Oolite Bulletins

I noticed reportAIMessages was also mentioned as property on the wiki JS page about ships. (always overlooked it)

But you don't need to set it in the console. Problem with the console it that you first have to look for the ship that you want to examine. It is probably easier to add two temporary scriptMessages to the AI:

sendScriptMessage: traceON and sendScriptMessage: traceOFF
and in the ship's JS script you define:
this.traceON = function(){this.ship.reportAIMessages = true}
this.traceOFF = function(){this.ship.reportAIMessages = false}

This way the AI will log exactly the AI part you are interested in, even when you were not aware the ship was added at all. You don't need the console for this.

Eric Walch wrote:

But you don't need to set it in the console. Problem with the console it that you first have to look for the ship that you want to examine. It is probably easier to add two temporary scriptMessages to the AI:

A good idea. On top of that, I’ve added some facilities to make finding ships in the console easier. Since they’re console macros using existing JS methods, they work in 1.71 and 1.70 too.

Ahruman wrote:

On top of that, I’ve added some facilities to make finding ships in the console easier. Since they’re console macros using existing JS methods, they work in 1.71 and 1.70 too.

Great macros. Biggest problem with above AI dump was getting the drone targeted before I could start the dump. I always missed the start of the AI execution with the old method.

I just want to add that these drones are a pure offensive weapons. No targeting and it only selects a target from one of the orange blips. I just don't get why Thargoid added an anti-thargoid drone. Did he switch sides? Or is it a Trojan horse that can be controlled by thargoids and loads the whole ships database and than sneaky delivers it at the thargoid side once launched?

The biggest difference I noticed with hard missiles is that missiles only chase away one pirate but when a drone attacks his target, all other pirates from a group switch their attention to the drone. (Only when the pirates belong to one group, what often is the case.)

Eric Walch wrote:

I just want to add that these drones are a pure offensive weapons.

If I may correct slightly, they're defensive rather than offensive. They only target ships hostile to the ship that launched them (plus ships which fire on the drone itself), rather than actively seeking targets to fire at (as my previous version did, that's the genius of Eric's new scanning script).

And as to why there's an anti-Thargoid drone, it's a counter-balance to the new wave of Tharglets and Thargons which will be coming along in my next OXP, to be titled "To Catch a Thargoid"