Oolite Bulletins

Re. the Space Compass ... to be honest I was just going along with what it says on the wiki: there it's a circle for the planet and a square for the station. I think this is what the correct behaviour is supposed to be: if the unmodified compass doesn't work this way, then it's possible that there's a bug in it. Which doesn't make writing reference sheets any easier! Do you go with actual behaviour, or intended behaviour?

Disembodied wrote:

Re. the Space Compass ... to be honest I was just going along with what it says on the wiki..... Which doesn't make writing reference sheets any easier! Do you go with actual behaviour, or intended behaviour?

Than that is written wrong on the wiki. I now also checked it with my oldest Oolite : 1.55 (And with 1.69). All showed only a filled circle for the station. It has always been one symbol for the normal compass. So who wrote that wiki part was mixed up on this point. The wiki pages were generated after the 1.55 release.

In this case I would say describe the actual situation. Wiki was written by a pilot that has used the advanced compass for to long and forgot about the old days.

EDIT: Looking in the code I see it is intended behaviour that the compass toggle is disabled when in basic mode. Also the station square is only drawn when in station mode, but without a toggle the compass mode should always stay in basic mode and only show a planet symbol.

Thanks, Eric. I'll edit my edits, so to speak!

Disembodied wrote:

Spoken Messages
This feature is currently only available for the mac. -- change to This feature is currently only available for the Mac. (capital M)

And on Linux (and anything else on which libespeak works) in 1.73~. OXPs which contain speech_pronunciation_guide.plist may need to be fixed.

Upon finding out that the Key Chart was meant to be a '0' and not a 'o', this aging android walks down to the cargo hold and shouts a stream of curses that melts alloy panels and scares the fur off his trumble.

Right, now that's over with...
The standard space compass behaviour as stated in the RS is correct. It actually dates back to the Acorn version, which I tested under emulation just to double check behaviour. I will add a small footnote to explain the behaviour better i.e. compass will target the GCW station when the ship has entered the aegis.

I uploaded the wrong (buggy) versions of the RS as the finals. <Dang these aging neurons.> Several of the errors highlighted aren't part of the correct one, but I'll add the other corrections first before uploading. The documents will be 'frozen' after these corrections as 'finalised' for the 1.73 release.

I'm going to be out of town for the next month (or three) so I'll won't be able to visit the BBS as often as I've have been. I'll try to fix all the errors by tonight, otherwise I'll have it done before the 30th and posted links to it.

Can I say a big thank you to the following people: Disembodied, _ds_, Kaks, Eric Walch and of course Another_Commander who got me started on this in the first place. Thank you to everyone else to who bug spotted over the last two months. (Two months It's been that long! Wow.) There's been times when I've wanted to bin the whole thing, but your support has kept me plugging on.

On to future plans...
Figure out some way of converting the ship images pngs in to vector images.

Since the RS has now turned in to a mini-manual, the need to make a printed one has decreased. The 'Your First Flight' just can't be compacted to a small download size either. I've been experimenting with the Tiddly Wiki system with some great results. I'm looking at combining the two projects in to a mini Oolite wiki weighing in at the 4-6MB size. It will not replace the main one, in fact the mini will have direct links to relent pages on the main one. The idea is this: when you have a question about the game, you can just hot swap from it to the wiki to find the info then flick back to carry on playing. I'll work on it and post alpha-0.0.1 version some time during April.

Once again, thanks for all the support. It's this environment that makes want to carry on doing the work in supporting the game that I love.

vector graphics. Hmm that's going to be a tricky one. It may be easire doing a ship schim like the world war II plane ideantifying books and just blocking the shapes in from there.

They are finished (I hope.) Source Open Office File, Standard RS, Low Res RS and High Res RS. This is the last work I should need to do on the RS for now. I'll look at it again when the next point release is due. There is a whole bunch of other information that I need to package up for the cadet commanders out there so I'll work on that for a while.

On the question of the ship images as vectors, they can actually be done in two different ways.

