Oolite Bulletins

Dr.-SPACE-Nil wrote:

Good to hear that the change is noticable. I made this one after crossing a galaxy in less than half an hour using skimming, so I at least would have to do more than point at the sun and press 'j' to avoid traffic.

As you might have noticed, this OXP is only about one kilobyte i size and it only consists of a very simple script and no other files. It doesn't do anything besides calling for traders, pirates and police from the pools of those types of ships and placing them on that formerly unused (by NPCs) route. How they behave once in place is guided by whatever AI the ship came with in the basic game or the OXP that supplied the game engine with it, when a ship of that type was called for (ie. trader, pirate or police).

What I'm trying to say is that odd behaviour from ships encountered on the route from the witchpoint buoy to the sun, should be a type of behaviour, that you would have exactly the same chance of experiencing on the route to the planet.

I am still a bit puzzled though, since this is the second report of odd behaviour from ships encountered on the way to the sun.

Yep, and i've sen the same..

@Doc - well it certainly makes it interesting - you can't assume anything - perhaps there needs to be a study into the effects of long term radiation exposure caused by high energy bosons coming from the sun's corona interacting with the phased quantum field displacement generated by the ship's shielding which is possibly creating as yet discovered exotic sub-atomic particles in the TeV energy band?

or in Layman's terms - staring at the sun for long periods of time may or may not drive you a bit mad....

On a completely separate thought(s) - when I quote I get the word "Quote" when other's quote they get the name of the person they're quoting from...

Also, how do you paste a link from another thread? I was going to ask you all to look at the "Exhaust" thread elsewhere on the BB to see if anybody had any ideas but I can't work out how to find the thread's details to post as a link...

It's a bit weird isn't it? I guess the answer is somewhere in the game code for those who can read it.

Is the wp-sun route the hip place to take your first steps as a pirate as a NPC?

@DaddyHoggy: This link should cover the BB-codes available on this forum. The link for a thread is what is in the URL field at the top of your browser, when reading that thread (not quite sure that this is what you asked for here )

Dr.-SPACE-Nil wrote:

The link for a thread is what is in the URL field at the top of your browser, when reading that thread (not quite sure that this is what you asked for here )

Yes it was - and as you can see I can now use the quote properly too!

And I think being so far from home once traders out near the sun are chancing their arm witha bit of one-off piracy!

(here)

chaos syndrome wrote:

You probably all figured this one out long ago, but sunskimmers.oxp generates pirates/traders/etc. in interstellar space.

This can be cured by adding "planet_number greaterthan -1" to each conditions() block in the script.plist provided in the addon.

v 0.11

Corrected error with ships spawned in interstellar space. Thanks to Chaos Syndrome for pointing out this error.

Download v.0.11 of Sunskimmers.oxp HERE

Sunskimmers has a problem. Not created by the author (Dr Nil), but by Oolite.

As mentioned here before, Oolite handles the AI not correctly on placing ships by OXP's. some ships have role "trader" and "sunskim-trader". The AI defined by default for the ships is trader. If the OXP introduces a sunskim-trader, the AI stays trader.

This is important as traders always travel towards the planet. So the sunskimtraders added by the OXP "Sunskimmers" don't go to the sun, but towards the planet, out of the space-lane Witchpoint-Sun. The player probably won't see these traders unless he travels very fast.

The OXP also adds pirates in this space-lane Witchpoint-Sun. Those ships stay in place until they see a trader. So the user only sees pirates that are clean because of a default bounty of zero for pirates.

So with Oolite version 1.65 or older the OXP does not behave as intended by the author.

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I even think that sunskimming has a problem and is removed from (or never introduced in) Oolite 1.65. I have created a scanner that counts the number of sunskimmers in the system. Without a special OXP that adds them, I have never seen a count greater than zero in any system. Despite the two AI's inside Oolite that are there for sunskimming.

I fixed that by splitting up the various roles in the shipdata.plist file, so I ended up with ships like "sunskim-python" which had role sunskim-trader and AI route2sunskimAI.plist (I think that's what the file is called, I don't currently have an installed copy of Oolite). Similarly for police there is a route2patrolAI, so I used a custom role for police on the sunskim route (can't remember precisely what I did and in any case lost the file in a reinstallation...)

Anyone up to the task of writing an updated AI that makes the cops placed by this OXP travel from the sun towards the WP-buoy instead of towards the planet?

(Thanks to Commander McLane for bringing this up)

I just suggested a general solution which would cover this problem as well.

Feedback welcome (over there, of course).