Tiared oddity

[submersible]

about 10-20% turn out to be total misfits.

Identifying and fixing those is simple but slightly tedious.

Well, those are the ones I was referring to..

Ok fair. :wink

Next time I'm going to try using the system properties more to guide the selection. After shaders are working for planets/

[Eric Walch]

The Elite-style RNG is not very good for this sort of chain (there are, for instance, 25 sports theoretically possible, but only 6 of them actually show up, and two of those are extremely rare)

You mean the 25 possible combinations of:

Code: Select all

		( // [34]
			"ice",
			"mud",
			"Zero-G",
			"vacuum",
			"%I ultra"
		),
		( // [35]
			"hockey",
			"cricket",
			"karate",
			"polo",
			"tennis"
		)

I think Karate isn't used in any of the 5 combinations.

If the problem is only present when generating random names (=%R), could it be fixed by calling an extra random number for that expansion type, to get the generator in sync with the old situation?

[Eric Walch]

BTW, the current version of HoopyCasino.oxp will not be affected by this oxp. It looks at the planet description before adding a casino ship. It will only mean that they will be added in other systems were the description matches.

But Oolite itself will have a problem, because all descriptions that describe the planet itself (like pink oceans or vast forests) are currently hardcoded to change the texture accordingly. That might will be affected also now.

[Wildeblood]

Tiared got my attention because I know of a few non-core resources which expect Tiared to play hockey. Assassins OXP, though that does set the description anyway, the vector maps which have the Zero-G Hockey Road, which is then incorporated into New Cargoes and BGS-X... and that's just one planet.

OXPs which expect, or worse depend on, a certain planet to be in a certain position on the chart, and have a certain name, description or any other characteristic, without setting - or at least checking - that characteristic, are broken by design. It's like walking into a car dealership and buying a car, with the instructions, "I don't care what colour it is, as long as I can have delivery in 24 hours," then going back the next day and whinging, "It's not blue, I wanted a blue car."

The default descriptions should be treated as place-holder strings. The equivalent of "Description text goes here." but with a bit of variety.

I would welcome a fresher description generator - the originals could be provided as an OXP plist.

Exactly right. Comical Planet Descriptions OXP should take a place alongside Famous Planets OXP and any others that might be created.

BTW, the current version of HoopyCasino.oxp will not be affected by this oxp. It looks at the planet description before adding a casino ship. It will only mean that they will be added in other systems were the description matches.

That's the correct approach to take.

[Smivs]

OXPs which expect, or worse depend on, a certain planet to be in a certain position on the chart, and have a certain name, description or any other characteristic, without setting - or at least checking - that characteristic, are broken by design.

I strongly disagree with this assertion.
I think it is entirely reasonable to expect these things to be 'set in stone'. An OXP which involves hopping from planet to planet (most 'Mission' OXPS!) will only work if the planets are in the right place and have the correct name. To expect an author to somehow incorporate into their OXP a mechanism to allow for planets being arbitrarily moved and/or being renamed is frankly ridiculous, and is likely impossible in practical terms.

[Commander McLane]

OXPs which expect, or worse depend on, a certain planet to be in a certain position on the chart, and have a certain name, description or any other characteristic, without setting - or at least checking - that characteristic, are broken by design.

I think in this point we have to agree to disagree.

OXPs are expansions of Oolite, and in Oolite planets a guaranteed to have all properties listed in the planet lists, reliably and for each player. This is certainly true for the planets' position on the chart. In my opinion it's also true for their other characteristics, as far as they affect story telling.

Changing the basic characteristics is the signature of a total conversion, not of an expansion. Generally, expansions for "vanilla" Oolite can't be expected to work in a total conversion, and expansions made for a specific total conversion can't be expected to work in either the "vanilla" setting or in any other total conversion. And of course two total conversions can't be expected to work with each other without conflicting. That's a triviality.

Thus it's a matter of correct declaration. Conversions shouldn't be advertised as expansions. They have a different quality.

Mission OXPs will be most affected by total conversions. Take the Longway mission as an example. Obviously it relies on having two planets that are just out of reach of each other. If a conversion would place these two planets either within reach of each other, or at opposite borders of the chart, that would break the mission and the OXP. You claim that this would be Longway OXP's fault. It would have to check that the two planets are in the positions it depends on. But what good would such a check be? The OXP could only give out an error message along the lines of "Sorry, this OXP doesn't make sense in your setup." Well yes, that was clear from the get-go. I don't think that the current state of the scripting engine would allow the OXP to find two systems which are suitable for its purpose in the player's current setup on the fly, and transfer its story to these systems. In other words: the Longway OXP has no means of fixing its "brokenness". Thus it can't be blamed for being broken. The total conversion causing its problem is to be blamed.

