[Release] Imperial Astrofactory 2.0

[Cholmondely]

The Imperial Astrofactories are happily situated on the space lanes between the witchpoint beacon and the station.

But! The Revolutionary Astrofarms are flung into the outer darknesses in the middle of nowhere (Stranger's World).

[phkb]

That would be because the astrofarm is a new station which SW has never seen before and thus doesn’t know what to do with, I guess. More evidence for why SW should have been set up as a scenario, and mods only allowed in when SW is changed to know what to do with them.

Anyway, I’ll spin up a SW environment this week sometime to see what’s going on.

[hiran]

That would be because the astrofarm is a new station which SW has never seen before and thus doesn’t know what to do with, I guess. More evidence for why SW should have been set up as a scenario, and mods only allowed in when SW is changed to know what to do with them.

Anyway, I’ll spin up a SW environment this week sometime to see what’s going on.

When I changed OoliteStarter to allow flavors to be installed in addition I essentially added a use case. Now you can choose whether to install it in isolation or in parallel to existing expansions. And I thought of restricting these two choices through metadata within the flavour. That could allow us to treat SW as a separate entity while the others go in parallel. Ummm - does this make sense at all?

Those that are allowed in parallel would get uninstalled when SW comes up, and then should also not be allowed to add. Hmmm, need to think this over again...

[phkb]

It makes sense. But at that point you’re essentially recreating the scenario system within OoliteStarter, with the downside that it still wouldn’t be able to restrict mods from being installed next to SW if they just go to the mod list and start downloading them. Having SW as a scenario would prevent that.

[hiran]

It makes sense. But at that point you’re essentially recreating the scenario system within OoliteStarter, with the downside that it still wouldn’t be able to restrict mods from being installed next to SW if they just go to the mod list and start downloading them. Having SW as a scenario would prevent that.

Is there some way to support that scenario system? Command line parameters to tell oolite to run a scenario? Pre-download the necessarz OXPs? ...?

[phkb]

I'd need to refresh my memory on how the scenario system works.

[Cholmondely]

There are only a handful of stations which end up in obscure places in Stranger's World.

Is it really worth rejigging the entire OXP suite as a scenario just for that?

Remember, a scenario excludes every single jolly OXP not listed as "allowed"! Thus you can't add in Aaron Aarts' Amazing Adventures, SniperLock (vital for crummy combatists such as myself) or even an Email System.

The current list of SW's "outer darkness dockables" (ODD stations?) now includes Revolutionary AstroFarms, Taxi Galactica stations and a handful of stations from unfinished OXPs (Solar Harvester?) - and presumably some of the missions (The Collector is the only one I know about, but I've hardly done any of them - and it hardly wrecks the Collector to have an ODD station if you have Telescope etc installed.).

(CommiesOrbitUpdate.oxz already sorts out the most egregious offenders - SLAPUs & CZGFs)

[phkb]

Is it really worth rejigging the entire OXP suite as a scenario just for that?

Remember, a scenario excludes every single jolly OXP not listed as "allowed"! Thus you can't add in Aaron Aarts' Amazing Adventures, SniperLock (vital for crummy combatists such as myself) or even an Email System.

Is it worth it now? Probably not. The effort to rework all the SW mods into a single scenario is probably too great at this point. The stable door is open and the horse has bolted a long time ago.

And yes, I understand fully the fact that by putting it into a limited scenario would seriously restrict what OXP's would be compatible. But consider this:

1. Every mod that adds a station is potentially incompatible with SW in some way, or at least requires serious rejigging to make it work acceptably in SW.
2. Every mission might potentially be broken by what happens to each system with SW, and would need to be fully tested to ensure compatibility.
3. Any mod that expects sun-skimming to work a particular way will potentially be broken.
4. Any mod that expects distances between various stellar objects to be within certain limits might potentially be broken.

The point is, while SW is a tour-de-force in what it manages to achieve, it does so at the risk of potentially breaking lots of other OXP's, and rather than leaving it up to the player to discover where these breakages occur, a better plan would have been to put it in a restricted scenario, just like SOTL, so that the author was responsible for checking compatibility, discovering breakages and working out if they are even fixable. There is an implicit assumption in the way SW is set up at the moment, that it will be compatible with any mod (that isn't explicitly flagged as incompatible). But as we know, that is quite far from the truth.

