Oolite Bulletins

The Second OXP, expands and adds assasins, pirate saboutuers, and execptionel skilled crew (which reflected by their price).. that mainly do damage control... some could even be so adapt as to be able to draw energy from fuel scoops and other equipment in order to draw auxiliry power to the shields and energy banks.

This is excellent stuff if possbile.

One issue might be, if crewmembers are treated as equipment, how will it work if they get "damaged"? Especially if some other crewmember has the ability to repair equipment... it might get a bit peculiar having your Quartermaster wounded in a firefight, only to be restored to health by your Engineer!

I think we'd need a way to make "damaged" crew roll a dice and see if they're "wounded but will recover", or "dead" – and if the latter, be removed permanently.

Well IF a crewmember is a droid (which you can also hire from several brands, heck there is an add in the your add oxp: ,,a droid is for life'' I think) Then it is a piece of equipment.

For the flesh crew members I don't know a.t.m. Anyone has a good sollution for that? Your dice idea seems to be implementable.

pagroove wrote:

Well IF a crewmember is a droid (which you can also hire from several brands, heck there is an add in the your add oxp: ,,a droid is for life'' I think) Then it is a piece of equipment.

For the flesh crew members I don't know a.t.m. Anyone has a good sollution for that? Your dice idea seems to be implementable.

Good point re. the droids... we'd have to decide thoug if droids should be very high-tech, very expensive, with the biologicals being bottom-end, or if we want a more Star Wars-esque situation where droids are OK for the gruntwork but if you want something extra then you need to go biological. Personally I'd prefer the latter version (there are droids in the loading bay, doing grunt-work when you bring in a special cargo).

A droid crew could be relatively cheap – you buy them, you don't have to pay them, like Thargoid's nanobots – but the downside would be they'd never get any special bonuses or do anything interesting. If they get damaged though you can repair them. A biological crew would have to be hired on and paid a wage, and can have a much higher chance of fixing broken stuff and giving you bonuses (and odd events). But if they get "damaged" there's a good chance they could die. You could have a really good crewmate who's been with you for ages, who might just get killed. It would certainly add a layer of player involvement to the game.

A droid crew could be relatively cheap – you buy them, you don't have to pay them, like Thargoid's nanobots – but the downside would be they'd never get any special bonuses or do anything interesting. If they get damaged though you can repair them. A biological crew would have to be hired on and paid a wage, and can have a much higher chance of fixing broken stuff and giving you bonuses (and odd events). But if they get "damaged" there's a good chance they could die. You could have a really good crewmate who's been with you for ages, who might just get killed. It would certainly add a layer of player involvement to the game.

I vote for basic droids. Cheap but then the commander who flies a big ship doesn't have to bother. Basic droids don't have any advantages over Thargoids repair bots but they are needed as crew to let a big ship take of and therefore making it more difficult to own a big ship.

However the flesh crew members are the interesting ones. Here a lot of game depth is going to be added.

Till now we have basically the following ideas:

- hire different crews from different races
- skill of crew can depend on tech level
- loyalty depends on system where the crew is bought
- crew members can give certain bonuses like drawing energy from other ship systems to the critical ones
- crew members can have disadvantages at the least if they fix or service on board systems in the wrong way
- crew members can get annoying or dangerous or even hijack your ship
- Idea of buy crew as equipment
- Idea of buying a droid-crew to meet minimum take off requirements

Anymore ideas??

Disembodied wrote:

One issue might be, if crewmembers are treated as equipment, how will it work if they get "damaged"? Especially if some other crewmember has the ability to repair equipment... it might get a bit peculiar having your Quartermaster wounded in a firefight, only to be restored to health by your Engineer!

I think we'd need a way to make "damaged" crew roll a dice and see if they're "wounded but will recover", or "dead" – and if the latter, be removed permanently.

No, it won't be an issue, because my suggestion was to use the equipment-screen only as an entry-point to the crew-selection. I mentioned that I don't want the player to carry something that is handled as a piece of equipment from the station:

Commander McLane wrote:

In the end the equipment itself is of course removed, because we don't want to flood our F5-screen, do we?

So the entire crew-management would have to be handled via mission_variables. The internal equipment handling is not affected. No 'Stepan (Chef) (damaged)' on the F5-screen. If you want to print something about the crew's status you will have to do it on the mission-description part of the F5-F5-screen, I'm afraid.

