We now have 800 OXZs on our Expansions Manager!

[Cholmondely]

According to Hiran's oolite expansion catalog, we are now up to 801!

This does not include extraneous OXZs such as Wildeblood's many "trinkets" or Murgh's Iron Ass series.

Not to mention our stable of unconverted OXPs (which still include staples such as the Galactic Navy OXP suite and Povray Planets).

My guess is that we are now up to over 1,200 OXPs.




This of course makes Hiran's work with his Oolite Starter flavours more crucial. The 2010 expectations that new players could look at the list of 200 or so OXPs and work out what they wanted was not so realistic even at the time (remember Wildeblood's discovery?). But it is even less realistic when we have 1,200 of them! How many hours would it take to work out what does what and tailor one's Ooniverse to the desired end-effect?

Appendix: Oolite Starter "Flavour" list

Vanilla
Nothing!


Beginner's Set
Helping OXPs for beginners such as Market Observer, Vimana-X HUD, Ship's Library (Ship's Manual), Equipment 'Sell Item' Color & Expanded Weapon Info


Additional Planets and Stations
This suite adds additional planets and orbital stations to your Ooniverse. This flavour conflicts with Stranger's World, below.


Stranger's World Set
Stranger's astronomy and physics OXPs


Depth Set
Commies, Dictatorships, Anarchies, Feudal States & individual systems such as Lave, TOGY & TCA, Riredi etc.


G1 Missions and Activities
Self-descriptive

[Wildeblood]

The 2010 expectations that new players could look at the list of 200 or so OXPs and work out what they wanted was not so realistic even at the time (remember Wildeblood's discovery?).

Nuh. What did I discover? Oh, do you mean that whinging blog post I found last week? He was just weak.

[hiran]

What could help is to have a classification system for the expansions. It partly exists in the wiki where on many OXP pages you find a rating if the game becomes easier or more difficult etc. We could add maturity level (bugs, graphics, sound), fix what might need to be fixed and add it to the catalog.

If the ratings I am talking of were not part of the wiki but part of manifest.plist they could not only end up in overview pages but also be displayed when browsing for OXZs.

[Cholmondely]

What could help is to have a classification system for the expansions. It partly exists in the wiki where on many OXP pages you find a rating if the game becomes easier or more difficult etc. We could add maturity level (bugs, graphics, sound), fix what might need to be fixed and add it to the catalog.

If the ratings I am talking of were not part of the wiki but part of manifest.plist they could not only end up in overview pages but also be displayed when browsing for OXZs.

There are problems.

1) How do we come up with a rating system which is objective/meaningful?
Our current systems are subjective - OXP authors rate themselves (I've seen several ratings which I felt were very wrong over the years).
It would be good to come up with some way of deciding between Smivs' blue and purple ratings for example.

2) Most of our OXPs don't have them. Smivs' systems has 333 tagged OXPs (some duplicates). I can't work out how to count those using Svengali's system - but they will be far fewer.
I can tag some of the OXPs, but am (eg) pretty useless valuing the ships OXPs.

3) Potential for change. At the moment, Library does not do much. But I think that it has vast potential and could well help to make the game easier if other OXPs really used it (the ability to store all news flashes - thanks, Phkb! - could make a major difference with complicated OXPs changing lots of things which are broadcast by GNN for example. Ditto with the ability to store information about systems and people).


References:
Svengali's  OXP Levelindicators
Smivs'  Gameplay and Balance Indicator
Zireael's  OXP by level indicated - I have not much idea about this one

[Wildeblood]

What could help is to have a classification system for the expansions.

