Oolite Bulletins

Norby wrote:

"Warning: this addon is reported that causing problems from invisible lasers to crash to desktop after a few minutes, use at your own risk."

Warning: this OXP has been linked to high blood sugar, dizziness, political unrest in Ruritania, dry mouth, and slight poltergeist phenomenon.

I was thinking a color flag, much how the manager shows dependencies in one color, OXPs with new versions in another, OXPs that don't work with your version of Oolite in a third, and so on. Flag any potentially game-breaking OXPs with a new color, and add any relevant bulletin board or wiki links in for more information.

The wiki OXP Table has a compatibility column, but this is now totally out of date. Is it worth trying to update this?
I'm not offering, by the way, just asking.

Smivs wrote:

Vincentz wrote:

...it would be easier for newcomers to set up a decent game.

I think newcomers get a decent game anyway
It's how they want to enhance/corrupt/break it we're discussing here.

It IS a decent game. It becomes a GREAT game with the work from modders.

Imho its how to prevent the newcomers corrupting/breaking it we should discuss

The Engine Trails by zireael caused me problems (took a while to figure out which addon did it, as a simple test didn't reveal its faults). It caused other people problems too (I believe there have already been a couple posts/threads on this, since I first signed up here around a month ago), and that is just from the active forum members.
Then there are all the "casual" gamers, who is just trying Oolite out. The ones we never hear about. The silent ones (ok, I'm overdramatizing here ).

I guess a "Addon is known to cause problems" is better than nothing though.

Layne wrote:

...Flag any potentially game-breaking OXPs...

Good luck with this one. Defining "game-breaking" will be mission impossible.

There is a real issue here. Earlier anyone with a wiki account could add a tag to the corresponding wiki page saying that the oxp in question is broken. That has now somewhat changed due to the introduction of the expansion manager. The rights with the manager should be discussed thoroughly and some consensus should be found on what to do with OXPs that have their manager maintainer missing? Should we have some agreement about adopting the manager maintainer rights after a proper length of time?

Smivs wrote:

The wiki OXP Table has a compatibility column, but this is now totally out of date. Is it worth trying to update this?

I would say that the manager is the primary source and it already has a compatibility field. I see Wiki as a secondary source for more information about the OXPs in the manager and for old and probably deprecated OXPs that should be used with caution. I would remove the compatibility column altogether. Many OXPs in the wiki say something about the compatibility in their pages.

Layne wrote:

I was thinking a color flag, much how the manager shows dependencies

Good in longer term, in addition to the warning which is easy to do and backward compatible with Oolite 1.80.

Norby wrote:

Layne wrote:

I was thinking a color flag, much how the manager shows dependencies

Good in longer term, in addition to the warning which is easy to do and backward compatible with Oolite 1.80.

I'm a little provocative here, but who (other than the uploader) will decide when an OXP is to be tagged? You know how this forum is, getting a consensus out of anything is a pain.

Rather than tagging, I would try to find someone to take care of the broken and abandoned OXPs in the manager. That would require some commonly agreed mechanism of transferring the maintainer rights.

spara wrote:

I'm a little provocative here...

You are, in-deed. But let's not let personal attractions get in the way of business.

spara wrote:

Rather than tagging, I would try to find someone to take care of the broken and abandoned OXPs in the manager. That would require some commonly agreed mechanism of transferring the maintainer rights.

Which opens up a new can of fresh and wriggling worms for all to enjoy. If the original designer of the OXP hasn't attached a notice or Creative Commons license to it, who gets to decide the rights to transfer ownership?

Layne wrote:

spara wrote:

I'm a little provocative here...

You are, in-deed. But let's not let personal attractions get in the way of business.

spara wrote:

Rather than tagging, I would try to find someone to take care of the broken and abandoned OXPs in the manager. That would require some commonly agreed mechanism of transferring the maintainer rights.

Which opens up a new can of fresh and wriggling worms for all to enjoy. If the original designer of the OXP hasn't attached a notice or Creative Commons license to it, who gets to decide the rights to transfer ownership?

That's luckily a minor issue nowadays as there is the license field in the manager interface. It's optional, but after years of debate about licenses, I hope it's been thoroughly used. IMHO it should be a required field for all OXPs in the manager.

Layne wrote:

Which opens up a new can of fresh and wriggling worms for all to enjoy. If the original designer of the OXP hasn't attached a notice or Creative Commons license to it, who gets to decide the rights to transfer ownership?

That's the easy case scenario. If there is no license, then the OXP cannot be modified by anyone and probably should not even be downloaded.

I strongly recommend that any and all OXP authors have a good read of this thread by Jens from a few years ago: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7047. Remember: Licensing is not optional.

