Miltary Laser Cooler equipment idea

[mcarans]

Silence != Assent. Some of us are just waiting the 2-3 month period before the next person comes along and decides to remake the tables. Or add new versions.

Ergo from now onward I'm just going to update my OXP pages and the main list

Where is this "main list"?

These nuisance people like me who come along and impose new wikis on you are trying to make your OXPs accessible to a wider audience. If your OXPs are easy to find, I think more people will play Oolite because the OXPs are a big part of what makes it great.

I don't want your superb OXPs swamped in the wiki by lots of OXPs that no longer work. The wiki needs to be clean and simple enough for newbies to find great OXPs otherwise they will lose interest fast and move on.

Have you noticed the number of times newbies ask the question on the forum, what OXPs should I install? I did a while back.

Keep in mind, taking over someone else's OXP is a very grey area unless they have given specific permission to do so, or their license states that such is possible. Hence why I put a "Dead Man's Switch" clause in my OXPs' licenses.

Are they not all under GPL? Is Oolite itself GPL?

[Thargoid]

Where is this "main list"?

The alphabetical one, as linked by the tagline box at the bottom of the wiki "OXP" page that used to point to it but now also points to your additional lists.

These nuisance people like me who come along and impose new wikis on you are trying to make your OXPs accessible to a wider audience. If your OXPs are easy to find, I think more people will play Oolite because the OXPs are a big part of what makes it great.

I don't want your superb OXPs swamped in the wiki by lots of OXPs that no longer work. The wiki needs to be clean and simple enough for newbies to find great OXPs otherwise they will lose interest fast and move on.

Like I said before, your aim is laudible. And equally so will the next person who has a different idea on how to do this, and the one after that, and quite probably the one after that. At which point we'll have lists of OXPs sorted by alphabetical sort, category, author, size, popularity and quite possibly colour of the authors socks. And as none of these lists except for the categories list are automagically generated, then each list will have to be updated individually. And that is what most of us are utterly fed up with doing. Hence why we were working on OXPCentral until Dizzy had Ooniversal existence failure.

Now if your niced sortable lists were automagically generated by such category tags then we'd be finally getting somewhere with all this, but as they aren't then they're just more on the pile of lists to maintain...

And as for my OXPs, between them they've been downloaded around 30,000 times over the last couple of years, so they can't have been that hidden away until now

Have you noticed the number of times newbies ask the question on the forum, what OXPs should I install? I did a while back.

Yes, and have you noticed the stock copy-paste answer that most of us repeat? Especially given that most people ask the question without actually stating what they want out of the OXPs or their game, or even what kind of kit they are running Oolite on to know if some of the OXPs will even work (e.g. the shader ones).

[mcarans]

The alphabetical one, as linked by the tagline box at the bottom of the wiki "OXP" page that used to point to it but now also points to your additional lists.

How do I find your OXPs in there?

And as none of these lists except for the categories list are automagically generated, then each list will have to be updated individually.

How do I find your OXPs in there?

[caracal]

Where is this "main list"?

The alphabetical one, as linked by the tagline box at the bottom of the wiki "OXP" page that used to point to it but now also points to your additional lists.

Which is the only list I use nowadays, since I can never find anything in the categories list. I can't seem to guess which category a given OXP falls into, unless it's blatantly and obviously "ships" or "missions" or summat. (I'm not typical, though, since by now I remember most of the OXP names at least vaguely, so the alphabetical list is more useful for me than it would be for a newbie.) On top of that, to my American ear "Expansion" and "Enhancement" are not different enough to be meaningful in this context. No offense, as others have tried to categorize OXPs like that and also have done poorly. Given the multi-faceted nature of OXPs, maybe a "tags" system would be better? As in, "This OXP provides: ships" or "ships, missions, equipment", or "missions, dockables, scenery", etc. Then allow searching and sorting by tag. That info could actually be derived by an automated process that inspected the files. Probably wouldn't be 100% perfect, but I bet you could get to 95% or better. I'd even be willing to take a shot at coding such a thing, although I wouldn't be much use if the target system were MS-Win or Mac.

These nuisance people like me who come along and impose new wikis on you are trying to make your OXPs accessible to a wider audience.

You're not a "nuisance", dude. As Thargoid said, your aims are laudable. I think that he and I and Cheyd and probably others are just dubious about the current implementation of those aims. And given how many such solutions have preceded yours, we're probably content (as much as can be) to wait until the next iteration, which history has shown will be along presently.

Oh, and ... the set of OXP authors and the set of wiki editors is not completely identical. I've wanted to point out some errors in the table concerning my OXPs, and others, but I suspect the response would be "So go edit the wiki and fix them!" I don't have a wiki login, and am not entirely sure I want one. As the talking dog said to the man who found him out, "Don't tell anyone, or next thing you know they'll have me pushing a mop."

[Thargoid]

How do I find your OXPs in there?

By their name

If you click on any of my OXPs, it takes you to its specific wiki page, from which there is a link (in the links section) to "Thargoid's OXP Page", which is my main user page listing all of my OXPs, including current version and compatibility information. That page then goes to the individual wiki pages for the OXPs, from which you can download.

As was stated last time all this was discussed, the best way to do all of this would be some sort of nice simple meta-tag that could be embedded in the individual OXPs wiki page containing all the relevant information (name, author, max version, min version, category, file size, notes/comments/brief description etc) and then people like your good self can then use that to make tables in whatever format takes your fancy without causing extra work.