And as there are a number of ideas around now on what the crew could do, please let me issue a warning/reminder: please remember that we have no satisfactory way to handle interaction (like between you and your crew) during flight time. There are already a couple of OXPs that push the number and length of screen messages you can possibly digest during flight very much to--and arguably in some cases beyond--the limit. And bringing up a mission-screen during flight--while technically possible--is simply not an option.

please let me issue a warning/reminder: please remember that we have no satisfactory way to handle interaction (like between you and your crew) during flight time. There are already a couple of OXPs that push the number and length of screen messages you can possibly digest during flight very much to--and arguably in some cases beyond--the limit. And bringing up a mission-screen during flight--while technically possible--is simply not an option.

This is something to be considered in general. Of course the stream of messages increases when the player installs more and more OXP's. Therefore it is better to keep messages at a minimum. But I opt for a com-log for Oolite in general. A sort of electronic message log. Most other spacegames like X3 and Freelancer have them. For example pressing shift-L then brings up a message screen to review so you can first fight and then look.

Also a lot of crew interaction is done when docked. But you're right that messages must be minimal and informative.

Guess that a sort of calculation function is needed to automatically determine how many crew members are needed for a certain amount of mass? Otherwise each ship must be programmed manually.

pagroove wrote:

Guess that a sort of calculation function is needed to automatically determine how many crew members are needed for a certain amount of mass? Otherwise each ship must be programmed manually.

What about using the available cargo space for an estimate of a ship`s "bigness"?

That the sizes of ship models are not fitting with their descriptions and assumed masses is something I have often noticed. But the cargo space (perhaps it`s created by subspace compression techniques or any other technobabble mumbojumbo) would be an indicator of how much space is in there anyways.

Then the 35 tons of a fully kitted out Cobra MkIII could be an indicator for the max amount of ship that can still be run by one person alone. 2 crewmen could be nescessary for a 70t-ship, 20 for a 700t ship, etc.



L

hm...that would sometimes contradict "cannonical" info. For example, Asp is two-man ship, but has cargo space 0-5 depending on version (considering OXPs). When speaking about OXPs anyway...for example Lamda class shuttle (from Star Wars) has 90t cargo, but can be piloted by one person.

There has to be option to set crew manually...but yea, some alghoritm is needed too, because all OXPs that include player ships would be incompatible till rewritten.

Sarin wrote:

hm...that would sometimes contradict "cannonical" info. For example, Asp is two-man ship, but has cargo space 0-5 depending on version (considering OXPs). When speaking about OXPs anyway...for example Lamda class shuttle (from Star Wars) has 90t cargo, but can be piloted by one person ... some alghoritm is needed too, because all OXPs that include player ships would be incompatible till rewritten.

Well, the "canonical" stuff is massively self-contradictory anyways - as no one had thought about issues like this one when they produced the numbers

So any present solution must use some sort of algorithm, perhaps an individually re-definable one that gives the Asp two crewmen and the Lamda-Shuttle just one, but still something that uses the given stats and produces a number of crewmen.

Basically, I think the crewmen thing is a good idea, also liked its implementation in the later two Elites.

Think it's would have to be a mass function, as that would work for all ships (including the ones yet to be built) and could be done with a couple of lines in a JS. Play with the numbers to give senisble crew numbers for the inbuilt ships and it'll then work for all ships. Something like:-

I think the formula LB implemented leads to realistic values. To implement this as a simple oxp would be: Ship X needs X crew. And thats that. Even having such an OXP would add realism. And if created form there one can start implementing further features such as having different sorts of crewmembers.

Sounds like a future must have oxp for me

now that player turrets are working, you could even have to have licensed or certified gunners onboard... maybe one could even tie the whether the turrets function or not to having gunners on board or not.

nijineko wrote:

now that player turrets are working, you could even have to have licensed or certified gunners onboard... maybe one could even tie the whether the turrets function or not to having gunners on board or not.

Well it would be kind a stupid, because the turrets work pr default, without a gunner OXP... and i´m pretty certain that we cannot changé accuracy of the turret... Which would be the only reason you would ever use a human gunner,

instead of the M1 turret computer. (made that up of course)

Cheers Frame...