On top of this, by shifting stations out of their spawn locations and making them orbit planets or suns, breaks the save game feature at those stations. I feel this keenly because I keep adding the save-game feature to every station I work on, only to have SW come along and break it again. It makes it hard to explain to players why they can't save the game at these stations. ("But I fixed that station? Why can't you save? Oh, are you running SW? Oh, right, yeah, sorry, my fix doesn't apply for that station now. You're out of luck.").

You might notice I feel strongly about this. I can't deny it. While I admire what stranger did in manipulating the Oolite engine to do things it had never truly done before, I feel that the things lost in the process were too high a price to pay. For me anyway. Which is why I don't run a SW setup normally, and I've got to build one each time we run into this issue.

[Cholmondely]

You might notice I feel strongly about this. I can't deny it. While I admire what stranger did in manipulating the Oolite engine to do things it had never truly done before, I feel that the things lost in the process were too high a price to pay. For me anyway. Which is why I don't run a SW setup normally, and I've got to build one each time we run into this issue.

That makes good sense to me.


The missing things don't really matter to me apart from the location of the systems stations (and there, really just Astrofarms, SLAPUs & CZGFs) - I don't really play with the other stations as part of my game (Taxi Galactica makes little sense to me - ditto for Hypercargo - and I've yet to get to all those missions). And spending too much time/saving at those nasty dictatorship stations... ooh... No, Thank You!).

I did look at your CommiesOrbitsUpdate with an eye to adding in Astrofarms, but it was just too complex for me to get my head around. I suppose that I should look at Astrofactories and see if I can do something there... I'd expected the Astrofarms to be virtually identical to the Astrofactories in terms of location...

If you do wish to go ahead and transmogrify it into a scenario, I'd be happy to come up with a list of permissible oxps (SniperLock, etc.).

[phkb]

I'd expected the Astrofarms to be virtually identical to the Astrofactories in terms of location...

I put the Astrofarms between the sun and the main planet, rather than the WP and main planet. You know, mixing it up a bit.

[phkb]

If you do wish to go ahead and transmogrify it into a scenario, I'd be happy to come up with a list of permissible oxps (SniperLock, etc.).

That one's at the bottom of a long list I'm afraid! I've far bigger fish to fry.

[Alucard]

I updated to 2.5.1 a few days ago together with following
oolite.oxp.Ramirez.Dictators.oxz
oolite.oxp.phkb.BulletinBoardSystem.oxz
oolite.oxp.phkb.BountySystem.oxz
oolite.oxp.spara.ImperialAstrofactory.oxz
oolite.oxp.EricWalch.PirateCove.oxz
yes I have been away from the game for a while) as since updating my Rating remains stuck on Dangerous 551

I have completed Constrictor (and destroyed quite a lot of ships since) and now heading to Ramada from Zaria to start Iconics, I want to know if there is known conflict.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated

[Cholmondely]

I updated to 2.5.1 a few days ago

I know of no conflicts (the only major conflicts at the moment involve the Strangers World suite). Ionics adds ships (some of which might look a bit clunky - they've not been "Griffified"), and changes some of the F7 screen planet descriptions.

There is also
1) Shrews Rights, Zarafrusteria's new mission, also set in G2.
2) And do you have the Povray Planets (all 256 main planets)/Famous Planets Overhaul (40-odd planets tieing in with the Famous Planets F7 screen descriptions) planet textures for G2?
3) And Killer Wolf has published a new station (Isis Interstellar) which is great fun to dock at (G2 Cebior) - don't use the Docking Computer/ILS - they don't work for it...

Phkb has also added in
(1) PlanetFall 2 - (with atmospheric turbulence and specific landing sites) which is now the version on the Expansions Manager (the old addons for PF1 (PlanetFall Markets etc.) don't work with it and are now incorporated into PF2)
(2) External Docking!
(3) Vimana-X HUD

And his new "New Cargoes" is now compatible with "Smugglers".


Enjoy!

[phkb]

There is no known conflict with Ionics, but I haven’t tested it or even looked inside that mod to check for possible conflicts.

[Alucard]

OK I rolled back a backup from May and loaded the Managed AddOns from then, now everything seems to be working