Oolite Bulletins

LittleBear wrote:

Yeah. The Nemesis, Mongoose Fighter and Vintage Adder are available to the player. (These ships being non-uber). None of the other OXP ships are as thery're way too powerful or one-offs.

You won't however see NPC versions of these ships unless you are in G7 doing the mission in which they feature, or are at a Galaxy 7 system where they are set to appear. EG you'll see the Dictatorship Navy ships if you are at that planet.

Excellent! <starts hacking a balrog-player ship>
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<fails utterly>
Nuts.

Captain Hesperus

For it to appear generaly in the game is a bug.

Don't they teach you kids anything nowadays? It's not a bug, it's a feature

Initiation briefing: it’s “hangar”, not “hanger”. Unless someone on the station wears really big coats.

Bruised, battered but triumphant. The Dreadnought is a cloud of wreckage drifting through space.

I enjoyed the text adventure, can't remember when I last played one.

LittleBear, in the nature of constructive criticism:

1. Taking away my fuel might not be a good idea for gameplay. Apart from the effect it has on dogfighting abilities it makes large chunks of the game boring while you wait to reach your destination.

2. The Space Station disappeared. Was it meant to? In the previous version (B7) it was there and the big space battle happened around it. In this version the battle happens around the Witch Point and I only found this out when I returned to the system to investigate (3). The Space Compass still shows headings towards it but the position is quite far away from the beacon and the display flips from "in front of you" to "behind you" without the big "S" appearing.

3. My advanced Space Compass showed headings for H, L and B. H and L seem to be the 2 moons but B seems to coincide with L and after travelling hopefully for a long time I didn't arrive.

I am now waiting for the next mission to trigger. Tarquin, here I come!!!

Glad it worked! All feedback is very welcome to improve the OXP for the (really this time!) final V.1.1 release.

1. In playtesting I found the mission was really too easy if you could just injector past all the opposition, whizz to "deploymeant distance" and then whizz out again. Hence the Scorpions with Fuel Disrupters! Could change it so this only happens when your near the target, but think if you'd been able to injector the mission would have been too easy. I was playtesting with a Cobra IIII though, so the lulls between the waves of attacking ships were a bit of a relief for my Commander, just giving time to get the shields recharged to a respecable level. If I've set it up right, you should only have flights of a minute or so NOT being attacked on the approach.

This is the difficulty in trying to make the OXP a challenge even if your in a Uber ship, but still playable in a classic ship like an Asp or Cobra. Does mean the mission lasts about 30 minutes though. For me it was tense as I was constantley being reduced to my last energy bar, just taking out the last ship in the nick of time and then desperatley hoping I would have a "quite patch" of flight whilst my poor battered Cobra got its shields back up. One thing I had to allow for was the appearance of Ramdom Pirates (as the system is an Anarchy). If you were lucky and no pirates appeared then the flight could have boring bits with no attacking ships around. On the other hand, if pirates had appeared in the gaps between the waves, its constant battle all the way!

Not quite sure how to get round this problem of having boring bits if no pirates turn up.

2. Yeah. GalCop threw the Dictatorship out of the Union of Worlds for breaching the treaties mentioned in the News Broadcast. So at this stage there is no GalCop Station present, as they withdrew them. (Mentioned on the F7 Screen description). The Space Battle is now moved to the Dreadnaught's position. (Rebels throwing everything they have to stop it), but suspect they were all dead by the time you got there. I'll add some code to repopulate space with death actions so the battle is still going when the player gets there.

3. H and L are gas giants (mentioned on the F7 description). They are massive but a looooong way away. You can travel there if you like (no need to), but they are about 30 light minuites away (semi-realistic). They only look planet size from your POV in the space lanes as they are big but far away. Takes about 30 mins at J speed to reach them!

Think B is the Black Monks. (They are still there as will HoOpys and other OXP stations). Not sure why you couldn't reach them.

@Ahruman. This is one of those words I always mispell! Had fixed it for the text advanture briefings, but missed it for that one! Will change for V1.1.

