Oolite Bulletins

...eyebrows charging... eyebrows engaged...

Looks VERY interesting cim, and will hopefully make it easier for others to try similar.
I look forward to trying it out

Excellent work cim!!!

Interesting that just few days ago I was thinking exactly about having an addon for unexplored stars. The Universe is large!

After reading posts on generation ships I came up with an idea of connecting your oxp with oolite in a way if player docks with generation ship they end up in the unexplored galaxy and have to find a way back. Just a scenario, just an idea.

Good work!!!

vsfc

First one:I died in hyperspace.

Thanks - will fix in the next release.

I discovered a bug in core Oolite which meant that secondary planets using procedurally generated textures were copying some but not all of the generation parameters from the primary planet rather than using the ones specified in planetinfo. So if you update to today's nightly, you should get more interesting-looking planets to find., and if you find a habitable one it should actually look reasonably nice to live on.

A further quick note while I'm here: the galaxy generation isn't very stable yet as I'm still adding parameters all over the place and this changes the random sequences, so 0.3 will have a different map and this is likely to continue to be true for a while - so don't get too attached to your exploration findings just yet.

0.3 is now out. The first post is updated with download links and more operating instructions.

Changes:
- new equipment: spectroscopic scanner, prospecting laser, extra features for the flight computer
- new system object: trojan/greek asteroid fields
- map change: you'll need to start again from the updated loader

You can now start to narrow down candidates for habitable planets, and find asteroids which contain the minerals needed to power larger expeditions in future...

As always comments about all areas are welcome, but one specific area I'd like some ideas on is what navigation tools you'd find useful for surveying asteroid belts (once you've found them) and being able to return to the more interesting asteroids later.

Still trying to work some of the mechanics out, cim - it will take me a while, I expect.
It is interesting though - interesting enough to tear me away from my courier work.

Am I right to think that this needs a completely separate installation of Oolite to work? Is there any way to set things up so that it can be active or inactive, and when it is running all other OXPs are disabled?

Actually, that might be a useful idea for the game generally - some way of choosing which OXPs are live for each saved game or new start. So you could have a couple of dozen OXPs in use generally, all of them plus a couple of extras when you want to run a particular scenario, and only this one when you're using it.

No, install it (into 1.83), launch Oolite, select Start New Commander, and Song of the Labyrinth will be in the menu - independent of your other Oolite stuff.


@cim: yellow text against a sun is nigh-on impossible to read, and I seem to have a problem getting moving after certain scans.
I had to jump back to base to escape overheating on one occasion.

Excellent - I'm a bit busy over the next few days but I'll give it a try when I have time.

ffutures wrote:

Is there any way to set things up so that it can be active or inactive, and when it is running all other OXPs are disabled?

Your question has been answered, but for those curious about how this works:

Exploration.oxp is set to not load in the basic core scenario. You can install it and it will do absolutely nothing in the normal game: it won't even be read or show up in the Latest.log OXP list.

The Loader.oxp only contains a scenario file. So it is always running and loaded even in a normal game, but all it does is give you a new "start new game" option, so that's perfectly safe.

The scenario file itself has scenario definition attributes in it which tell Oolite that save games based on it can load the Exploration.oxp, and also tell it to suppress loading of a number of core game plists (so the core game ships, trade goods, and world scripts are overridden rather than added to as a conventional OXP would) - essentially it makes Exploration.oxp plus some but not all of the Oolite core files into a new base game.

Cody wrote:

@cim: yellow text against a sun is nigh-on impossible to read, and I seem to have a problem getting moving after certain scans.

I do mean to put a proper cockpit on at some point, once I'm sure all the HUD dials are in the right place.

Sounds like you didn't turn off the gravity scanner fully. If you could have read the console messages, it would probably have been easier to switch to the "power" mode of the scanner to turn it off. Easy mistake to make: I've not yet overheated from it, but I have taken far longer than necessary to get clear of quite a few stars doing exactly this.

If you're in the same situation again and not mass-locked, then hit 'h' twice: so long as you cancel it before the drive is fully charged, you won't take damage, but it will disable the grav scanner. If you are mass-locked by the star as well, just hit 'b' followed by 'n' until you can move - the worst that will happen is you overwrite your mass measurement for the star and need to do it again once you've cooled down.

0.4 is now out - links in first post updated and documentation mostly moved to [wiki]SOTL Exploration[/wiki]

New equipment: sampling laser, sample collection bay
(it's a mining laser - easy enough to use...)

The flight computer now has a third mode to switch your engines between cruise mode (previously all there was) and precision mode (useful for scooping asteroid chunks and maybe for docking). You need to be at a stop to switch modes, and there's a little indicator on the speed gauge for the current mode.

I've put a few sheets of metal in to stop sun glare getting to your instruments; proper cockpit graphics to follow later...

I think the map is the same as in 0.3, so you should be carry on with a 0.3 savegame this time.

Woah, NEED to check this out! I wonder what's the Altmap file do...


I wish HUDs could be made to work with this...

Wow, great work cim.

Look's like the release of ED is having more effect on the Oolite universe than I thought it would! It's great to see though.

Zireael wrote:

I wish HUDs could be made to work with this...

The amount of custom dials I'm using you'd need to build or at least adapt the HUD specifically for it - but there's no technical reason it couldn't be done. (At the moment you'd need to edit your savegame to allow an extra OXP into the scenario, but I'll put a proper tag: in the scenario definition next release)

This sounds absolutely awesome from what I have read in this thread so far, it's such a shame that it is not compatible the current version of Oolite.