What is needed is something analogous to the decimal system libraries use, that would sort all similar OXZs to be adjacent. So, add one only new key to manifest.plist with a number that can have as long a decimal component as you want, and sort by that. Example, category 3 - equipment:

3 - equipment
3.1 - weapons

3.11 - lasers
3.111 - lasers within established range
3.1111 - lasers with pretty colours
3.1112 - lasers with humorous names
3.112 - uber-lasers

3.12 missiles, mines etc.
3.121 - missiles
3.122 - mines
3.123 - special pylon-mounted equipment

3.13 - other weapons
3.131 - weapons, automatic
3.132 - weapons, primed equipment

Then. the user just searches for the number at the level of specificity they want: search for "3" get 100 search results, search for 3.1415926535 get 1 search result. Easy to implement, easy to understand, hours of family fun debating the classification of old OXZs whose originators aren't here anymore.

[Cholmondely]

What could help is to have a classification system for the expansions.

What is needed is something analogous to the decimal system libraries use, that would sort all similar OXZs to be adjacent. So, add one only new key to manifest.plist with a number that can have as long a decimal component as you want, and sort by that. Example, category 3 - equipment:

I think that you will find that Phkb has already done some of that for us - sneak a peek at the innards of his  Loadout by Category.

We can spend a lot of time and effort categorising. We can just come up with a handful of decent flavours for the Oolite Starter.


How do other games with a plethora of modifications do it? The one thing which I've noticed (not that I'm any sort of expert outside Oolite) is that they categorise by the popularity of their modifications. We used to be able to do that, but it crashed.

Code: Select all

== Download ==
[[Media:Cobra_Mk3-XT1.4.oxz | Cobra_Mk3-XT OXZ]] (downloaded {{#downloads:Cobra_Mk3-XT1.4.oxz}} times)<br>

We did have a discussion here some years ago about alternatives. I forget the details.

References:

Is the OXZ download counter still not functioning? Any ideas, maik?

According to the Special Pages in our wiki (https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Special:Version), Maik wrote the freeware Download Counter for this version of wikipedia!

Code: Select all

Installed extensions
...
Parser hooks
Extension		Version	License			Description						Authors
Media Download Counter	1	CC-BY-SA 3.0		Counts downloads of Media files		Maik Schulz
ParserFunctions		1.6.0	GPL-2.0-or-later	Enhance parser with logical functions	Tim Starling, Robert Rohde, Ross McClure and Juraj Simlovic

There is a discussion starting here: viewtopic.php?p=282453#p282453

I think there is another discussion somewhere else with one or two ideas about alternatives. Was it NiteOwl?

[Wildeblood]

We can spend a lot of time and effort categorising.

Hardly any effort. A first pass can be automated, just converting the existing "category" key in every manifest.plist into its equivalent "decimal_category" and inserting it. It could be all over in an hour. Then any time someone took an interest in updating an OXP, they could ask themselves, "Can I be more specific about the category?" Optional specificity that fails gracefully. Seriously, sometimes you read like a person who's never been in a library, and we know that's not the case.

I'm right about this. I was right 15 years ago, and I'm still right.

[Cholmondely]

The Dewey Decimal System for Book Classification took three years to devise (1873-6). The Bliss bibliographic classification took from 1940-53. Admittedly, they were dealing with thousands upon thousands of books. But in each case there was a dedicated, full-time employed librarian at the heart of it.

We're a bunch of volunteers!

[Wildeblood]

The Dewey Decimal System for Book Classification took three years to devise (1873-6). The Bliss bibliographic classification took from 1940-53. Admittedly, they were dealing with thousands upon thousands of books. But in each case there was a dedicated, full-time employed librarian at the heart of it.

So, you're saying that if we changed to a decimal category system, you would not begin with a simple mapping of the existing categories, each to a number. So, you're implicitly acknowledging that the established categories are poor, you're just not saying it.

[hiran]

Interesting. We are trying to sort all OXPs into one linear sequence. That I can already do:

- by title
- by author
- by publishing date
- by ...

You can browse the catalog and experiment which ordering suits you best - and I believe it depends on what you are after.

An additional thing I had in mind could be the maturity score. As to see which OXP is a nice idea or draft as opposed to having had painjobs and shaders applied.

