Oolite Bulletins

This is a chicken-hen paradoxon. It does not make sense to configure a test framework if there are no tests. But what point is it to write tests if there is no test framework? Test framework in the sense of "there's somewhere you can write tests and run them locally while building the change&q...

Do I understand correctly that Oolite version numbers contain at most a 1 as major, then two digits as minor and at most a 99 in the end? They're semver-style arbitrary-base numbers, so 500.45785.284783 would be valid in theory and understood by the OXP manifest parser. Going to 1.100.0 for a futur...

Semantic versioning for pre-release: watch out for things like "maximum_version = 1.XX.99" in OXP manifests, if you're going to be incrementing that number automatically every build. So long as the "odd = pre-release" / "even = release" pattern for XX continues, it shou...

Not strictly true - objects in Oolite can have inertial velocities: cargo pods or asteroid fragments, for example. If the object has no Aristotelian drive, then the inertial velocity will continue indefinitely until another force is applied. If the object has an Aristotelian drive, then the function...

I mean, in general the answer is: it's a barely tested prototype :) But on this specific bit: The hyperspace is pretty much unplayable using a keyboard. Let me guess. You have a joystick, you tested it only with the joystick and you thought "let's the markers tell the pilot how to lean the stic...

1) Would it have been difficult to rejig the vanilla game code to allow .oxp galaxies containing stars without planets? One might then create a more involved exploration scenario involving trying to find some stars too! Just needs system.mainPlanet.remove() to be implemented. Probably not that diff...

The original ED exploration idea drafts - never implemented - had exploration require finding the destination stars first, and then quite a bit of logistics needed to avoid your ship falling apart on the way. The actual implementation had all star positions be public knowledge, and wear-and-tear dur...

condition: ai.conditionScannerContainsMiningOpportunity, contains if (!this.ship.forwardWeapon == "EQ_WEAPON_MINING_LASER") { return false; } so should always return false for a scavenger with a pulse laser, and never set off the mining. That was the idea, and why they weren't supposed to...

Are there ways to hide the "Station at the End of the Universe"? (since it would have to be deterministic, created at populator time, there will have to be one at any system the player is in, during the whole system lifetime) Sure - stick it at some random coordinates of the order of 10^1...

The main thing I think would be needed is an extra event to be called after startupComplete for OXPs to initialize their in-flight player ship state... it could be a brand new one (OXPs would HAVE to be updated to deal with it) Doesn't need a new event - startUpComplete is already fine for this - b...

Being destructible isn't a problem - the station obviously isn't going to be destroyed between saving and reloading - but the game does require some assurances that it's likely to be in the same place after reload, which Rock Hermits and some OXP secondary stations have. The main technical reason be...

<nods> Do Thargoids have an "accuracy" thingy? I took an Adder into interstellar space once, and I seem to recall even they had trouble hitting me. Yes. It works slightly differently for their turret laser to a conventional one. At accuracy 10 they should hit dead-centre of their target e...

improvements to AI subroutines could kick in only over certain accuracy levels... The core game only generates accuracies -5 to +5 so that ones above that can be unlocked by OXPs and made as dangerous as possible. Moving the cap above +10 for additional core AI capabilities might make sense too. - ...

The majority of randomness - with the JS AIs, anyway - is provided by the player role list. The player gets various roles (reputations, in intent) assigned to this list as they do stuff in the game, which then decay away again back to "player-unknown" (which is responded to roughly like th...

From a game mechanic point-of-view, pirates treat the player as a separate category that they look for first. So if the player goes first, they pull all the pirates onto themselves and the traders won't help a bit...not even to ECM a missile that's almost guaranteed to kill the player as they leave...