How about..............

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Thu Oct 02, 2008 9:58 pm

@pagroove - ah-ha! Yes. Like it!

RazorbackSnr · Post by **RazorbackSnr** » Sat Oct 04, 2008 9:29 am

Morning Everyone!(Anyone....)

Just started using v1.65 rather than v1.62 and its utter magic. Loaded a few OXP's and upgraded my RAM and it runs perfect. Thankyou to Giles and everyone else for bringing such a wonderful "way of life" back to my PC!

Its good to see this topic is in full flow! Even i am getting bored of running my PCC between Ansoreat and Telaan(G2) making thousands and not seeing a soul. A little more dynamism in the game wont hurt even if it is generalised as suggested by Disembodied. The only thing is having a list of OXP's like entries in Encyclopaedia Britannica(sic) with all the loose ends and bugs inherent with lots of people all making an input will end up like the Augean stables. Just one OXP which allows but also restricts this dynamic effect would be interesting at least to try. With certain keywords the situation could vary in say 15 sections with up to 15 variables. Disease, revolt, all out war. How many participants, flying what ships, with what skill level and what kind of equipment all aiming to what end. I suppose its the machine creating its own OXP but different every time?

Its all food for thought and better than babbling on about laser cooling boosters........

Just got the constrictor mission again for the fourth time in my life and it still feels like someone pouring iced water down my back. Great Stuff!!!

Any political state can change irrespective of its economic condition. Otherwise why have a political ranking structure. A sweatshop planet with 2+ governments upgrades to a sweatshop planet with a unified government. When Communist China finally integrates Nationalist China(Taiwan)by "whatever" means, by which time it WILL be a global superpower, this might be an example?

Great forum, for a great icon of the last 25(?) years.

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Sat Oct 04, 2008 10:35 am

I definatley like the idea of randomisation! Random Hits creates this sort of interaction, although here its more hunting down randomly created individuals and groups. System changing events also occour in Assassins, Ionics and Deposed. Dictatorships slip to anarchies as the rebels and govenment forces duke it out in the space lanes. The player may play a role in taking the system untimatley to a Democary or Dictatorship depending on the results. News Broadcasts are also used in a lot of OXPs to give more of a feeling of immersion. Tridant Down has 9 different endings and the Ooniverse changes depending on the paths the player takes and the sides he alies himself with! (really reckomed that mission as a must play!

) For more interaction, I reckomend installing Commies and Dictators. These give the systems a more individual feel. Try also Thargon Threat, Navy, Behomoth and Behmoth Space War. These OXPs interact to create battles between the Bugs and the Navy and missions in which the player can play his part. One of the cleaver things about the core engine is that it is not player centric. Each ship in a system follows its own AI. Pirates react to traders, police react to crimes and so on. If your systems are feeling a bit empty I'd reckmond putting in some of the feature OXPs!

There are now over 100 missions available (not including randomly generated ones), so if you install all the mission OXPs you'll find there is a lot to do out there! Most will run on 1.65, although if you can run 1.65 you should be able to use 1.71.x. Most mission writers have put a condition of having a certain number of kills before their missions start running, so early game-play in Oolite is very similar to classic Elite. But as you start moving up the ratings ladder the game opens up more. I reckon it should now be possible to get almost to Elite without running out of missions to do.

)

pagroove · Post by **pagroove** » Sat Oct 04, 2008 3:29 pm

@LB

I was exactly pointing to Random Hits random but then in a broader way and not restricted to Anarchies but this time coupled to the planet description.

I like the way Random Hits creates an infinite number of missions.

Post by **Disembodied** » Sat Oct 04, 2008 6:34 pm

RazorbackSnr wrote:
Any political state can change irrespective of its economic condition. Otherwise why have a political ranking structure. A sweatshop planet with 2+ governments upgrades to a sweatshop planet with a unified government. When Communist China finally integrates Nationalist China(Taiwan)by "whatever" means, by which time it WILL be a global superpower, this might be an example?

I think this is true, but the ranking structure really only relates to how safe the system is for traders to fly in, i.e. how much money/time/effort the planet is prepared to shell out to GalCop for policing services – and, in the case of the Commies and Dictatorships OXPs, what policing services they provide for themselves. There's no reason to assume that states "upgrade" from one level to another (unless one subscribes to a very strict Marxist interpretation

). At the moment, China looks like it's in the process of going from Poor Agricultural Communist to Rich Industrial Corporate State, with no intervening periods of Confederacy or Democracy.

