[Beta] Release of Telescope 2.0

[Cholmondely]

...
Edited to add: the only really important issue that I have (and have had) with any of the versions of Telescope is "death by ILS". The other problems I find rather minor. As mentioned elsewhere, in my early days, I died 5 times by ILS/Telescope whilst being murdered only twice by pirates!
...

I think I've got a fix

When ILS is set to the player's ship, all automatic targetting is suspended. If you disengage ILS, it resumes as normal. I usually land manually, so am not that familiar with ILS. Those of you who've become tri-dimensionally challenged in the past would be better able to judge, so please give it a try and let me know.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/swfwx5klha3d ... .oxz?dl=0
(same link as first post)

...
iii) I don't understand how the fast activation system works, but is it possible to have the spotting of other "targets" disabled by a fast activation button? Or disabled when ILS is operating? The first suits me better, but ...

I'm not sure what you're asking here. Telescope operates quite differently depending on whether weapons are online (AutoLock) or off-line (GravLock). Either can be altered to any value that suits (0 (off) to 180 degrees (full sphere). Are you looking for a temporary suspension, based on time or context (alertCondition/weapon state)? Or a manual toggle to flip at your discretion? This last is problematic until we get more buttons, as Telescope already has 10 11 modes (which can be trimmed to 5 using the RemoveInFlight option.

Thank you! I'll give it a bash!

I'm asking for manual control when and only when Phkb has introduced his 365 extra Fast-Activation buttons.

Wondering: I never understood GravLock to mean anything in particular, and certainly not the way you defined it. I still don't really understand what the gravity scanner is supposed to do - or how it makes any difference to my game, other than funny sounds when I'm close to a Large Body...

Might it be better to call AutoLock "Weapons-on Locking" and GravLock "Weapons-off Locking", or some such?

I do intend to send you the Station Options text corrected for typos at some stage - I'm sorry, I've been dragging my heels...

And what is the current status of Station Options vis-a-vis Telescope Options?

I do feel that Telescope is really the only .oxp that needs this. And the only .oxp for which it can be done in an immersive manner, as you demonstrated. The other oxp options handled by Telescope are really not the sort of thing which a pilot would expect to control in-game (how many Academies there are, or how many asteroids there are, or how the customs find contraband... I think that Phkb's option for an amber GUI for his XenonUI is probably the only real pilot-controlled choice I would expect to find in-game.

At some stage, heavens willing, we will have some other complex oxp's which will deserve your tender treatment...

[cag]

Wondering: I never understood GravLock to mean anything in particular, and certainly not the way you defined it. I still don't really understand what the gravity scanner is supposed to do - or how it makes any difference to my game, other than funny sounds when I'm close to a Large Body...

Might it be better to call AutoLock "Weapons-on Locking" and GravLock "Weapons-off Locking", or some such?

Both GravLock and AutoLock specify the size of the detection cone, and default to 20 and 1 degrees respectively. 20 degrees relative to you heading is about the average player's screen (excepting really wide screens and fov settings) and the 1 degree for Autolock is about the same as the vanilla game. Players using a keyboard vs a stick/gamepad will have different needs and this lets them fine tune.

The names stem from the script variables and are less than clear; I'll be tweaking the descriptions:

Code: Select all

AutoLock     1   Size of targeting detection cone
GravLock    20   Size of navigation detection cone

Better? Suggestions?

And what is the current status of Station Options vis-a-vis Telescope Options?

I do feel that Telescope is really the only .oxp that needs this. And the only .oxp for which it can be done in an immersive manner, as you demonstrated. The other oxp options handled by Telescope are really not the sort of thing which a pilot would expect to control in-game (how many Academies there are, or how many asteroids there are, or how the customs find contraband... I think that Phkb's option for an amber GUI for his XenonUI is probably the only real pilot-controlled choice I would expect to find in-game.

At some stage, heavens willing, we will have some other complex oxp's which will deserve your tender treatment...

As it stands, Station Options does all I need for Telescope and then some. I threw in the licence agreement page to test dynamic page loading (yah, I know, you didn't notice; few would. But the 'experimental' options page does not load until you accept and later, the licence page gets removed.)

Any oxp with a handful of options could use it, esp. those with expansive readme files which require the player to read the wiki or crack open the oxz. Having the info available at the station is more immersive. Station Options is driven entirely from the missiontext.plist file, so there's minimal coding involved.


I always had in mind that it could also function as a mission builder. Especially useful is the 'choice' option type, where in a given situation, the player could be presented with options/questions and the mission would proceed base on his input. If missions were structured like a tree (not linear), then they could be replayed yielding different results.


