Newbie - Questions on Scope of Mods/OXPs

[viberunner]

Hello

I'm a coder with some free time next year and am looking for a game to mod, Oolite is a candidate. I'm interested in creating a single, story-driven sandbox, immersive experience.

Some questions on the limitations of the module engine:

Can you change the starting variables such as starting planet and ship?

Can you force a change of ship on the player? Full change of stats e.g. credits, police status, etc.?

Can I make a series of modules for an open-world sandbox storyline. For example, if there are two basic breed of module, side-module and story-module, the game starts with the story-module mission, you do that and it triggers any number of side missions, when a number of them are done the second story-module is started.

How much control over the creation of factions? For example could I set a gang of half a dozen Vipers (paramilitaries) to warp in and attack every hour or two?

So you can see my kind of thinking - can anyone give me a basic overview of engine scripting limitation.

[Svengali]

Welcome viberunner,

the engine supports a lot of things in your wishlist, but no scriptable ship switch for the player - bounty and a few other things can be set though. Story driven OXPs are absolutely possible, scripts can communicate with each other, the JS engine uses SpiderMonkey ECMAv5 (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference), spawning NPCs is everytime possible, Timers and Framecallbacks are supported.

A good start is the documentation on the WIKI http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Catego ... _scripting and the WIKI has a lot more stuff [wiki]Main[/wiki] to be explored .-)

We are a friendly bunch here, so just ask .-)

[Micha]

Hi viberunner,

Also, the game engine is under active development; feel free to dive in yourself!
Alternatively if you bug the developers enough they just might add the additional features you require; for example, changing the player ship (and divorcing the player from the ship) is a recurring request, perhaps something for a future release.

Cheers,
- Micha.

[viberunner]

OH god I don't want the madness of bugging the developers of the main exe, but a ship-changing system would be really cool but I'll concentrate the writing on what is possible, not what is not.

[DaddyHoggy]

OH god I don't want the madness of bugging the developers of the main exe, but a ship-changing system would be really cool but I'll concentrate the writing on what is possible, not what is not.

Nice to see you unlurk with such a positive outlook! It sounds like you'll be a welcome addition to the OXP community!

[Cmdr. Maegil]

You can change equipment freely using scripts, but not the ship - essentially you can only do that when docked, via a shipyard.
This has been recently discussed, I believe the post that comes the closest to a workaround to what you want is this one.

For examples of what can be done regarding missions, look at the [wiki]Oolite Missions[/wiki] for reference, then search the forum for more information.

And, Welcome to the Friendliest Board This Side Of Riedquat!

[viberunner]

Thanks for the encouragement.

I'm sure at some point the main code developers would want some kind of fleet management system, maybe in Oolite 2.

In the mean-time just how difficult is it for a hack to basically set the player into a ship at whim? Who are the developers and just how busy are they?

[Fatleaf]

Who are the developers and just how busy are they?

You have this Team for the forum: https://bb.oolite.space/memberlist.php?mode=leaders
This is the Dev Team https://bb.oolite.space/memberlist.p ... =group&g=8

OH god I don't want the madness of bugging the developers of the main exe, but a ship-changing system would be really cool but I'll concentrate the writing on what is possible, not what is not.

But we are good at bugging the Dev team for the goodies we want! And quite often they deliver

[Capt. Murphy]

Welcome aboard viberunner. Your project sounds most intriguing.

Re the development team and feature requests a couple of things to note (and if I'm wrong I'm sure one of them will correct me).

1) As it stands right now a feature-freeze is in place until the next stable release is ready (which should be soon, hopefully by the end of the year). The last official stable release is 1.65 which is laughably out of date. Current test release and nightly builds have way more features and any remaining bugs are minor (and often very difficult to reproduce) but the dev team are doggedly hunting them down. After the next stable release (nickname MNSR - Mythical Next Stable Release), then a new round of feature adding can commence.

2) The dev team are small, and not all the listed devs are currently active (e.g. no project leader currently), and do this in their spare time. If you know/can learn Obj C and want to poke around in the source code they may be happy to include any patches/tweaks you make (post feature freeze of course). You may find yourself poking around in the source code anyway trying to work out why things work as they do as you build your OXP.

3) Some commonly requested feature requests have become somewhat taboo as the devs have responded many many times with good reason as to why they won't be implemented. The two that spring to mind are Multiplayer (would need a re-write from the bottom up), and scripting lasers (would make it possible to release OXP's with potential to seriously unbalance the game).

[Cmdr. Maegil]

scripting lasers (would make it possible to release OXP's with potential to seriously unbalance the game).

I can imagine it now... someone coming up with a player  liner-sized mother(-of-all-uber)ship armed with  Plasma Accelerators turrets and with entire  battle groups for  wingmen... soon followed by an  armed frangible core stations' pack!

It's beyond me how can anyone possibly not want this!







(I know I do... even if only for the lulz)