Therefore: OXPs which expect, or depend on, a certain planet to be in a certain position on the chart, and have a certain name, description or any other characteristic, without setting - or at least checking - that characteristic, are not broken by design. They are simply designed for working in Oolite, and that's a feature, not a bug. Especially mission OXPs with a scripted story line cannot possibly be designed in a way as to make them work in any possible conversion of Oolite. Thus it's unrealistic to expect that.

I'd put it this way: there is virtue in having a consistent and reliable layout of the game, and one of its strong virtues is that story OXPs can depend on certain characteristics (one of its problems is that it sets limitations, because the Ooniverse is limited, and it gets increasingly harder to find new places for stories; on the other hand: if the stories don't change the basic layout themselves, two or more stories can happily live alongside each other in the same place). It's easy to share content if everybody is using the same layout. If the layout gets changed, the audience becomes fractured, and some content cannot be shared across borders anymore. However, it's not the content creators who are responsible for that, but the border builders.

[Disembodied]

OXPs which expect, or worse depend on, a certain planet to be in a certain position on the chart, and have a certain name, description or any other characteristic, without setting - or at least checking - that characteristic, are broken by design. It's like walking into a car dealership and buying a car, with the instructions, "I don't care what colour it is, as long as I can have delivery in 24 hours," then going back the next day and whinging, "It's not blue, I wanted a blue car."

I think this is wrong. It's more like someone making a blue car, then - after someone else changes the spectral values of the sun - complaining that their originally blue car isn't blue any more. The fault isn't with the car, or the manufacturer: the fault is with whatever changed the colour of the sunlight ...

This metaphor is getting out of control. Basically, any OXP author should legitimately be able to build an OXP for a standard universe. The only significant change they should prepare for is the potential that one system in one galaxy might go nova, as that's a core mission. Equally, though, anyone who installs an OXP that guddles around with the names, locations, and other values of systems, should be prepared for the fact that those changes might not play nice with other OXPs which they have installed (always assuming that the author of such a universe-guddling OXP has made this clear in the ReadMe). It's an end-user issue, not an OXP-author issue.

[CommRLock78]

<SNIP> It's an end-user issue, not an OXP-author issue.

Which is exactly why I voted for cim's option #3 - I've not yet joined the dark side and at this point, wholly an end-user . I think that the planet descriptions are part of a fiction; if they were to change that fiction would necessarily change. Even though I'm only just approaching my first year as an Ooliteer, I've become attached to things as they are .

[Commander McLane]

It's more like someone making a blue car, then - after someone else changes the spectral values of the sun - complaining that their originally blue car isn't blue any more. The fault isn't with the car, or the manufacturer: the fault is with whatever changed the colour of the sunlight ...

This metaphor is getting out of control.

I could help out with another version: It's more like buying a car with left-hand drive, because the place where you live requires you to use the right side of the road. But you are actually the king of the place, and order a switch to driving on the left side of the road overnight. And then on the next day you complain that your car has its steering on the wrong side.

If you change the basic layout of the Ooniverse, you shouldn't complain that everything that was designed for the old layout doesn't work flawlessly in the new layout. As player, you're the king of the place. You decide which OXPs you install, and how that will affect the basic layout of the place. It's your responsibility to only change it in such a way that the things you expect to work will still work with the new layout. However, it's the responsibility of OXP authors, if their OXPs do change the basic layout, to clearly say so. Only then can the player act responsibly.

[Svengali]

It's an end-user issue, not an OXP-author issue.

However, it's the responsibility of OXP authors, if their OXPs do change the basic layout, to clearly say so. Only then can the player act responsibly.

Unfortunately there is no such thing like a end-user issue. If a guddling OXP breaks other OXPs where do you think users will complain? And very often it is not obvious where the real problem is located and often enough not even what the exact problem is.

Additionally these OXPs are forcing ALL other OXPs to use
a) in quite a few cases specific ways of scripting and
b) a lot more checks and exception handling which has a negative impact on performance.

That's why I don't like clashing/breaking OXPs. And even more if there are other ways available.