Oolite Bulletins

The assassination missions I'm considering are not going to be a career option and there will be no bulletin board as it would feel strange to have a public bulletin that everyone can read. I'm still spicing here and these will work better the old school way. When you dock at a chaotic hermit, a shady person might approach you and offer you an immediate in-system small scale assassination mission. Take it or leave it. The offering will depend on your reputation and status. I'm using as much core features here as possible, so no special assassin rank or anything like that.

About finishing this one or splitting it, nah , it's quite complete and functional already and if someone fancies just grab the latest version and have fun with it. But I'm not finished yet.

My current sentiment is that the pirate hermits are practically done. They've been spiced so much that you should recognize one easily. And the limited high tech equipment shop is a unique feature. I think now it feels like a pirate base like it should. Chaotic ones need some more spice, and I think the occasional assassination mission will work here. You should already recognize them visually when you approach them. The silent watchers going around and around. And the standard ones I'm going to leave as they are. Spice them with mining contracts and they also have something unique to offer.

ocz wrote:

As I already wrote phkb in his thread, I'm currently working on a OXP(more like a library script) that's goal is to give a common way to add mission screens in between other screens for other OXPs. I want to finish something tomorrow that's usable. Maybe it's something you're interested in, too.

Why don't you guys team up to create one library instead of 20 different ones?

Svengali wrote:

ocz wrote:

As I already wrote phkb in his thread, I'm currently working on a OXP(more like a library script) that's goal is to give a common way to add mission screens in between other screens for other OXPs. I want to finish something tomorrow that's usable. Maybe it's something you're interested in, too.

Why don't you guys team up to create one library instead of 20 different ones?

I guess that it's really hard to create something so general it's usable. I mean, what's the need, really. Apart from some generic bulletin board. And I mean this with no offense to anyone, I'm just curious. What kind of functions people need?

I think that phkb's idea of a centralized bulletin board is a great one. It would remove one obstacle from writing missions. If there are people writing missions, of course.

spara wrote:

If there are people writing missions, of course.

Yeah... if!


<waves at Svengali>

spara wrote:

And I mean this with no offense to anyone, I'm just curious.

If that "no offence" was partly aimed at me, don't worry. Non taken.

I came up with that idea while thinking of other OXPs I might want to develop. That particular idea was so simple and general, but yet so useful and quite powerful (and of course I can make good use of it myself later), that I thought, hey why not. It's simple. How long will it take. I regret it now.

ocz wrote:

spara wrote:

And I mean this with no offense to anyone, I'm just curious.

If that "no offence" was partly aimed at me, don't worry. Non taken.

. Some people might be a bit touchy and English not being my native language...

ocz wrote:

I came up with that idea while thinking of other OXPs I might want to develop. That particular idea was so simple and general, but yet so useful and quite powerful (and of course I can make good use of it myself later), that I thought, hey why not. It's simple. How long will it take. I regret it now.

I _will_ play the game again. Someday. The problem is that every time I start playing I see something that I think could be improved. And off we go again. But someday...

After serious thought process, I think I'll ditch the in-system assassination idea. I don't want to make it a bulletin board thing and a constant shady fellow making outrageous suggestions gets tedious real fast.

So I have one more thought. Back to spices here, just a small tweak. Being the main destination for smugglers, one might assume that the market would have more illegal goods for sale. So I think I'll try to tweak the market a bit to this direction and call it finished. Maybe.

Yes, try it! The pirate hermits can be quite dangerous, so there should be some incentive to approach and dock (other than fighting).

But even now, I think it's ready for version 1.0.

One more version (0.9) to test, if someone has time. I'll try to upload 1.0 to the manager by the end of the week.

This version is almost solely about markets. Here are the market changes:

Mining Base (regular):

Capacity of mining products doubled to 63. Quantities of valuables are automatically doubled. The quantity of minerals has been halved. Halving the quantity combined with doubling the capacity roughly leads to a situation of half filled market of minerals. That allows the player to do some small scale mining around the hermit and selling the products to the hermit.

Smugglers' Den (chaotic):

Capacity is the default 31. The quantity of minerals has been halved to give room for some really small scale mining. The beef of this hermit type is in trading restricted goods with capacity 31.

Pirate Haven (pirate):

Capacity has been doubled to 31. Everything except alien items in stock. Buy, sell, do whatever pirates do with their loot.

And how you recognize them? The standard one usually has the miner doing mining. The smuggler version has the miner and a couple of hired goons flying in circles around the station. They are offenders, but they only attack if provoked. The pirate version has no miner, but pirates loitering around the station. Approach with caution. Unless you're pirate by reputation yourself, naturally.

https://app.box.com/s/d6a5msrio4dq2yozqqwkb976m42ufiw1

A lower-case 'r' and 'reg'? If 'reg' means regular, Rubic's Auger is meant to be a pirate hermit - it has pirate patrols, but the market looks standard.

What about compatibility between this and ye olde hermit markets ?

Removed Ye Olde Hermits and the market seems better - but the patrols were attacking me, even though I was a fugitive.
Destroyed their own hermit in the process, they did - something ain't right, methinks!

A thing I noticed. The chaotic hermit don't have beef this the feds, right? (If I'm wrong here, the rest of the posting is obsolete.) If there goons have offender status, won't the cops go for them? I know, it's a nice touch, but won't this cause trouble? Offender status cleans itself after a while, so ex-criminals that live off as goons can possess a clean bill. Or is it made, that GalCop won't attack them either?

ocz wrote:

Offender status cleans itself after a while, so ex-criminals that live off as goons can possess a clean bill. Or is it made, that GalCop won't attack them either?

Based on Oolite Reference Sheet an Offender get:
-free travel and access to GalCop Stations,
-limited protection by Vipers (so only Fugitives are attacked, at least in theory).
Patrolling ones probably wait for clean status and new offenders replace cleaned ones.

Spara, you've forgotten your test beacons again!

I've included my own beacons for testing in the past versions. I start getting used to them, but it seems to be cheating for normal playing, because rock hermits shouldn't have beacons. So I had the idea for a "Rock Hermit Memory" OXP: This would store all rock hermits the player has seen (and targeted!) in the save file, and the advanced space compass will only show those hermits. So when a player returns to a known system, he will find the hermits easily, but in new systems he will have to look for them. Of course I would make it compatible to Spicy Hermits, so relocated hermits could be targeted as well.

Before I start, I will try to find a way to store the coordinates more compactly, because after playing some time, the player would know hundreds of rock hermits. The way Oolite (JSON / XML) does this at the moment would create quite a big save file, consisting mostly of brackets, """, "x", "y", "z", and other overhead. Probably the best way will be to use a single string for each entry containing all numbers.