Oolite Bulletins

Posted: **Sat Jan 03, 2009 11:06 pm**

Screet wrote:
Maybe you didn't notice because you did neither stay there after the first replacement nor fly towards "w" while it was replaced - or your workers never told you that the replacement hasn't been destroyed as they get extra payment for the second one? ;) However, yeah, why not charge GalCoop, for as long as they don't claim taxes from me to pay you :twisted:

Believe me - Eric and I have spent endless hours with it and I've never seen it in v1.02.x. Even 2 hour sessions with doing nothing beside the buoys (except fighting some ~~innocent~~ lawless bastards. Before I've seen these things too, but they were very rare. Maybe another reason to install YAH again. I've only used it for some days when the problem with missing buoy came up.

Screet wrote:
I've even seen a GRS ship heading back from there with a buoy, which I guess has something to do with that.

This is the normal behaviour if things go wrong and a second Armadillo arrives. But it is also very rare (at least on my computer).

Screet wrote:
I do NOT know what caused them to be missing, nor could I tell since when they are not stolen anymore. I haven't disabled oxp's in the recent days, only did add a little bit. Before, the problem was always there, and pretty annoying, as it's difficult to do random hits without those things.

Strange. Maybe it has something to do with the number of installed oxps or merged plists?

Posted: **Sun Jan 04, 2009 12:34 am**

The Behemoth Space Battle OXP occasionally adds a few thargoids near the witch point. As thargoids will attack anything thats not a thargoid (including the witchspace beacon), when added they have a chance of attacking the beacon when. As the beacon can't run or fight back, if they select it as a target then its had it! It'd say thats a feature though rather than a bug. Darn Thargoids attack our navigation systems!

Posted: **Sun Jan 04, 2009 12:45 am**

LittleBear wrote:
The Behemoth Space Battle OXP occasionally adds a few thargoids near the witch point. As thargoids will attack anything thats not a thargoid (including the witchspace beacon), when added they have a chance of attacking the beacon when. As the beacon can't run or fight back, if they select it as a target then its had it! It'd say thats a feature though rather than a bug. Darn Thargoids attack our navigation systems!

Makes sense...and I really think they might be the reason for the hermits which are missing, just as they like(d) to blow up spacebars. They are also very good at encircling a single trading ship with their whole party. Poor traders, I quite often do not make it in time to get them out of there.

However, the beacons were missing when loading a saved game or as soon as I came out of witchspace, thus I believe that might have had a different reason. GRS always proved pretty good at replacing them in time, though. Apparently they take much longer to replace a "N" buoy.

Anyway...I got the impression that the Thargoid decoy ships are new. I encounter them quite often now...and once it's blown up, a full horde of them jumps directly on my position. At least it's a highly satisfying task to smash some bugs!

Screet

Posted: **Sun Jan 04, 2009 11:49 am**

Screet wrote:
However, I had several Rock Hermits missing in the past days - their buoys were there, but not their asteroids! Do they steal bigger stuff now?

I had this also yesterday: a buoy but no rock. Never saw this before. I just assumed some missile had blown up the rock.

LittleBear wrote:
The Behemoth Space Battle OXP occasionally adds a few thargoids near the witch point..... As the beacon can't run or fight back, if they select it as a target then its had it! It'd say thats a feature though rather than a bug. Darn Thargoids attack our navigation systems!

Yes, there is even special code in BuoyRepair for this occasion. When a replaced buoy is attacked it calls for help and police will arrive. But when thargoids attack the buoy when the player in nearby, no police is called. I added this to prevent that this behaviour would call police during the internal thargoid mission and would help the player in destroying the thargoids.

Screet wrote:
However, the beacons were missing when loading a saved game or as soon as I came out of witchspace, thus I believe that might have had a different reason. GRS always proved pretty good at replacing them in time, though. Apparently they take much longer to replace a "N" buoy.

The idea of GRS originally started when Svengali and I had problems to do some missions were some of the pirates often destroyed the w-buoy. Without this buoy you are blind. You can't navigate in space anymore. But instead of writing an oxp that added the buoy "out of nothing" we came up with this nice idea. We immediately liked the idea but had hard time to make the code work.
N-buoy would be more speedy when we would just add the ship there, but we both found it more realistic to let it launch from the station. And then you rely on launch queues you can't influence. But a missing N buoy is not a real problem for navigation.

Screet wrote:
One can see that when waiting at the replaced buoy, but the compass makes it easy to notice from a distance, as it jumps away from W but has W again in the list instantly.

What you see here is as follows: First the W is completely missing. Than the GRS ship arrives with the W. Then it flies to its destination with an already powered W buoy. But entities can't just "drop" subentities. Within one screen update, the whole ship is moved to deep space and a new ship and buoy are placed at the exact old location and old orientations. The player can't see this swap. Your compass is for a brief second pointing to that deep space position and than the old ship disappears there and the w disappears from the compass.

So what you witnessed is the swap not the disappearing of the original buoy.

Posted: **Sun Aug 30, 2009 9:18 pm**

*** News bulletin for our GRS shareholders. ***

Bad news has to be reported: Oolite 1.73 is released. Over the past month we had infiltrated a spy into the dev team that added a gremlin in the code to regularly destroy those nice buoys we sell. For some time is seemed to work well. The development version destroyed more station buoys than 1.72.2. However our infiltrated code was discovered and we regret to tell that 1.73 seems to kill less buoys than ever. So we expect no big profit on the buoy production this year.