Milo had an idea for an oxp to help with the primeable equipment issue and I've implemented some 'advanced' keys in addition to the dynamic options he wanted.
(see  Adopting Station Options)

cag, would you be willing to add support for OXPs to provide dynamically-generated options at runtime, or give me pointers on how to do it?

I want to generate options for each primeable equipment that the player has.

...

I read recently about Hermitage's market woes.

...
Ideally, I would like to rewrite the entire F8 Market screen to allow the combination of a number of functions. At the present time, though, with the limitations mission screens have with keyboard input, I wouldn't be able to achieve a one-screen version of all that would need to be done. At best, it would be a multi-page screen, where all the commodities are listed (but without the ability to use the page up/down keys, because mission screens can't use those) and you would then have to select the commodity you want to work with, which would bring up another screen with all the sub-commands you might like to run (transfer to cargo/storage/market, change price) and each of these would need another screen where you enter the amounts.

I mean, if that sounds better than the current implementation, I could put it together, but my feeling is that it would be kind of jarring to have such a different F8 page in play. What do you think?

This could be a candidate, with pages for transfers, price fixing, etc, with the 'options' being the market items, each with its own page for operations. Assigning it a category other than "Ship Systems" would make it easier to find on the F4 screen.

[Cholmondely]

Wondering: I never understood GravLock to mean anything in particular, and certainly not the way you defined it. I still don't really understand what the gravity scanner is supposed to do - or how it makes any difference to my game, other than funny sounds when I'm close to a Large Body...

Might it be better to call AutoLock "Weapons-on Locking" and GravLock "Weapons-off Locking", or some such?

Both GravLock and AutoLock specify the size of the detection cone, and default to 20 and 1 degrees respectively. 20 degrees relative to you heading is about the average player's screen (excepting really wide screens and fov settings) and the 1 degree for Autolock is about the same as the vanilla game. Players using a keyboard vs a stick/gamepad will have different needs and this lets them fine tune.

The names stem from the script variables and are less than clear; I'll be tweaking the descriptions:

Code: Select all

AutoLock     1   Size of targeting detection cone
GravLock    20   Size of navigation detection cone

Better? Suggestions?

That looks much better to me. But GravLock still sounds confusing (mixing things up with the gravity scanner, which I defer anybody but you and Norby to understand!)

And what is the current status of Station Options vis-a-vis Telescope Options?

I do feel that Telescope is really the only .oxp that needs this. And the only .oxp for which it can be done in an immersive manner, as you demonstrated. The other oxp options handled by Telescope are really not the sort of thing which a pilot would expect to control in-game (how many Academies there are, or how many asteroids there are, or how the customs find contraband... I think that Phkb's option for an amber GUI for his XenonUI is probably the only real pilot-controlled choice I would expect to find in-game.

At some stage, heavens willing, we will have some other complex oxp's which will deserve your tender treatment...

As it stands, Station Options does all I need for Telescope and then some. I threw in the licence agreement page to test dynamic page loading (yah, I know, you didn't notice; few would. But the 'experimental' options page does not load until you accept and later, the licence page gets removed.)

Oh, I jolly well did notice it. And I liked it. Since I only adjusted the options one or two times, I promptly forgot about it, but I thought that it nicely amplifies the immersive element

Any oxp with a handful of options could use it, esp. those with expansive readme files which require the player to read the wiki or crack open the oxz. Having the info available at the station is more immersive. Station Options is driven entirely from the missiontext.plist file, so there's minimal coding involved.


I always had in mind that it could also function as a mission builder. Especially useful is the 'choice' option type, where in a given situation, the player could be presented with options/questions and the mission would proceed base on his input. If missions were structured like a tree (not linear), then they could be replayed yielding different results.

This sounds very interesting. I've been snooping around our chums over at Pioneer, and found some links to a new game called Sunless Skies. I like the way that this works - and was hoping to adapt BeeTLe BeTHLeHeM's Life in the Frontier to create something special for Digebiti. I was thinking of 4 different threads to start with - one where you meet an engineer who asks you to invest in his fledgling repair shop (and where you can then get discounts), one where you get to go down the gravity well, play extreme dominoes & dance the gavotte, one where you get to foil bolshevist irredentists from Vetitice & Inonri who are sponsoring local piracy, and a last where you meet a fair damsel whom you wish to impress, and her family start giving you missions (we need mercury for silk top hats, go and get some from Qutiri...). But from what you say, your .oxp might be better than BeeTLe's. I'd also like to do something with my fantasies for the Feudal Lodge interiors...

Milo had an idea for an oxp to help with the primeable equipment issue and I've implemented some 'advanced' keys in addition to the dynamic options he wanted.
(see  Adopting Station Options)

cag, would you be willing to add support for OXPs to provide dynamically-generated options at runtime, or give me pointers on how to do it?