With that a user can choose which OXPs to bundle into a high realism ooniverse or going for an experimental one.
We could decide for a flavor to contain similar maturity levels, or decide which OXP to touch and facelift next.
OXP authors could look at the steps required for full maturity to know what they need to look at next.

Edit: One thing that could already tell us what needs to be done is the list of warnings:
https://ooliteproject.github.io/oolite- ... nings.html
Some of the OXZs on the expansions manager do not specify a license - something that had been discussed back and forth in the past and that is a showstopper from including all the other OXPs on the expansion manager.

[Cholmondely]

The Dewey Decimal System for Book Classification took three years to devise (1873-6). The Bliss bibliographic classification took from 1940-53. Admittedly, they were dealing with thousands upon thousands of books. But in each case there was a dedicated, full-time employed librarian at the heart of it.

So, you're saying that if we changed to a decimal category system, you would not begin with a simple mapping of the existing categories, each to a number. So, you're implicitly acknowledging that the established categories are poor, you're just not saying it.

I thought that we'd broached this some time ago: OXP Categories (Analysis/Discussion) (2022)

[Cholmondely]

I dropped this since I ended up with egg all over my face.

I'd been badgering various people to reassign categories to one or two of their OXPs. In particular, the "Systems" category. When I got active in our community, the Systems OXPs were purely these: Anarchies, Feudals, Commies, Dictators, Rescue Stations. Then other OXPs which I felt did not "fit" were added.

Quite some time after I'd made myself unpleasant, I discovered that Cim had defined the category as "Alter multiple star systems in a number of ways eg. combinations of changing main station and local police ships, adding new stations, ships, activities, missions" which I'd been unaware of (as a latecomer to the party) and which these new OXPs fitted into. Embarrassing. I presume that the OXP authors had been vaguely aware of the definition but were unable to quote it when I started badgering them.

There were other similar incidents, including a feud which developed between Montana05 and Reval over the use of the "Fictional organisations" category on the wiki.

So while the idea is a good one (as a past librarian I like things in order), I'm now more dubious about the practicalities, and wonder if simpler solutions might not be better.



But just thinking about what we have is a good idea. Does it work? Does it help new players? Could we improve it (although our morass of OXPs might never get redefined if their authors starting objecting to a new taxonomy)?

[Cholmondely]

There is another point.

What are we actually trying to do?

I'm interested in helping people (like your 2014 DoctorFrog) easily customise their Oolite to their whims. So I want something which will help them do that.

Something complicated will be an obstacle to this. A decimal system, for example, involves more classification which they might need to learn to help them search. That will be more time wasted before they can start playing. Whereas Oolite Flavours is instantaneous - you just press a button! It is not perfect. But then perfection as Plato, Plotinus and Iamblichus argued, cannot be found in this imperfect world.

Excursus on Oolite Flavours
What would be really nice would be to have truly different flavours. Our current flavours look to me like elements of a cocktail - a sweet ingredient (we have just the one beginners' flavour), a sour ingredient (we have just the one depth flavour), a bitter ingredient (we have just the one missions flavour).

Might it be better to have different Ooniverses? Call them "Main courses". We have Stranger's World. Another with Elite Trader. And we might be able to create one or two others (no great ideas there, sorry!). And then we could add "condiments" (Missions. Depth. et cetera).

[Wildeblood]

There were other similar incidents, including a feud which developed between Montana05 and Reval over the use of the "Fictional organisations" category on the wiki.

You've several times mentioned this, and I'm intrigued. How can any two sane people have any disagreement over fictional organizations? Was there an assertion of insufficient fictitiousness? Or, insufficient organization? Or was it a demarcation dispute, the Union of Space-farers versus the League of Space Traders trying to do the same thing?

[Wildeblood]

What are we actually trying to do?

Not have people download all 800 OXPs and seriously expect everything to just work. Not have people download two OXPs that do exactly the opposite thing, then come on here and demand, "Make your crap compatible with that other crap."