Newships 'Josher' missile selection issue

[Nijik]

Evening all, first post here so be gentle.
Firstly I'd just like to say I'm loving this game, it's brought back great memories of playing Elite on my old Electron, except now it doesn't take 30 minutes to load.

Now to my problem, I've taken a shine to the Josher in the newships OXP and, after having resolved the 'invisible laser' issue by adding and editing the view and weapon position co-ordinates, I've now found another problem, the available missile cycling button 'Y' (or button 5 on my Logitech Attack 3 joystick) doesn't work which pretty much renders the ship unplayable at present, anyone got any ideas?
The button works for my Cobra Mk3 game save and I'm sure I remember playing with a Josher in v1.69 without this problem...

Cheers in advance, Nijik

Currently running v1.72.2 on my laptop with 2GHz AMD Turion processor, 1GB memory, ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 graphics and running XP Media edition.
I have the following OXPs installed:
Behemoth 2.5
Cargo_wrecks_teaser
cobra3njx
Dredgers 2.2
e5amigasoundpack
Fuel Tank v2.2
Missile Rack 1.02
newships
orbits
PAGroove_Stations_v1.2.1
RandomHits275
Rock_Hermit_Locator
sell_equipment
Thorgorn_Threat 1.2
UPS-courier v1.5.3

[Thargoid]

Firstly alien greetings and welcome

The question to ask is have you got the multi-targeting system purchased and installed on the new Josher? With one or two exceptions, equipment doesn't transfer when you move between ships.

The missile selection doesn't become available until you've got that equipment installed. It's available for 325 credits from any good tech level 6 or above system.

[Micha]

Since it has come up again I'll mention my private patch for Oolite again which allows changing of missile stations without the mutli-targeting system (but does NOT provide the actual multi-targeting capability).

Personally I think with all the new pylon-mounted equipment this should be a standard part of the interface - you shouldn't need an unrelated piece of equipment to be able to select a pylon and use the equipment on it.

If there is sufficient interest I'll lobby to get this into the trunk.

[Lestradae]

If there is sufficient interest I'll lobby to get this into the trunk.

I suggest you find yourself a dev to do it or you ask them if they want to let you join the devs yourself? I heard they do that if someone is up to the task.

[another_commander]

@L: Micha has been a member of the dev team for ages. By invitation, too. Lots of the new stuff you saw in 1.72 (plus stuff you will see in 1.73) were (are) his contributions.

[Nijik]

Ah, apologies for the schoolboy error, didn't have the Multi-targeting system installed, sorted now cheers.

Of on a tangent now but the external views don't work for the Josh anymore, while this isn't a show stopper it's a bit annoying as it did work as I used it to check the laser position when sorting that out?

[Screet]

Of on a tangent now but the external views don't work for the Josh anymore, while this isn't a show stopper it's a bit annoying as it did work as I used it to check the laser position when sorting that out?

Have you checked the oolite-log? Maybe you accidentally introduced an error to your ships plist file. In that case, you most probably see it if you start Oolite with left shift pressed, then load your commander and then check the log.

Screet

[Lestradae]

@L: Micha has been a member of the dev team for ages. By invitation, too. Lots of the new stuff you saw in 1.72 (plus stuff you will see in 1.73) were (are) his contributions.

Ah! Cool. My general thanks for the work on this great game then also extend to Micha!

[Eric Walch]

Of on a tangent now but the external views don't work for the Josh anymore, while this isn't a show stopper it's a bit annoying as it did work as I used it to check the laser position when sorting that out?

External views didn't exist when the Josher was written. In the past such ships hadn't a external view at all. I recently discovered that with 1.72 such ships do have an external view. This is probably a fixed default value that will be to close for the Josher. At least is was to close for the ship I was working on.

.... Thinking on it further. .... Maybe it was a bug I saw the views in the first place and Oolite used the views of the previous loaded ship. And the same happened to you. On first test you got the old views and after a restart you started with empty views.

Easiest solution is to find a player ship of similar size that has external views defined and copy those lines to your Josher.

[Micha]

a_c is being much too kind - I've only contributed a few minor tweaks so far.

[Thargoid]

Since it has come up again I'll mention my private patch for Oolite again which allows changing of missile stations without the mutli-targeting system (but does NOT provide the actual multi-targeting capability).

Personally I think with all the new pylon-mounted equipment this should be a standard part of the interface - you shouldn't need an unrelated piece of equipment to be able to select a pylon and use the equipment on it.

If there is sufficient interest I'll lobby to get this into the trunk.

Would get my vote. Have the "key_next_missile" key as always available, but only make "key_next_target" and "key_previous_target" work with the MTC purchased or something. So you only have one active target across all missile pylons at a time, but with the MTC that target is selectable from the memory. Is that roughly how your patched version works?

Although then I guess we're mixing up multi-target and target memory equipment somewhat, which could get a bit tricky.

Something like that would make a little project I'm currently working on work better, and would also help in a number of the equipment-type pylon based items.

[Kaks]

a_c is being much too kind - I've only contributed a few minor tweaks so far.

You can always contribute more tweaks!
I personally won't have any problem at all if this tweak (and a few others!) finds its way to trunk!

[Screet]

a_c is being much too kind - I've only contributed a few minor tweaks so far.

You can always contribute more tweaks!
I personally won't have any problem at all if this tweak (and a few others!) finds its way to trunk!

That question "why is the key not working" is also regularly being asked on the forum, a strong indicator that it should work that way as Micha suggests!

If that code is being updated, maybe also have a look at why buying new pylon equipment advances the selected weapon always? I believe it should only be set to the first mounted weapon and then stay there.

Screet

[Micha]

If that code is being updated, maybe also have a look at why buying new pylon equipment advances the selected weapon always? I believe it should only be set to the first mounted weapon and then stay there.

Screet

Funnily enough I thought the same and I already changed that in my personal branch to work as you suggest.. can include that in the submission.

@Thargoid: No, with the MTC installed, each missile maintains its own target as at present. I can change it to work as you suggest which probably makes more sense.
OTOH, currently you can assign a bunch of different targets to different missiles and then fire them all off in quick succession to different targets. This would be lost if we implement your suggestion.

Taking this further, we could implement this as per your suggestion, Thargoid, but then add a new piece of equipment which allows each missile to be programmed individually. Might make it a bit too confusing though. Thoughts?

[Kaks]

Of on a tangent now but the external views don't work for the Josh anymore, <snip>

Hmm, we could fairly easily change Oolite, so if no external views are defined, we can use the cobra's ones instead.

This could cause some problems though: if a ship is pretty big (longer than 300m & wider than 200m), the external cameras will end up showing extreme close ups, and in extreme cases even the inside of the ship itself...

Any suggestions?