Firstly it could be done in, vessel schematic style as ClymAngus suggests. Considering that the manuals for all 8-bit versions of the game had the ships illustrated with both a schematic and a ink rendition, it would be in keeping to have the same thing for the RS. On Ian Bell's Elite subsite, he has both the original Acorn manual as gif scans and the C64 Elite manual as a Word document where the ship charts are vector images. The downside is that such image styles would increase the document size in pages immensely for only a small gain detail. This style of image would be better suited to a full manual or the mini-wiki that I'm playing with at the moment.


The other way is to simply convert the current images themselves in to vector versions. Converting a bitmap in to a vector is the kind of number crunching that computers are designed for. Inkscape has this type of procedure built in. The trick is to get a clean source image that will trace easily. So I'm going to have to spend some time getting to grips with Wings3d so that I can position the ships in a consistent manor that produces the type of image I want. For a crude example of how it works, grab this SVG image.

To be honest, the vector images are part of the would like to have group not the must be done group. There are several other things I would rather include first in the RS, explanations on how both the economic and government settings effect the player, docking and how to trade, all spring to mind.

Still a few typos remaining, I'm afraid ...

Page 1

Flight Controls

Galactic Hyperspace jump -- note reference should be 6, not 7

Dump one cargo canister -- note reference should be 7, not 6

Rotate through the manifest -- note reference should be 7, not 6

(Ref. 6: "Galactic Hyperdrives are one time use only. To jump again another drive must be bought." Ref. 7: "Unless the cargo is selected by the commander, the ship’s computer will dump one unit from the first commodity listed in your manifest.")


Page 2

Missiles

These icons show what types of, and how many, missiles or other pylon mounteddevices you are carrying ... hyphenate pylon-mounted, add space between "mounted" and "devices"

Space Compass: number 15 should be bold, larger and indented to match other entries.


Page 3

Legal Status: Fugitive

Actively targeted by GalCOP V Vipers ... delete double V

GCW Orbital Laws

Space Lane Hazard Clearance
Destruction of navigation hazards from the space lanes,. i.e. asteroids and wreckage. -- delete extra full stop after "space lanes,"

Property Destruction
Possible double space between "stations" and "and"


Page 4

Joystick Controls Settings (should probably be "Joystick Flight Controls", as per "Mouse Flight Controls")

View forward / aft / port / starboard
Buttons or axis's -- "axis's" should be "axes"


Page 6

Notes

Vessels’ agility are measured -- should be Vessels’ agilities are measured

The higher value of each letter (A being lowest) the better the performance. -- should be The higher the value of each letter (A being lowest) the better the performance.

Still out of town at the moment so it's just a quick post (by my standards.)

The final corrections from Disembodied have been done and I've rewritten the GCW Orbital Laws so that they are grammatically cleaner.

Files are as follows
Standard OoliteRS
High Quality OoliteRS
Low Quality OoliteRS
OoliteRS Source - Open Office Format
OoliteRS Source - Word Doc Format
I've converted the source file to Word format for those who don't have Open Office. Unfortunately, due to some cross-format issues it's not quite the same as the master one, but it's close enough to get by.

There should be no need for any more changes to the RS till the next point release. On other news, I'm almost done on DTP'ing Disembodied's Advice to New Commanders. It's about half a meg in size zipped so far but I think I can squeeze smaller. I'll make a new thread when I've got the finalised version done.

Just a quick update on the RS and other stuff folks.

I've done a minor update to the OolteRS and finished jazzing up Disembodied's Advice for New Commanders. The updates to the other versions of the RS can be grabbed from my filebox space. (Other than the Word source file which I'm having problems with again <sigh>)

The update to the RS is just the correction to the measurements of the Asp Mk II which set for the Anaconda and little bit of micro tidy up. It now weighs in at just over 500kB zipped so I'm pretty happy about the final product. I've done the DTP job on Mr Grimlet's words of wisdom as promised. At 280KB zip size it's not too weighty.

If anyone wants their documentation jazzed up, Oolite related or not, give me a PM and we chat about what we can do.