Don't get me wrong, I fully agree that your table format has some good merits. But at the moment it's populated with a lot of incorrect or missing data, which is available in either the already existing tables, the wiki itself or the OXPs themselves. It would just be nice if some of these new table formats built on the older ones and used their data, rather than re-inventing the wheel again and again and requiring all the data to be entered again and again.

[caracal]

As was stated last time all this was discussed, the best way to do all of this would be some sort of nice simple meta-tag that could be embedded in the individual OXPs wiki page containing all the relevant information (name, author, max version, min version, category, file size, notes/comments/brief description etc) and then people like your good self can then use that to make tables in whatever format takes your fancy without causing extra work.

I heartily second this approach. (Or, since it's been discussed before, probably seventh or eighth it.) Make it a requirement that if you want your OXP listed on the main site, then you fill out a simple form:

Code: Select all

Name:  Reavers
Version: 2.9.6
Size: 2.7mb
Provides: ships, missions, dockables
Difficulty: 4
Author: Not Caracal fer sure!
License: CC-by-sa-nc
Legacy: If abandoned, re-use freely under cc-by-nc-sa
Requires: bigships 1.02, behemoth 2.5.4, snoopers 2.0.6, oolite 1.74.2-1.74.99
Description: Adds "Reavers", terrible cannibal pirates who track your ship mercilessly and eat you alive.
Comments: This OXP creates packs of roaming Reavers, nomadic tribes of cannibals who want to disable your ship, steal your cargo, take you aboard their mothership and have you for dinner.  Not a problem, except you have a mission to deliver an urgent diplomatic parcel into Reaver space!

The "Provides" tags should probably be chosen from a list rather than something free-form that the author dreams up. Meaning we'd probably have to go through several iterations to get the list near complete, and would always need an "other" choice.

Why do I suspect that something like this was going to be part of OXP Central?

Don't get me wrong, I fully agree that your table format has some good merits. But at the moment it's populated with a lot of incorrect or missing data, which is available in either the already existing tables, the wiki itself or the OXPs themselves.

Yeah, and in several cases the old "long" table entry was all the information you had about an OXP until you downloaded and unpacked it. And sometimes even then, unless you were willing to examine the code. We definitely lost information with the new short descriptions.

[mcarans]

I agree that the pages ought to be auto-generated. Big problem - they can't. Ahruman already said that Winston will not install Mediawiki addons that might allow some of the clever autogen functionality you suggest. So for the time being unless someone rebuilds the wiki somewhere else, I don't see auto-generation beyond the most basic happening.

As I said before OXP Central was probably too ambitious, but if it surfaces I will happily eat my words.

As I mentioned before, I PMed Ahruman to ask him if its possible to make the OXP pages world editable, so you would not need to log on to edit them, but have no reply so far.

[Kaks]

mcarans, the whole reason no page on the wiki is world editable - and that it's not terribly easy to get a wiki account - is that nobody here has got the tons of time it would take it to keep things spam free...

[mcarans]

it's not terribly easy to get a wiki account

That kind of defeats the purpose of a wiki doesn't it?

I've updated the Max Versions to 1.74.x. Thargoid, thanks for taking the trouble to update your entries. If I want to find all your OXPs, I just sort by author - nice

If anyone can get the appropriate Mediawiki addons installed on the wiki, I would be happy to look at the auto-generation stuff. How will this work for authors who have their own separate web pages with their OXPs?

[Cmd. Cheyd]

Keep in mind, taking over someone else's OXP is a very grey area unless they have given specific permission to do so, or their license states that such is possible. Hence why I put a "Dead Man's Switch" clause in my OXPs' licenses.

Are they not all under GPL? Is Oolite itself GPL?

Let's handle these in reverse order.

As for Oolite itself, I'll quote the Wiki:

Oolite is offered for free under the GNU General Public License version 2, with the data files (ship models, graphics etc.) dual licensed under both the GPL and the Creative Commons License

As for OXPs, I have seen them licensed under GPL, all forms of CC from CC0 to CC2.0 BY-SA-ND, custom-created licenses, and no license. I would suggest you read a few README's in the OXPs you use.

TANGENT ALERT - And despite what many folks assume, No License is actually the most restrictive there is because it therefore defaults to the most restrictive terms possible. Unlicensed OXPs may not even be technically legal to use.

[Smivs]

Hence why I put a "Dead Man's Switch" clause in my OXPs' licenses.

Interesting idea...how does it work?

[Cmd. Cheyd]

PM'd you the details. Back to the conversation at hand....

[Smivs]

PM'd you the details.

Many thanks.

[Kaks]

That kind of defeats the purpose of a wiki doesn't it?

Unfortunately, given the amount of timewasting spambots all over the place, spamfests defeat the purpose of having any kind of information on a wiki at all: not many people actually enjoy reading about all those fabulous offers of body parts enlargements / genuine bargains, etc... when trying to look for an oxp!

You might have noticed a few forum members have got spam assassin under their name. They've earned it, by noticing the spambots that logged in this very forum, and helping the admins stop spammers.
Do ask them if spammers are a problem or not...

[Uncle Reno]

Do ask them if spammers are a problem or not...

Please don't, the flashbacks have finally started to settle down...