Social upheaval is social upheaval, as LittleBear indicates. A planet "cursed by civil war" might go from any political structure to any other political structure, depending on who wins!

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 8:56 am

There is of course the issue that the planet descriptions, while fun to read, are actually in no way whatsoever related to either political status, economy, techlevel, or any other planet property. They are purely random. So yes, in many cases (especially if it comes to "cursed by civil war" etc.) they simply don't match with the other properties (which are equally random).

Therefore in my personal gameplay I generally ignore the descriptions, except for where there are just funny.

RazorbackSnr · Post by **RazorbackSnr** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 1:14 pm

Afternoon everyone!

Randomization is certainly a good thing. Also the art of surprise. Ive just finished the Constrictor mission and DIDNT get a Navy energy unit. They just said, "see you soon".....
Halfway through the Ionics OXP and its good fun so far. Just money and checking out The Link Base which didnt have any prices for some stuff which was wierd. Working towards deadly and after Ionics im going to jump into G4 for some other mission(I think?).

My OXP's: Behemoth, Fuel Tank, Aegidian, Redux, FTZ, Energy Unit(?), All the OXPs req. for Trident Down as well as some other wierd ones!

Sweet!

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 1:34 pm

RazorbackSnr wrote:
Working towards deadly and after Ionics im going to jump into G4 for some other mission(I think?).

The Navy will contact you again in Galaxy 3, so don't go straight to Galaxy 4.

As you are an experienced fighter by now, you could also install Military.oxp. A lot to do for the Navy as an in-between--and the addition of some bad guys who are a real challenge for the bored pilot who is going towards deadly.

Same goes for Renegades.oxp, but that one only has hard bad guys, without a mission attached to them.

The only problem is that Military may clash with Ionics (I am not sure out of my head whether these rather old OXPs have already been made clash-proof). "Clash" means that, as you surely have noticed by now, only one mission screen can be displayed in Oolite at a time. Problem is, if there are two scripts that want to bring up a mission screen in the same moment, they don't cross-check with each other. So both will display their screen, but the second one will instantly overwrite the first one, without you noticing, because it goes too fast. So you will effectively miss one of the screen (which one is unpredictable). Which may leave you without the next important clue for one of your missions.

So to be on the safe side, you should only install Military once you have finished Ionics. (Or when one of the OXP-overhaulers confirms that they are now clash-proof.)

RazorbackSnr · Post by **RazorbackSnr** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 1:52 pm

Afternoon Cmdr McLane!

Unzipped the Military OXP into Add Ons but when initial screen is displayed(Load Commander Y/N?) at the top is says Galactic Navy Oxp could not be persaed(sic). Deleted it and then unzipped it again but still no. Got about ten OXPs in now and the only bit that chuggs is leaving the station(F1).

I'll leave Military out until i've whipped the Ionics Corp and G-drived to G3.

Thanks for the heads-up!!!!!!

Love the way pirates can shoot Q-mines before they detonate. Class.

C you soon.

pagroove · Post by **pagroove** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 10:40 pm

Nice to know but back on topic...

Although the descriptions on the planets screen don't match with the other values I vote for a simple keyword mission generation system. For example take Dreadful civil war.

The computer then gives a rating to the first word 'dreadful'
Because you also have Deadly civil war (correct me if I'm wrong)

Based on this value the system goes to the next word 'civil' It also evaluates the meaning on this word because also other kinds of wars exists. Next comes the word war which is obvious. It then randomly creates two fractions out of the standard ships pool. Both fractions get a base. Lets say the rebels get an Astroid and the main party another sort of stations (a destroyable one, maybe a Griff Coriolis). After this the system generates the possible sort of missions. For example Reckon (using the system information equipment of Thargoid to download something out of a data node), Protect base and attack base. Each battle will be different though because of different sizes of ships. All mission briefings comes of course with a big fractions database a la Random Hits.

And this is just one example with one aspect of the F7 screen (namely civil war)

Just to add a lot more life to the game.
Yes I know there are a large choice of mission OXP's and thats good but those are scripted and require to fly to certain places. This is also good but I'm opting for more random elements in the game in general

sorry for the long post.