Smivs wrote:

Vincentz wrote:

One thing that would REALLY have helped a lot is if the web-address shown in manager was a hyperlink

I think this is a feature of the up-coming v1.82

No, sorry. Starting a web browser sensibly across three different OS families is not a straightforward thing to do - and could also potentially be quite messy if Oolite is running full screen. It's a good idea, but no plans to implement it at the moment.

What is in 1.82 is an extended "description" field - you can put a few more paragraphs in there, and they can be viewed in the manager by pressing "i".

spara wrote:

That would require some commonly agreed mechanism of transferring the maintainer rights.

Obviously I'll transfer rights on request of the current maintainer, though - see below - in that case this is entirely a courtesy to avoid a little bit of retyping: two maintainers can "transfer" an OXZ by their own agreement without any intervention.

If the license permits derivative works, you could just upload your own version to the manager. Oolite should cope just fine with two OXZs with the same identifier and different versions - the case I was expecting for this feature is where you want an OXZ to make use of a new core feature, so having one entry with maximum version 1.80, and another with minimum version 1.81, so you can have it automatically marked for upgrade once the user upgrades Oolite without having to remove the 1.80-compatible version from the 1.80 manager.

Regarding making the licensing field compulsory: the admin page notes next to the license field that putting it in the manager requires allowing people to download it and make copies for personal use. Requiring any more than that would be impractical - and probably not a good idea anyway.

cim wrote:

Smivs wrote:

Vincentz wrote:

One thing that would REALLY have helped a lot is if the web-address shown in manager was a hyperlink

I think this is a feature of the up-coming v1.82

No, sorry. Starting a web browser sensibly across three different OS families is not a straightforward thing to do - and could also potentially be quite messy if Oolite is running full screen. It's a good idea, but no plans to implement it at the moment.

What is in 1.82 is an extended "description" field - you can put a few more paragraphs in there, and they can be viewed in the manager by pressing "i".

Ah, I mis-understood. Yes, I can see that wouldn't be easy, or necessarily a good idea in practical terms, but as a concept it is certainly attractive.

cim wrote:

Oolite should cope just fine with two OXZs with the same identifier and different versions

So if the author is not responding l then I can make a new entry within my login in the oxz admin page and upload a new version with the warning in the description field. This is a good solution imho in the case of a confirmed problem in an abandoned oxz.

Vincentz wrote:

Another "fun" thing could be a voting system. Either by stars (1-5) or simply "upvote/downvote". That way its easier to spot the "good" addons as a newbee.

Done right, this could work well.

I used to spend a fair amount of time geocaching. The community is pretty scathing of the company, Groundspeak, behind the main geocaching site, but one thing nearly everyone agrees on is that the system of "favourites" introduced a few years back has been a good thing. I'll describe the system they use; perhaps someone here can think of an analogy that would suit Oolite.

• The ability to award a favourite point to a cache is restricted to paying members. You have a number of favourite points to dole out equal to the total number of caches you have found divided by ten, rounded down. (If you're a committed player, you can vote, but you can't vote excessively.)
• You can award a favourite point to a cache, or not award anything. There's no upvote/downvote thing, it's just a recommendation system. A favourite says, yeah, I'd recommend this cache to others.
• The number of favourites is shown on the cache listing. You can find out who awarded those points (made those recommendations) by clicking a button. There's been speculative talk of an online shopping type "others who liked this also liked that" system, but it's never been implemented and no-one really believes it would add much.
• You can also see at a glance the percentage, among "voters" who visited the cache, of those who awarded a favourite point. The two scores, if you will, absolute and percentage, suit different people: high absolute number => ought to visit so you're not left out in geocaching conversation down the pub; high percentage => potentially of fabulous niche value - maybe your bag, maybe not.

Making the system a purely positive one, with no chance to viciously award 1 out of 5 stars to all caches of victim X, seems to have done away with much of the angst associated with other scoring systems. Players seem generally happy to be influenced in their choice of "find" by the favourites count, and the best cache hiders appear to have raised their game as well. It's a win.

another_commander wrote:

Layne wrote:

Which opens up a new can of fresh and wriggling worms for all to enjoy. If the original designer of the OXP hasn't attached a notice or Creative Commons license to it, who gets to decide the rights to transfer ownership?

That's the easy case scenario. If there is no license, then the OXP cannot be modified by anyone and probably should not even be downloaded.

If an OXZ has no license, it probably shouldn't be available through the auto-downloader in game...if that isn't already the case.

As for OXZs with issues, maybe flag them in YELLOW if they still sort-of run and RED if they have crashes. The OXZ authors may not know to do this, so it becomes the community's job by default.

Norby wrote:

cim wrote:

Oolite should cope just fine with two OXZs with the same identifier and different versions

So if the author is not responding l then I can make a new entry within my login in the oxz admin page and upload a new version with the warning in the description field. This is a good solution imho in the case of a confirmed problem in an abandoned oxz.

This sounds like an excellent solution to the broken oxps in the manager problem.