[blackdragon]

I assume it would be a better idea to measure distance as it would appear in game. But from what I remember the point the game calculates this from is not always in the same place, is it?  I am open to suggestions about how to do it.

[Goober5000]

Warping in:

One way is to place the ship at (0, 0, 0) and then give it orders to warp in at a certain time (like 00:05).  Then set up a sexp which uses SCP variables to display the current coordinates of the ship when you press a key.  Then fire up the mission, wait for the ship to warp in, wait for the ship to come to a stop, and read off the coordinates.

This way would measure from center-to-center, so you if you wanted to measure the distance from warp-effect-to-center, you'd have to subtract off the length of the ship from the center to the front (which may not be equal to half the length of the ship).  The easiest way to do that would be to place the ship so that its front is at (0, 0, 0), but you'd probably have to eyeball that.


Warping out:

Not sure about this yet.  The best idea would probably be to measure the distance from the center (or front) of the ship to the point at which the warp effect appears, but I'm not sure how you'd get the coordinates of the warp effect.


Of course, the best way to figure this out would be to look it up in the source code.  But I'm a little too busy/lazy/occupied-with-other-priorities to do that at the moment.

[karajorma]

Just don't try measuring it yourself using the hud distances whatever you do. You'll get all kinds of problems doing that.


In fact that's probably why the numbers on FREDzone are incorrect. They were compiled before you could simply out but the results in a message and so they probably were calculated by having a ship jump in and then getting the player to go to 0,0,0 and read off the distance on his HUD.

Unfortunately the distances that reports are not the same ones that FRED would use most of the time.