Requesting assistance

[Rese249er]

I wouldn't let the kill go, but the pods, sure.

[Cpt]

This really would be essential kit for summoning SAR assistance + other "interested" parties and occasionally even the police especially if your hands aren't clean... perhaps even Thargoids checking to see if your cargo is parking meters. A useful piece of kit to draw desperate attention as a N00b and for the kill score if nothing else for the more experienced pilot...

On reflection you do have the L ; C and R options, L seems most useful for friendly greetings I suppose. You can also try flying in real close to get their attention, it would be good to be able to choose more than either brute force and ignorance or eat my dust and live to fight another day...

[GGShinobi]

Yay, I also think it would be nice if the player was able to communicate, since the NPC's can make distress calls or tout you, too.

They can also beg for mercy, and this often works on me So it would be nice if the player could do that, too (although I have to admit that dropping some cargo works in a similar way - at least on pirates)

But I had some situations where I was attacked by a bunch of pirates (5 or 6 ships, some even stealthed) and 2 cops in big ships with mighty turrets where in range, but didn't help me! I had to place my ship so close to the cops that they got hit by the pirates in order to make them attack them!

[Smivs]

....2 cops in big ships with mighty turrets where in range, but didn't help me! I had to place my ship so close to the cops that they got hit by the pirates in order to make them attack them!

These must have been OXP ships as the cops in standard Oolite only use Viper variants. The 'core' cops use an AI which will allow them to detect offences (like an attack on an innocent player) and respond to it which they do quite effectively. I don't know what the big turreted ships might have been, but if they are police ships they may need an improved AI by the sound of things. If they were OXP-added military ships (which share the purple scanner flag with Police) then they may not act like police at all.

[GGShinobi]

....2 cops in big ships with mighty turrets where in range, but didn't help me! I had to place my ship so close to the cops that they got hit by the pirates in order to make them attack them!

These must have been OXP ships as the cops in standard Oolite only use Viper variants. The 'core' cops use an AI which will allow them to detect offences (like an attack on an innocent player) and respond to it which they do quite effectively. I don't know what the big turreted ships might have been, but if they are police ships they may need an improved AI by the sound of things. If they were OXP-added military ships (which share the purple scanner flag with Police) then they may not act like police at all.

Yes, they where definetly oxp-ships. I don't know if I remember that right, maybe they even killed some pirates (it was near a pirate cave), but after that they just flew on, while I was still struggling with a big number of pirates.

I searched through the OXP-List of the wiki (with the side-effect that I now have got approx. 2 dozen more ship-oxp's installed ), and I think it must have been Titans (http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Far_Arm_Titan).

By the way, some of the textures for ships are fairly large... is it possible to reduce their size (e.g. by scaling them down)? I fear I might run out of memory if this goes on

[Smivs]

By the way, some of the textures for ships are fairly large... is it possible to reduce their size (e.g. by scaling them down)? I fear I might run out of memory if this goes on

Yes. The core textures are 512x512px, but many OXPs use much larger textures to achieve the detail required - I normally use 2048x2048.
If you open the .png texture file in a graphics editor (Gimp is excellent if you don't have one) and scale it to any multiple of 512. Try 1024x1024 as a good compromise. You will lose definition/quality, but if you computer is slowing under the load it might help.

[GGShinobi]

By the way, some of the textures for ships are fairly large... is it possible to reduce their size (e.g. by scaling them down)? I fear I might run out of memory if this goes on

Yes. The core textures are 512x512px, but many OXPs use much larger textures to achieve the detail required - I normally use 2048x2048.
If you open the .png texture file in a graphics editor (Gimp is excellent if you don't have one) and scale it to any multiple of 512. Try 1024x1024 as a good compromise. You will lose definition/quality, but if you computer is slowing under the load it might help.

Thanks Smivs for that quick reply!

Gimp is indeed my favorite, but as I'm lazy and I am not aware that Gimp has some kind of batch mode, I used ImageMagick to convert them, using these simple commands:

Code: Select all

for x in *.png; do convert -resize 50% $x ${x%.png}0small.png; done

This command creates smaller versions of the original images, which are named like the originals, but with "0small.png" instead of ".png" (I added the zero in order to make them appear directly beneath their originals, making it easier to compare their quality)

After checking that the quality is ok (as far as I can judge ), I renamed the small versions, overriding the originals, with this command:

Code: Select all

for x in *0small.png; do mv $x ${x%0small.png}.png; done

(I am using Linux (Ubuntu 12.04))

[Smivs]

Yes, that would be quicker if you are doing a lot of them!