Addon clutter: Which OXPs should I nuke?

[Mauiby de Fug]

Wow, a lot of those look like old ship oxps that I think were old when I started Oolite! (Not that that means that they won't work, or course. I would expect them to still work just fine)

You do seem to have multiple HUDs installed. Unless things have changed, I would expect only one of those to be active, and I don't know how that would be determined.

• MilHUD 4000 ver 1.1.2.2.oxp
• MilHUD-new.oxp
• MilHUD-v4.0.oxp
• Wide-Screen HUD 0.7.2.oxp

I'm assuming that you are still in "Galaxy 1", judging from the fact you only have the Povray Planets oxp for that galaxy installed. However, you also have a few mission oxps there that if I recall correctly are set in other galaxies and are therefore doing absolutely nothing right now. (By which I mean, the trigger for them to start is at some point in one of the later galaxies.)

• Assassins.oxp
• Deposed1.4.oxp
• galaxy 2, Blackjack's Bullion 1.2.9.oxp
• lovecats 1.3.0.oxp
• Victim11_1.0..oxp
• XeptatlsSword_v2.3.oxp

[DataPacRat]

I've just installed Oolite Developer and popped my newest Latest.log up here, and from my quick glancing-over there seems to be a whole lot of error messages related to various OXPs. Does anyone who understands Oolite scripting want to take a gander, and see if any conclusions can be figured out about any particular OXPs?

[Smivs]

These errors are all due to the age of the OXPs in question, and that they have not been updated for current Oolite versions.
The manifest.plist warnings are not too important, simply stating that the OXP doesn't have one, which it should to be compatible with the Manager. The sub-entity definitions are now out-of-date as there is a new and better way of positioning sub-entities on entities (these would be things like turrets, engines and even flashers. TL99 was the old way of making items un-available when limiting what equipment was available in some situations. Many of the scripting errors are due to the script not being marked as 'use strict' which is a way of ensuring that the script is fully compliant and correctly written.
There are many others but the general thrust of this is they are all very old and need to be updated (completely re-written in some cases) to comply with the requirements of the current game. In practice many of them won't even be working, and those that are will not be working as intended, so you really should ask yourself if it is worth keeping them.

[another_commander]

In addition to Smivs' remarks, note that adding OXPs in such quantities will definitely have an impact on performance (made worse by the fact that some of those old, obsolete OXPs are just consuming the processor for nothing). Deciding what you really want for your game and using only that will eventually offer a better gaming experience.

[DataPacRat]

In addition to Smivs' remarks, note that adding OXPs in such quantities will definitely have an impact on performance (made worse by the fact that some of those old, obsolete OXPs are just consuming the processor for nothing). Deciding what you really want for your game and using only that will eventually offer a better gaming experience.

Okay, now /that/ is a reason why excessive OXPs would start reducing my immersivity and enjoyment, and is a good enough reason for me to start moving piles of OXPs to an archive.

Could I get some more detail here? Which /sorts/ of OXPs lead to the biggest performance hits? Missions, stations, ships, equipment, weapons, HUDs, retextures, ambience, others...?

[another_commander]

Could I get some more detail here? Which /sorts/ of OXPs lead to the biggest performance hits? Missions, stations, ships, equipment, weapons, HUDs, retextures, ambience, others...?

That's a bit tricky to answer. It really depends on what an OXP exactly does. For example, if an OXP is switching huds on every frame, chances are that performance will get a good hit. OXPs that contain heavy on timers and callback functions scripts, when not optimized, might be a performance hit. The problem of course in this case would be to identify those heavily scripted OXPs that are not too optimized. Another possible performance buster might be OXPs that rely heavily on shaders, when your gfx card is low end. Finally, remember that OXPs, being community products, are not quality-tested by anyone other than their creators. Sometimes OXPs simply cause severe lag due to bugs (there was recently a case of na OXP that was basically filling up the universe with entities, without ever removing any, which resulted in single-digit FPS followed by an unceremonious exception in the core game within about 25 minutes of gameplay).

An easy start would be to remove the OXPs that are often reported in the log as "having run for x.xxx seconds and have been terminated". But again, this is not gospel because the Developer Release of the game has very strict limits imposed for scripts, while the end-user version is more relaxed. So, even if an OXP is reported as running for too long in the Dev version it does not necessarily mean that it is the main cause for eventual performance drops.

Moral of the story: Decide what you want your game to be like. Then load up OXPs that do just that and do that one at a time so that you can verify that all runs well after each addition.

[Diziet Sma]

/that/ /sorts/

Ermm. you are aware that you can highlight words in the text editor and then click on the bold, italic or underline buttons (or even combine them) as you'd like, yes?

[DataPacRat]

/that/ /sorts/

Ermm. you are aware that you can highlight words in the text editor and then click on the bold, italic or underline buttons (or even combine them) as you'd like, yes?

I've been sending online messages since the days of the original Elite and dial-up BBSes; over the last three decades, every forum has its own unique method for adding emphases, but the only method that actually works consistently is inline ASCII for *bold*, /italic/, and _underlines_.

[Diziet Sma]

I've been sending online messages since the days of the original Elite and dial-up BBSes;

I suspected it was something like that.. old habits, and all that.