Hi, new here and not yet warned-off asking stupid questions
Has there been any attempt to automatically rank the NPC combat capability of ships, e.g. in five-aside matches (like Pit Vipers versus Viper Interceptors) in some sort of sandbox environment?
Notwithstanding the unreality caveats (e.g. black ships are tougher adversaries for humans than for the computer), I think it would be rather interesting to see the results of series of such deathmatches. But I don't think it can be simulated in an OXP, can it, as the OXP couldn't exert sufficient control to make the match happen and let the player witness it?
There is a somewhat similar effort in CCL which produced a Table of Player Ships. Click on the title of the "Standard" column to order by the estimated strength.
There is a somewhat similar effort in CCL which produced a Table of Player Ships. Click on the title of the "Standard" column to order by the estimated strength.
Nice, but not really what I had in mind: I wanted to have Oolite pit ships against each other in a controlled environment and observe the outcome.
I know nothing about OXP programming, but I took a quick look at the documentation and it seems doable to manufacture battles of the type I was thinking of. It would go something very (very, very) roughly like this. Your ship arrives at special system X. All ship generation in system X is disabled except for those we choose, so we choose to create two ship groups near the witchpoint. Group 1 is led by a Foobar (fancy names aren't my strong-point) -- an invincible, immovable, unarmed lump of whatever -- with five Mussuranas assigned to protect it. Group 2 is also led by a Foobar, this time with five Imperial Traders escorting. The groups are told by the OXP to go kill each other (they're all bounty-hunting fugitives?). They're so busy wiping each other out that they ignore the player, so you just drift there watching the battle unfold.
It's only a sketch, from close to zero knowledge of the API, but does that look like a plausible way of constructing a battle in a controlled fashion?
What you describe is do-able certainly, and could probably be more specific in terms of targeting each other as you could write scripts/AIs which specifically tell group A to target group B ships and vice-versa. Also, why have the large group leader? It doesn't sound as though it has any purpose, although each faction could start from a small station, which is then open to attack if the defenders are wiped out. All sorts of possibilities exist.
It may not be as hard as it sounds, so why not have a think about trying it yourself? You will find plenty of help here - most of us OXPers started from a baseline of zero knowledge.
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What you have described there is exactly what happens outside a Space Bar when they come under attack. Except you have a lot of different cool looking ships and you can get involved if you want.
Find out about the early influences of Fatleaf here. Also his OXP's!
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OR i could go with
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Sounds like a fun and interesting project.. I look forward to seeing what becomes of it.
jh145 wrote:
Hi, new here and not yet warned-off asking stupid questions
Around here, we work on the principle that there's no such thing as a stupid question. Feel free to ask anything you like, you'll get plenty of helpful answers.. (and you won't be told to RTFM or search for it, either!). We do our best to live up to our reputation as "the friendliest board this side of Riedquat™".
Most games have some sort of paddling-pool-and-water-wings beginning to ease you in: Oolite takes the rather more Darwinian approach of heaving you straight into the ocean, often with a brick or two in your pockets for luck. ~ Disembodied
I have something basically working. The add-on spawns two groups of five same-type ships either side of a buoy a little way back (away from the planet) from the witchpoint. They attack the heck out of each other until no-one's left or a timer calls it quits (learnt the hard way from watching two small and inaccurate ships get nowhere fast). The score is logged. Then I've got a Python script that implements some dodgy probability calculations to estimate, from rather sparse data, the "rating" for each ship.
Running this morning on all ships associated with a Random Hits big boss, I have (rating : won-lost : ship) ... (edit: updated to reflect results of further trials)
The ratings are not trustworthy (and between this and the previous draft of the post they looked quite different), but they are at least somewhat suggestive of how one might rank these opponents in practice.
<-- an elf
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