Commander McLane;
Oh, yea, I know...
The reason that I brought up coding in the first place is because of my occasionally convoluted mind; you see, as we age, our brains curdle like old eggs in a frying pan. If we are UNLucky, when we turn into old eggs, we drool and don't say much. If we are relatively lucky, we babble.
I was babbling.
I brought up the maintenance issue > mentioned how maybe it could be in an OXP > (someone might say "well, write an OXP for it) > so I mentioned that I COULD code, and have some experience, just not with Oolite or with what Oolite uses.
Unless I get kicked off the board for vicious babblitiousness, you'll find that sometimes (most of the time) I tend to "put too much detail" into my posts. More than most people would, when explaining an idea.
I am getting an idea (the more that I play Oolite, and the more that I look stuff up) as to how OXPs are put together. Maybe some day. Right now, I only have ONE idea for an OXP, and I assume that it either wouldn't be well recieved, or met with " (shrug) So What? ";
The one idea that I have might be called "YourBaseHere". Sort of like Elite / FFE / Oolite combined with player-owned property. Sort of like the X-series of games (X=Beyond the Frontier, X-Tension) only not so complicated.
It could be as simple as a distinctive looking "Hanger in Space". To dress it up some, maybe it could be scripted to have a neon sign on it with the commander's name and stats (rating, kills, credits)... the scripts would have to reference images of all 26 letters of the alphabet (to put the commander's name on the sign) and the 10 digits... ratings of course are whole words... maybe with graphics next to the rating ... HARMLESS could be a kitty cat... MOSTLY HARMLESS a full grown cat... COMPETENT maybe a cheetah or a leopard... ELITE maybe a lion or a tiger. Or the user could hack the OXP to use reptiles, or the faces of politicians... maybe there could be a space on the sign (initially just blank background) that the player could use to add his own face.
EDIT: Actually the OXP might come with a default "Commander Jameson" JPG of a specific size, and the ReadMe explains how to replace it with a JPG of one's own callsign, and maybe we could forgo the numbers. So the sign might show "Commander Khan" "Dangerous" (a picture of a jaguar, or a monitor lizard/kimodo dragon) and a rendition of Ghengis Khan in full barbarian regalia.
The whole idea is that your "Palace" is also advertisement. We are mercenaries, yes? So one would not just live there, it's also your "office", with what amounts to be a big "business card" on top of it.
Maybe the base could have special features. Do overhauls whenever. Full repair facilities. Storage for commodites? Of course some of the usual things; navmaps.
To get extreme, this would be an extremely expensive thing whereby the player goes into business for himself. It could make money... NPC ships dock and do trading. Maybe YourBaseHere has manufacturing ability... can make expendible like missiles (free for the owner, of course).
Of course it would have to be EXTREMELY expensive and/or the player would have to do some enormous monumental task to get it.
Would I code this? HECK NO! Hehehe. Too lazy I think for an undertaking of that magnitude. Also too.. "un-canonical". Too much of a departure from the original game. But someone MIGHT like the idea, someone MIGHT code something like this some day.
For now, I DO want to learn a little about XML in order to hack and modify other OXPs for my own use. I realize that such things should not (and would not) get distributed. Its possible that this is frowned upon on the board, and I don't know, I'm still new here, but "Tell me how to hack this OXP and change it" is probably considered bad manners. I will read references on the web on XML and so forth as time permits.
EDIT: Not just to MODIFY OXPs, but to occasionally FIX them as well.
