Oolite Bulletins

cim wrote:

Zireael wrote:

Admiral, would adding more rank names in description.plist break the DisplayRatingStringFromKillCount function in core?

It wouldn't break it, but only the first 9 entries will get used whatever they're called, and always at the same kill counts.

I guess I'll have to grab the compile environment this evening (as I was planning to do regardless) and make a patch for the function so that it could use more entries

A patch was made and compiled and tested - d'ya want it, team?

So you've already created a patch for the ratings? Wow, quick much?

Yeah, give it to me baby!!

what's it do, and how's it work?

The patch adds the Skilled (128), Venomous (1024) and Fatal (4000) ranks.
I will upload it to GitHub this evening.

The question was directed more at a_c and cim.

If the patch gets pulled into the main source, all you'd have to do is grab the next nightly. If not, you'd need to set up the compiler and compile from my fork...

Still thinking whether we should have something after ELITE or not.

Zireael wrote:

The patch adds the Skilled (128), Venomous (1024) and Fatal (4000) ranks.

Personally, I would not be interested in a patch that adds two, three or more ranks in the current implementation. Apart from the opinion I maintain that it adds nothing really to the gameplay, I can see someone else coming in a month or two and asking for more ranks or, alternatively, asking for ranks to be removed and this discussion will happen all over again.

Now, if you could provide a patch that reads both rank names and rank values directly from descriptions (possibly by changing the array format of rating to a dictionary format and changing core code accordingly to read everything from that dictionary), then it means that ranks and ratings can be defined as one desires from descriptions without having to recompile the game and then, yes, I would be interested.

Still thinking whether we should have something after ELITE or not.

If you can implement the above proposal, then you could just OXP this.

Now, if you could provide a patch that reads both rank names and rank values directly from descriptions (possibly by changing the array format of rating to a dictionary format and changing core code accordingly to read everything from that dictionary), then it means that ranks and ratings can be defined as one desires from descriptions without having to recompile the game and then, yes, I would be interested.

That was something I was actually thinking of yesterday, so yeah, I'll try it sometime this week.

Here's what I came up with, alas, not making a patch yet because I don't know how to access (display on screen) this dictionary.
Help?

Perhaps the amount of kills and descriptions could all be defined in a .plist file, and the code just take the references from there? I'm at work at the moment so I don't have access to the source from here, but if you look for where the code gets the number of kills from and tell it to read this from a .plist file and then cross reference the kills to a description in the .plist file, this would work?

This may just be a shot in the dark (given my almost non-existent knowledge of coding), but for the idea of owning a fleet, perhaps you could make it such that the purchase cost is zero for switching ships? Obviously not all ships, but ships you own, wherever that would be. After that, the only other possible problem that I can think of would be whether or not the ship you "sold" when you switched ships would still have all the pieces of equipment on it...

If you just want to own multiple ships and be able to switch between them, there is the Extended Shipyards OXP for 1.77 or later. It hasn't been worked on for a while but I don't think it needs that much to finish it off.

So uh where do I plug my dictionary in for it to work?

Zireael wrote:

So uh where do I plug my dictionary in for it to work?

Probably the dictionary is a red herring if you're doing it with two separate arrays in description.plist. Instead, assuming that the two arrays remain in ascending order of kills:
1) Iterate over the ratingKills array until you find an index with more kills than the player currently has.
1b) If you don't find any such index in the array, then the player is at maximum rank.
2) Subtract one from that index, and select the string with that number from the ratingNames array.
3) Get DisplayRatingStringFromKillCount to return that string rather than the one it currently does.

Other possible ranks that come to mind: "Notorious", "Infamous" ... and dare I say "Belgian"?

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... 52#p214752

Extra ranks and legal statuses.

So, the general consensus on the "Buy your own Asteroid/Fleet" is that the core Oolite package will probably change in the near future to allow such OXPs to come into being, extra ranks are 50/50 because some users might prefer the original untampered ranks.

Well, it's nice to see that some of the high profile members weigh in with their opinions.

I was going to ask a couple of other questions;

Firstly, is there going to be any follow ups to the Assassins Guild OXP? I'd like to go a bit Keyser Soze, and wipe the guild out, knowing what they know about my work leaves me a bit uncomfortable...

Is there any way to make donations to Oolite development? I'm not talking loadsa dough, but if we could donate to the development team and maybe some of the creators of the top end OXPs, we might encourage them to continue their fine work!

Regards,

ZM