Oolite Bulletins

aegidian wrote:

Oolite's chief advantage has been that it is easy to mod and edit, ideally with the simplest of text editors and graphics editors. OXZs seem only to get in the way of doing that. I like the expansion manager, and appreciate the ease it allows new users to download mods, but in my opinion the OXZ format (in hiding information from users) hinders those new users who want to peek and poke behind the curtain...

It was exactly with this point in mind that I was earlier suggesting that OXZs should be viewed as the nice easy and reliable 'managed expansions' for everybody, including those that have no inclination to tinker, and that OXPs should become the format of choice for expansions which might need some user input, either testing or modding etc.
The author simply has to decide if their expansion is 'complete and needing no player manipulation' and should be made available as an OXZ via the manager, or whether a more 'hands on' approach by the player is needed or desirable, in which case an OXP release is in order.
The main issue with this is communication - people would need to know the benefits and advantages and thinking behind both formats, and where to find the OXPs if they want them. This is not a major hurdle.
Having said that, if a new system was developed that somehow merges both functions, then great. Keep it simple.

I think Aegidian is over-stating the case. The OXZ format is not the problem, just the devs' apparent belief they were creating something we wouldn't "tamper" with. In another thread, it was recently asked by someone why the managed add-ons folder was buried six deep in the folder structure, and the blunt answer given was words to the effect of "to make it hard to find". Well, that's just dumb.

Move the managedAddOns folder to sit alongside the addOns and oolite.app folders. Leave a readme.txt in it explaining that a .oxz file is just a re-named .zip file, and re-assuring any concerned citizens that an OXZ will function just as well whether it is in the addOns or managedAddOns folder. Put aside this unjustified angsting that the OXZ format is somehow disenfranchising anyone.

Wildeblood wrote:

Put aside this unjustified angsting that the OXZ format is somehow disenfranchising anyone.

I don't see it that way at all. Rather the ease of use is something which I'm sure has brought many more players into the world of expansions.
The problem is (as I think I've said before) that there has been a mad rush to release anything and everything as an OXZ, even if OXP was a 'better' format for some of these. For some reason a lot of people around here seem to consider OXP to be a 'dead' format which should be ignored. This is not the case at all. As I mentioned previously, I really think that both formats are equally valid and with the same status, but they do slightly different things in slightly different ways.
Expansions that are finished and require no player input should be released as OXZs via the manager for end-user convenience. Expansions that are WIPs, require testing, or are designed to be tinkered with should be released as OXPs. <meerkat mode>Simples!</meerkat mode>

Smivs wrote:

It was exactly with this point in mind that I was earlier suggesting that OXZs should be viewed as the nice easy and reliable 'managed expansions' for everybody, including those that have no inclination to tinker, and that OXPs should become the format of choice for expansions which might need some user input, either testing or modding etc.

Unfortunately, because of the great ease of the expansion manager, OXZ has become not the format of choice, but the default format. And the default format should be the easy-to-edit format, not the easy-to-install format.


Ideally, as I've stated, the expansion manager should be capable of dealing with the OXP format, or downloading and expanding OXZs, but saying that OXZs should not be tinkered with is a step in the wrong direction.

I will over-state it again, but for the last time, since I believe this horse is already dead.

I think OXZ as a format is a dead-end.

It gets in the way of one of Oolite's basic principles, that the game data is in a form that is easily editable with basic tools by everyone.

It is therefore, not as worthy, or good, or valid, as the OXP folder hierarchy format. It should be deprecated.

aegidian wrote:

I think OXZ as a format is a dead-end.

It gets in the way of one of Oolite's basic principles, that the game data is in a form that is easily editable with basic tools by everyone.

It is therefore, not as worthy, or good, or valid, as the OXP folder hierarchy format. It should be deprecated.

I don't disagree with any of this, but am a bit concerned that an awful lot of time and effort will be wasted if OXZs are phased out. Still, if the system is flawed it does need changing.

It has become clear that this whole issue is controversial in some ways, and there does seem to be a lot of confusion and disagreement about how best to work within the current system, although I suspect that most of the disagreements are actually not disagreements at all, but rather looking at the same thing from different perspectives.

So what do we do and where do we go from here? One thing that is clear is that the managed expansions have opened up the world of expansions to a lot more people, and therefore I think the principle of being able to download expansions easily via the in-game manager should be maintained. What we need therefore is a mechanism whereby this simplicity is maintained while allowing for the same ease of access to the workings of the expansions that we currently have with OXPs.
I'm afraid I don't know enough about how these things work to offer any solution though. We have some very keen minds developing the game though, and hopefully a solution will be found.

Smivs wrote:

I'm afraid I don't know enough about how these things work to offer any solution though. We have some very keen minds developing the game though, and hopefully a solution will be found.

I'm out of my depth here too, but as a player, tweaker and an oxp author, it feels that the general idea where the download manager would download the expansion and unzip it to the AddOns-folder could be a way to go. Don't have the vaguest idea, if that's possible at all and how the system should handle overwriting manually installed expansions. But that would bring the straight forward moddability back.

Smivs wrote:

I think the principle of being able to download expansions easily via the in-game manager should be maintained. What we need therefore is a mechanism whereby this simplicity is maintained while allowing for the same ease of access to the workings of the expansions that we currently have with OXPs.
I'm afraid I don't know enough about how these things work to offer any solution though. We have some very keen minds developing the game though, and hopefully a solution will be found.