I want to generate options for each primeable equipment that the player has.

...

I read recently about Hermitage's market woes.

...
Ideally, I would like to rewrite the entire F8 Market screen to allow the combination of a number of functions. At the present time, though, with the limitations mission screens have with keyboard input, I wouldn't be able to achieve a one-screen version of all that would need to be done. At best, it would be a multi-page screen, where all the commodities are listed (but without the ability to use the page up/down keys, because mission screens can't use those) and you would then have to select the commodity you want to work with, which would bring up another screen with all the sub-commands you might like to run (transfer to cargo/storage/market, change price) and each of these would need another screen where you enter the amounts.

I mean, if that sounds better than the current implementation, I could put it together, but my feeling is that it would be kind of jarring to have such a different F8 page in play. What do you think?

This could be a candidate, with pages for transfers, price fixing, etc, with the 'options' being the market items, each with its own page for operations. Assigning it a category other than "Ship Systems" would make it easier to find on the F4 screen.

I finally bought a Smugglers.oxp smuggling compartment, and this seemed to me to explain where the clunky structure came from, I presume that Phkb naturally adapted what he already had in Smugglers - and tweaked it to do what he wanted.

It sounds more and more that the limitations on the mission screens are an issue. Has anybody thought about how they could be improved? Do we know which limitations are the most irksome and need to be dealt with?

The other thing that seems to be an issue, to my ignorant eyes, is the way in which markets are handled. I know that Switeck has found it impossible to update his .oxp's to the new system. I can also see how SWEconomics is hampered by an inability to mark Poor Agricultural Economies as different from Mining Economies, and how the pricing seems identical in both, the difference seems to be purely in quantities. While I take on board Redspear's comments on the advantages of simplicity regarding the number of commodities, I fail to see why there has to be a rigid template of a mere 8 economies which are marked as such on the Short Range chart. And why they need this bipolar approach. Or is it possible to create additional "template economies" which could then be marked with their own icons?

It is so frustrating knowing the little things which I would really like to change (Spara's Asteroid Tweaks, for example: I hate the way the configuration interface works, it is just so immersion-breaking. I feel that I should be able to solve it, but know that I'll just make a bodge job of it if I do...).

[phkb]

Has anybody thought about how they could be improved?

There is one main area (well, at least one) where mission screens need updating, which is the ability to access the entire keyboard for input, which can be done on any of the other built-in screens. For example, the page up/down keys, insert, delete, home, end, a-z, 0-9, etc. At the moment, there are only four keys that can be used: up arrow, down arrow, enter and escape. If this limitation was to be removed, OXP developers would be able to create quite complex screens that have a reasonably intuitive UI. There are other UI issues (the actual size of the usable portion of the screen, being able to have a clickable map on a mission screen, etc), but in my view, the keyboard input issue is biggest issue that is impeding progress.

I do have an idea for this (and saying this is almost akin to putting my head in the noose!) but I wanted to get the other big keyboard gap closed first (ie a in-game keyboard mapping). I also wanted to do some test builds before I change the word "idea" into "plan".

I hate the way the configuration interface works, it is just so immersion-breaking

I created a small OXP for myself to default the Asteroid Tweaks settings, moving the settings into Library Config and then suppressing all the prompts the original OXP will display. If there's interest I can post a copy in my box.com account.

[hiran]

Is there some download link that I could use? The expansions manager only covers Telescope 1.15...

[Cholmondely]

Is there some download link that I could use? The expansions manager only covers Telescope 1.15...

This is cag's most recent version:

New Telescope: (ILS issues hopefully fixed): https://www.dropbox.com/s/swfwx5klha3d ... .oxz?dl=0
(same link as first post)

But he has also come out with newer versions of Telescope Extender - and also his Station Options - which is well worth trying (confusing, but immersive - and only confusing because Telescope itself is so horrendously complex)

This is still in Beta - and presumably won't be uploaded to the Expansions Manager until the Thargoids have been ironed out of it...

New Telescope Extender: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oq331u061tucn ... .oxz?dl=0

New Station Options: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dzz9ayq1e0jhv ... s.oxz?dl=0

[arquebus]

I'm having issues with Telescope. I'm unable to get the MFD to load, even on a clean new save.

I replaced the three OXP's in Cholmondely's previous comment with the ones linked there, then loaded my existing save. The MFD showed up - but when I saved the game and then reloaded, the MFD no longer showed up.

I created a new test save, gave myself 100K credits, bought Telescope and Telescope Extender and Gravity Scanner (to match the equipments I had in the other save). The MFD does not show up.