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 6:34 am

Hi, pagroove,

I suggest you dive into descriptions.plist and examine the system_description-array. There's all the information you need, because all planetary descriptions are created from that array.

pagroove wrote:
The computer then gives a rating to the first word 'dreadful'
Because you also have Deadly civil war (correct me if I'm wrong)

To be precise, you have "[21] civil war". [21] refers to the 21st sub-array within the system_description-array (counting starts--as usual--with ZERO!), which reads "frequent, occasional, unpredictable, dreadful, deadly", which are all the words that can be combined with "civil war". Thankfully the sub-array doesn't contain pointers to other sub-arrays, which in other cases is quite frequent.

Based on this value the system goes to the next word 'civil' It also evaluates the meaning on this word because also other kinds of wars exists.

No, they don't, as you see in the first array. In "[21] civil war" civil war is one single string and never changes. The alternatives, if the dice rolls otherwise, are ""[26] [23] [24]s", "[26] disease", "[21] earthquakes", "[21] solar activity"", which for instance means that there are no other activities apart from solar. I leave it to you to find out what "[26] [23] [24]s" means. Have fun following the pointers through the array!

(Ahruman has created a big sheet which allows you to follow the pointers through the strings of the array. He has posted it somewhere in the Multilingual Oolite-thread. Very helpful for understanding which system descriptions can be created.

pagroove · Post by **pagroove** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 7:09 pm

Somewhere I knew this was not going to be easy.

Will look someday because I like to learn it (scripting). But I'm now taking a bit rest of working on the Famous Planets v1.1. oxp.

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 9:09 pm

Commander McLane is right, as a scripter you can't access this sort of thing directly, but you could make missions trigger based on the numbers for tech / govenment type and generate random descriptions. This is fairly easy to do code-wise (dreaming up words that all fit together is a little more tricky), but you can do a lot with a small number of words and phrases if you put them together in sub-strings. RH for example only has about 450 words / phrases to describe a character in a three word/phrases way, but this produces 150 cubed combinations of describing a character. A charcater may be described as "a nasty horned solictor" but this is done by telling Oolite to describe him/her as a "[diewordroll1] [dierole2] [dieroll3]". As each die has 150 sides and each is rolled independantly, the three word description has hundrends of thousands of combinations. When you break a mission description into more sub-strings where in each one a die is rolled per word the combinations are almost endless.

Its rather like an STR DNA profile. An individual STR type is very common as humans are all virtually identical. If 1/4 humans have STR type A at site 1, then only 1 in 16 have type A at position 1 and type B at position 2 and so on. A ten position STR match has a probabilty of 1 in 4 to the power 10. Individually an STR is common but the collective combinations are very rare. Thats the theory at least, in reality its more complex because of multi-contributor profiles as it is rare to obtain a pure sample. But you can create very varied mission descriptions from a relatively small number of words. Its the sort of thing I would be interested in developing, but I've just got no time to spend on it due to RL stuff. I wrote the DataBase for RH when off work for three weeks with a broken shoulder. Have a poke around the RH descriptions.plist and you'll see how it fits together. Randomly Generated stuff is really fun to mess about with!

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 9:24 pm

LittleBear wrote:
Randomly Generated stuff is really fun to mess about with!

Amen, is incidently messing about with createting the solar systems OXP, which involves alot of random generated stuff...

And ATM got a bad foot, and it will prolly have to be operated.... but got alot of time... but i get so easely side tracked, and bored....

pagroove · Post by **pagroove** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 10:27 pm

@LB>

It where the best spent weeks of your life then?

You wrote a monumental OXP back then which manages to entertain everytime you play a mission. Just reading the BBS pages is great fun too.

I just,(thankfully to Thargoid, Capt Kev and many others) know how my own little OXP works now but the framework was done by the scripters. I too don't have enough time to delve into the code. Besides that I have the problem that
I simply love to play many other games. (racing, Flightsims, Strategy etc.) But for a stange reason I always start up Oolite just to do a quick run.

So if I had the time and energy I started right away. But in the near future I have many other obligations. Glad that the Famous Planets is to v1.1.

But..

I hopefully inspire others with this idea. Therefore is the suggestion box.