I entirely agree about the expansion manager, it's a great feature. It needs to be adjusted to encourage users (that are so inclined) to then tinker easily and freely with the data.

If the devs agree then we should probably split this thread to a discussion of how to proceed from here, as such a discussion wouldn't be OT for the thread's OP.

FWIW I'd suggest that modifiable data should ideally be kept in only one single location (the AddOns folder wherever in a user's OS decides that is), with perhaps only a representative token (a copy of manifest.plist and the file location of the unzipped OXP perhaps?) copied to a separate 'managed expansions' area used by the expansion manager.

spara wrote:

I'm out of my depth here too, but as a player, tweaker and an oxp author, it feels that the general idea where the download manager would download the expansion and unzip it to the AddOns-folder could be a way to go.

Phooey! I like having two add-ons folders. One with the OXPs I've fixed, and one with the ones that are still in their original state.

Interesting maybe an unpack repack bundled with the add ons manager? Or am I talking bollocks here?

aegidian wrote:

Smivs wrote:

I think the principle of being able to download expansions easily via the in-game manager should be maintained. What we need therefore is a mechanism whereby this simplicity is maintained while allowing for the same ease of access to the workings of the expansions that we currently have with OXPs.
I'm afraid I don't know enough about how these things work to offer any solution though. We have some very keen minds developing the game though, and hopefully a solution will be found.

I entirely agree about the expansion manager, it's a great feature. It needs to be adjusted to encourage users (that are so inclined) to then tinker easily and freely with the data.

If the devs agree then we should probably split this thread to a discussion of how to proceed from here, as such a discussion wouldn't be OT for the thread's OP.

FWIW I'd suggest that modifiable data should ideally be kept in only one single location (the AddOns folder wherever in a user's OS decides that is), with perhaps only a representative token (a copy of manifest.plist and the file location of the unzipped OXP perhaps?) copied to a separate 'managed expansions' area used by the expansion manager.

Wildeblood wrote:

spara wrote:

I'm out of my depth here too, but as a player, tweaker and an oxp author, it feels that the general idea where the download manager would download the expansion and unzip it to the AddOns-folder could be a way to go.

Phooey! I like having two add-ons folders. One with the OXPs I've fixed, and one with the ones that are still in their original state.

There's more than one way to skin a cat. I group my modified oxps in a tweaked.oxp folder. As well as ship oxps go to a ships.oxp folder.

spara wrote:

Smivs wrote:

I'm afraid I don't know enough about how these things work to offer any solution though. We have some very keen minds developing the game though, and hopefully a solution will be found.

I'm out of my depth here too, but as a player, tweaker and an oxp author, it feels that the general idea where the download manager would download the expansion and unzip it to the AddOns-folder could be a way to go. Don't have the vaguest idea, if that's possible at all and how the system should handle overwriting manually installed expansions. But that would bring the straight forward moddability back.

A possible solution might be to have the expansion manager automate manual behaviour :
update oxp list
show oxp list (similar to oxp list in wiki, but only shows oxps that have manifest & comply with naming/hierarchy schema below)
user selects oxp to install
take care of dependencies
extract to Addons folder
update list of installed addons

The list of installed addons :
If oxp has manifest.plist, use the info in there and mark it as 'manageable by expansion manager if desired'
also add a column that shows if there are updates available for this oxp

oxp without manifest or not schema compliant : show name of oxp-file, mark it as 'needs to be maintained manually'

Combine this with a standard schema for oxp hierarchy & naming.
the oxp list used by the expansion manager will only list oxps that have manifest.plist & comply with the standard scheme.
oxps that don't follow these rules can only be installed manually

naming schema could be something like :
name.version.oxp.zip .

hierarchy would be :
top level
folder name.version.oxp
manifest.plist
readme.file
config/scripts etc folders


Basically this would mean changing oxp format to be usable for both manual & automatic install, removing the need for the oxz format withotu sacrificing it's benefits.

While we are putting the world to rights, can anything be done about the location of the expansions (of any flavour). As it stands we now have AddOns and the managed expansions folder in two different locations, and where your AddOns lives seems to be different between O/Ss and even installation location (home/system wide for example). This has been a source of much confusion (particularly for newcomers) on countless occassions in the past.
There might be technical reasons for this, but as a 'layman' in terms of these things it just seems to me that if AddOns (which might also include managed expansions in the future?) should be in the same location as the main Oolite files. Surely having everything together is desirable.

This must be a stupid question, but I'll ask it anyway. Is there a problem in some systems with the OXZ files. In my system, Debian with xfce, thunar and xarchiver, oxz-files are automatically recognized as archive files. If oxz type is a problem in some systems, needing some extra work to be recognized as an archive, then it's better to just keep it as zip.

spara wrote:

This must be a stupid question, but I'll ask it anyway. Is there a problem in some systems with the OXZ files. In my system, Debian with xfce, thunar and xarchiver, oxz-files are automatically recognized as archive files. If oxz type is a problem in some systems, needing some extra work to be recognized as an archive, then it's better to just keep it as zip.

Never under-estimate the stupidity of Windows. Under the flashy graphical transitions is the same pile of crud that has always been there. To Windows only .cab and .zip are archives. OXZ files are just random noise until you rename them to .zip.