Given that the MFD did show up when I first loaded a save that had been made using the previous version of Telescope etc., but not after I saved and reloaded, I suspect one of the above OXPs is incorrectly writing information to the save file. That said, since it's also causing problems on a fresh save that hasn't been saved and reloaded yet, it can't *just* be the save file format itself.

**EDIT: See below, test save actually does work**

[arquebus]

Further testing confirms that the issue is with the Telescope equipment/MFD itself, not necessarily with the extender or the gravity scanner equipment interacting/interfering with the MFD. If I open my fresh test save, buy a Telescope and then fly out, the MFD will not appear in the list of options. It *does* appear as an option in the HUD and MFD selector on the F4 screen. But it does not actually appear when I'm out in space.

**EDIT: See below, test save actually does work**

[arquebus]

In case it will be of use for debugging, here is the fresh, newborn baby save:

https://app.box.com/s/3fojbazsc2ln6xmpq1p5588ydzkl9kp2

And here's that same save with Telescope installed:

https://app.box.com/s/w3c3n9g97ibppb6wgpalp7hljrtxxxo3

**EDIT: See below, test save actually does work**

[arquebus]

And here's the log:

https://app.box.com/s/tehx3jh210yd70xvac9ve3wm7wicbnkl

I notice that I am able to get the TelescopeAux MFD to pop up (but it says Disabled), just not the regular Telescope MFD.

I've tested this both with my usual Vimana HUD and with the default.

**EDIT: See below, test save actually does work**

[arquebus]

Ugh, scratch ALL that, it's working now in the test save... I don't know what happened. I checked the log and found exactly where it's supposed to be, then cycled through and... well, there it was.

However, it is still not working in my regular (non-test) save, and it *was* working yesterday. I refreshed the OXPs with the ones listed just above, and then encountered the issue I described.

When I check the log for my usual save, I notice that the Telescope MFD does not appear in the list when I cycle through. (However, this could also be due to removing Ship Version.)

[Cholmondely]

I notice that I am able to get the TelescopeAux MFD to pop up (but it says Disabled), just not the regular Telescope MFD.

I think that this stays disabled until you set it with Station Options: Docked F4 screen > Ship Systems category > Telescope Options

[LittleBear]

Really like the Telescope Options add on as I prefer not to have the mass lock rings visible. I've had the same odd issue as Arquebus however, including it breaking my save file.

I installed V2 of Telescope, Gravity Extender and Station Options. All worked perfectly and I used the Options to turn off the lightballs and mass lock rings. That all worked nicely and I saved my game. I loaded it this morning and it ran fine. Saved again and then loaded up this evening. The Station Options had disappeared from the F4 screen and Telescope's MFD had disappeared. I took all OXPs out reloaded and saved my game. Put them back in and reloaded. Still the same issue I'm afraid. The fact that the Station Options had disappeared would tend to indicate a broken script (but no complaints in the Latest.log.

@ Arquebus. Really been enjoying your Let's Play Videos. Great Fun and its helped me spot some bugs in the Galactic Almanac that (should) be fixed for V1.5. Saw you save file was corrupted. I had the same issue. I deleted all the telescope options variables from my save file (there are a lot) and you need to make sure you've highlted every one so you don't have a stray <string> anywhere as that will break the save file. I did a search for telescope and deleted every variable, then installed the version of Telescope on the Manager. That worked to recover my save file.

Its a very odd bug, but it could be that turning off the mass lock rings / lightballs (as those were the only things I fiddled with in Options) is issuing a command to Telescope's script which is breaking Telescope causing its script not to run at all. Very strange though that it only did it on a reload.

[arquebus]

Really like the Telescope Options add on as I prefer not to have the mass lock rings visible. I've had the same odd issue as Arquebus however, including it breaking my save file.

I'll have to test to see if the newest version breaks the MFD across fresh saves (new start, save, reload), or if it only breaks the MFD if it's replacing an older version on an existing save. I was using beta version of Telescope just fine until this most recent configuration of updates.

[cag]

I'll have to test to see if the newest version breaks the MFD across fresh saves (new start, save, reload), or if it only breaks the MFD if it's replacing an older version on an existing save. I was using beta version of Telescope just fine until this most recent configuration of updates.

It broke more than just that! sorry

Here's the latest:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/swfwx5klha3dn ... e.oxz?dl=0
(same link as first post)

If you've not tried it yet, Station Options is required by Telescope 2.0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dzz9ayq1e0jhv ... s.oxz?dl=0
(same link as first post)

If you use Telescope Extender, you'll need the new version, 2.0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oq331u061tucn ... r.oxz?dl=0
(same link as first post)