Dear fellow Commanders,
mcarans, Smivs, and maik proudly present the new OXP overview page.
Thank you all for the constructive discussions that took us through 3 release candidates to the final version.
The sortable table allows us to easily find updated OXPs, OXPs by category, by (main) author, by name, and by compatibility. You can even sort by two columns by first sorting the secondary and then the primary column.
While going through the existing categories we felt there were too many that had too few OXPs and too many OXPs that didn't quite fit. So we reworked those as well and came up with 12 categories:
- Activities: OXPs that allow the commander to carry out a new activity or task, e.g. racing, gas giant skimming, taking out loans, etc.
- Dockables: OXPs that mainly add new objects that the player can dock with, e.g. carriers, space bars, casinos, fuel stations, new space stations, etc.
- Ambience: All OXPs that have the main goal of changing or adding to the scenery visuals or sound effects. This includes planet skins, adding new planets and/or moons to systems, moving suns further away, dimming nebulae, adding monuments, etc.
- Equipment: Stuff that can be added to your ship but which is not a weapon
- Mechanics: OXPs whose main function is to change the game play in a specific way, e.g. changing market mechanics, adding more pirates
- HUDs: Modifications of your dials, gauges, and other read-outs
- Missions: OXPs that have the main objective of adding missions.
- Retextures: All OXPs that mainly retexture existing objects, either by replacing or adding variations, but without adding objects that did not exist before
- Ships: OXPs that add any number of new ships, except dockable ships
- Systems: OXPs whose primary goal is to change multiple star systems in a number of ways, e.g. changing main station and local police ships, adding new stations, ships, activities, missions
- Weapons: Stuff that you use to blow up the baddies.
- Misc: OXPs that don't fit into the other categories, e.g. debug consoles, internationalisations, config mechanisms, demo OXPs
The descriptions try to capture the essential information from the old OXP A-Z list, including the information from the ships and stations columns. They always start with the OXP's name to enable sorting. Some explanations have been left out to keep it concise. In order to work towards the goal of keeping the list short, we restricted the description to one line (about 140 characters) and in our humble opinion it works out rather well. As the list is meant as an overview, all OXP details that go beyond the brief teaser description should go into the OXP's Wiki or web page.
Adding the author column required quite a bit of archaeological savvyness for some OXPs. While the vast majority should be attributed correctly, there will still be the odd case where we made a mistake. Note that we list the main authors, all contributing authors can be added in a tooltip next to the main authors' names. In some cases we might have picked the wrong author as main author or missed contributors. Please accept our apology in advance; no offense meant. Let us know and we will fix it or, if you have a Wiki account, go ahead and fix it yourself.
Filling in the date column also required a fair bit of research. We took the information from the OXP documentation, file dates, the BB, and even Oosat.
The information in the compatibility column comes from our own experience and the OXP documentation, but for many OXPs it is still empty. Please help us filling in the blanks.
Some author and date fields have been left empty, we just couldn't dig it up or were not sure enough. Pointers towards filling in the missing bits and pieces are greatly appreciated. Wiki authors filling them in themselves even more so
Cheers,
mcarans, Smivs, maik
edit: poll removed. Two thirds voted to have an OXP list linked from the [wiki]OXP[/wiki] page vs. to have it included.
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), because so much of the information was spread all over the place. What we need is for the 'people who know' to contact us so we can put it right, or sort it out themselves if they have Wiki access. If you can help out with more accurate data, post here or PM myself, Maik or Mcarans.
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