Current version 1.02 of buoyRepair should also work on 1.73 although it might give some deprecation warnings in the log. When those warnings irritate you, you should download the latest revision from the wiki. (1.02.3 were these warnings are already dealt with).

When you never look in the log, you can also wait a bit longer until we have a version that is fully tested with 1.73

Posted: **Mon Sep 28, 2009 8:15 pm**

Hi,

I'm curious what has changed between the latest two minor revisions. The reason is that I had 1.02.1 running with 1.73.4 of OOlite. Everything seemed to work, but after flying to a system with a GRS station, docking, saving and quitting Oolite, I was in trouble: Everytime I did load that commander, Oolite closed without any notice of what happened almost instantly after showing me the equipment screen. That problem went away when I updated to 1.02.3.

Since L has reported regular crashes without log entries being back in the current version of Oolite, I've got the hope that knowing what changed here could lead to a way to find out what's causing the problem in that thread:
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=6773

Screet

Posted: **Mon Sep 28, 2009 9:04 pm**

I now uploaded the version 1.02.4

Only minor changes in the scripts of the ships flying around the GRS station. Now fully tested with 1.73.

Posted: **Wed Oct 07, 2009 2:18 pm**

I've stumbled across a minor annoyance in buoyRepair.
Trying to access the Ships for Sale screen (F3-F3) while docked at a GRS station reliably causes a CTD.

I've tested with buoyRepair 1.02.4 as the only installed OXP, and the crash always happens.
I'm running 1.73.4 under XP Pro.

I can provide logfile, savegame and further testing if needed.

Posted: **Wed Oct 07, 2009 2:35 pm**

CheeseRedux wrote:
I've stumbled across a minor annoyance in buoyRepair.
Trying to access the Ships for Sale screen (F3-F3) while docked at a GRS station reliably causes a CTD.
..I can provide logfile, savegame and further testing if needed.

Better report this in the bug section as it is not likely a buoy repair bug but a more general bug for such stations. Also mention your OS system.
I just tried it both with the 1.73.4 and the current Oolite test release on my mac and I don't get crashes but I also don't get that page. It worked in the past. At least with Oolite 1.72. All I get is:

Code: Select all

[script.error.exception] PlayerEntityLegacyScriptEngine.m:434: ***** EXCEPTION NSInvalidArgumentException: *** -[NSCFString objectAtIndex:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x198ba760 while testing legacy script conditions.

for every time I try to access that page. But no part of the oxp uses legacy scripts.

Posted: **Wed Oct 07, 2009 3:03 pm**

Eric Walch wrote:
CheeseRedux wrote:
Trying to access the Ships for Sale screen (F3-F3) while docked at a GRS station reliably causes a CTD.
Better report this in the bug section as it is not likely a buoy repair bug but a more general bug for such stations.

It seems to be the workaround for the known problem (XML vs. OpenStep) with shipyards in non-mainstations. Maybe it strikes back now .-)

I'll try it in a few minutes and see what happens on my machine.

Posted: **Wed Oct 07, 2009 3:06 pm**

CheeseRedux wrote:
I'm running 1.73.4 under XP Pro.

I figured the "XP" bit would give it away, but I'm running Oolite under Windows.

Anyway, I've had no similar happenings with any other station type.
While I haven't been playing Oolite for more than a week and a half or so, this also means that I consistently try to dock with anything (new) I can dock with, and practically always check the purchase screen. (Usually just to marvel at the gazillion of stunning ships out there, and then glare angrily at the price tag.)

But I'll shuffle over to the bug section for completeness sake.

Posted: **Wed Oct 07, 2009 3:26 pm**

CheeseRedux wrote:
CheeseRedux wrote:
I'm running 1.73.4 under XP Pro.
I figured the "XP" bit would give it away, but I'm running Oolite under Windows.
Anyway, I've had no similar happenings with any other station type.

I'm on XP too and no crash, only a error message in Latest.log (v1.73.4 and SVN2635) and no shipyardscreen.

You can change shipdata.plist line 568 to

Code: Select all

hasShipyard = 1;

This change brings the shipyard screen back and should stop the other weird things.

Oh, and thanks for notifying us.-)

Posted: **Wed Oct 07, 2009 3:33 pm**

No worries. With all the great work you guys do, the least I can do is give you more.

I'll give that a whirl and see what happens.

I'm part way through a proper bug report, though.
Belay or complete?
(And if complete, do you want a PM copy?)

Posted: **Wed Oct 07, 2009 3:49 pm**

CheeseRedux wrote:
I figured the "XP" bit would give it away, but I'm running Oolite under Windows. .

As I am not familiar with windows, I missed that XP code part and just mend eXtra Poweful.

The bug happens because of the way that shipyard was defined for this particular station. As Oolite 1.72 had a bug that it could not accept booleans for shipyards in the open step. When it was defined as a condition that resulted in yes, it was allowed. Apparently this is now wrong supported with Oolite 1.73. When you want to fix the problem yourself:

Find in shipdata.plist the lines:

Code: Select all

hasShipyard = ("score_number greaterthan 1") ;

and replace with:

Code: Select all

hasShipyard =  yes;

With this the shipyard won't be there with oolite 1.72.

I'm part way through a proper bug report, though.
Belay or complete?

It is still a bug. oolite should support conditions or not support it, but not crash on it. But it gives now a good clue were to look.

Posted: **Wed Oct 07, 2009 3:54 pm**

Eric Walch wrote:
As I am not familiar with windows, I missed that XP code part and just mend eXtra Poweful.

It normally translates as eXtra Problems (especially when loaded onto your Problem Creator...)

Oolite Bulletins

GRS buoyRepair.oxp