I got pirates, easy meat after the Navy ships

Remember that one doesn't get to Ezuzauve with full tanks so I don't know that it will be as easy as you think.

You could always put in some detached patrols apart from the waves centered on the Dreadnaught.

UPDATE (again) : V1.2 is now on the Wiki. (Follow the link below). This version fixes the bug with the Gavition Missile and improves some of the AIs and code generally. Davefaci PMed me the list of texture files as they appear on Unix. I've gone through the OXP and cross checked the case. This version shouldn't therefore crash Unix with a case sensitivity bug!

Download Assassins V1.2 here

This will be the final version of Assassins. I really am having a break from OXPing now!

If you are updating, just delete Assassins.oxp from AddOns. Unzip the download file and move the new version of Assassins.oxp into AddOns.

Save files work on all versions of Assassins, so if you've started playing you don't have to start a new commander to play the updated version.

The readme has a list of updates. Have a read of the players section if you are new to Assassins or updating from version B7.

This version shouldn't therefore crash Unix with a case sensitivity bug

Unix / Linux crash less than once a year. A program can crash, occasionally it will take down the XWindows system. Crashing the kernel is a major undertaking.

Actually what happens in Oolite is that the file with the wrong case is not loaded - which leaves a hole in the ooniverse

Looking forward to v1.1 so I'm off to download it. As far as I can tell Gov Tarquin's fleet is a few jumps from total annihilation and I am a few jumps away from Cr90,00

No offence to Unix. From playtest reports B7 did crash Oolite runing on Unix! (although didn't crash Unix itself).

Cheers for the lists you sent me. It may be the settings I have, but on Windows, the OS claims (as an EG) the texture for hitsplanet1 ends .PNG when in fact it ends .png. Think this is what caused the crash with Lowhites exiting whitchspace playing on Unix with B7 at this system, as I'd told planetinfo to add a planet with the texture hitsplanet1.PNG when actually the texture was called hitsplanet1.png

Anyway, in this version I've checked the case for all the additions of ships and planets, so should be okay on Unix!

OK, I think I know what's happening.

I would guess that you create some files in DOS or a DOS window. Windows then lies about the case of the extension.

I've seen this happen but have never bothered to investigate.

Regarding v1.1, 2 bugs I'm afraid.

1. Case problem with beatletex.PNG, should be lower case.

2. On reaching Esazauve the program tries to load gas_giant, gas_giantA and gas_giantB. However in the plist file there is no gas_giant but there is gas_giantC.

Thanks for the game. Gov Tarkin is no more. One can only hope that after your break you will develop an itch to write another OXP

OOlite crashes my linux,,,, in a major way. Everything locks to the point where the power needs turning off. It only happens when I have GNOME running so I play from a failsafe termninal and there is no problem. This suggests that the problem is more GNOME than OOlite (which frees everything after exit).

linux isn't as bulletproof as it used to be

Grr!!

Oh well, thats a fairly easy fix. I'll put up a new version with those cases fixed.

I've put a version 1.2 on the wikki (and updated the first post in this thread). The link on my signature will take you to the Wikki page where you can download 1.2. This fixes the two bugs mention by Davcefai above.

1) The Gas_Giant bug was proberbly harmless. Orginally whilst developing (not realeased) I had 3 gas giants at this system. But with the Main Planet and the moon as well, I decided that the System looked too crowded and removed the green gas giant. I remembered to delete the entry in planetinfo defining the gas giant but had left in the command to add it. This version just gets rid of that redundant command from planetinfo.

2) In the .dat files that use beatletext (The minesweepers and the Repair Base), i've changed .png to .PNG so this version should now be fine on Unix.

Cool.

Assassins finally released

Good job.

I look forward to playing it, when my loodomania kicks in again.

Hi guys.

I'm really enjoying the oxp Little Bear.

I am getting a slight glitch when I go into Beatle. My Oolite freezes when the baddies appear and state I am not welcome.

I'm struggling. I am running V1.2 on pc.

Any ideas