Oolite Bulletins

Here! Here!

Nice suggestion N!

There is a lot of discussion about the problem of too many equipment in the info screen. I am one of the first members of the forum that a year ago pinpointed that incoming problem but honestly I had no idea that the problem will reach that critical state in such a short time. Obviously I underestimated the creativity of oxp writers and the possibilities of JS

What Eric did today with Target redicle oxp gave me an idea. It is not necessary to be one big concept that will solve this problem drastically.

What we need is more clever ideas from oxp creators like Eric’s idea. Thargoid created a lovely oxp the welcome mat but at the same time he brought an additional equipment in the oouniverse. Nobody ever considered the idea to tell Thargoid to present it not in the form of equipment but in the form of Subscription? Something like the maintenance overhaul that you have to pay it regularly.

So by testifying me idea I beg all of you in the forum to think with what clever ideas we may reduce the number of equipment in oolite. Even one less equipment can make the deference until someone (obviously from the dev team) can solve it drastically

Thargoid wrote:

I thought this idea (a kind of RS for equipment) had been proposed before, and people had reservations against it?

I think it would be a really good idea. It would even go beyond the RS idea, to perhaps in addition or, imo even better, instead of all the "small" equipment items be able to buy big items that combine a sh*tload of functionalities and are as expensive as all of those together.

Perhaps a "Ship AI Turinggrade 1.3" equipment, that unites the Docking Computer, Welcome Mat, any other information equipment, and so on.

A "Combat Computer", uniting all targetting enhancements, for the scanner, missiles targetting, red/green laser aim etc.

I am planning to unite some additional equipment into the RS successor anyways to furnish fitting equipment onto NPC and player ships alike - SuperCobras with Energy Equipment, Yakuza pirates with Military Scanner Jammers, Juggernauts with Combat Drones, Zenarchy priests with crappy homemade missiles etc.

An "all equipment + equipment meta-items" oxp would be really, really great, both as a player and for my future merging hunger

Really, great potential for creativity in there. Somebody volunteer, really pretty please?



L

Ark wrote:

I beg all of you in the forum to think with what clever ideas we may reduce the number of equipment in oolite. Even one less equipment can make the deference until someone (obviously from the dev team) can solve it drastically

I agree we should reduce the amount of equipment. Before 1.72 it was difficult to script, But with the new "equipmentBought" handler it becomes easy to immediately initialise the equipment and remove it again. It also needs the "condition" list in equipment.plist to set a condition the equipment is not shown for sale again. (condition was already present in 1.65 but never documented until recently)

I just removed the "escorts" in ups-courier as equipment. You can still hire them over the equipment screen but they don't show up in the inventory. It is even better this way. What would happen if somebody damaged the "escort" equipment? Not realistic, this new way it can't be damaged.
Same for Svengali's hyper radio. It is a licence, not equipment. It would be a good candidate to script it this way.

Hi Eric,

the problem if your suggestion would be generalised would, imho, be that if there were more "invisible" equipment items that Hyperradio and Escorts the equipment screen wouldn`t be so flooded, but also I as a player loose oversight over what I actually have.

Thence my suggestion of merged equipment items, with merged price also - you can then look up in a readme what your "Ship`s AI" contains, but that`s not invisible for me as player!

Just my 0.2Cr

L

Ark wrote:

What we need is more clever ideas from oxp creators like Eric’s idea. Thargoid created a lovely oxp the welcome mat but at the same time he brought an additional equipment in the oouniverse. Nobody ever considered the idea to tell Thargoid to present it not in the form of equipment but in the form of Subscription? Something like the maintenance overhaul that you have to pay it regularly.

If you look in the Welcome Mat thread in the expansion pack area, I did a poll as to whether WM should be equipment or not, and the results iirc were about 50/50 split. So I wrote the OXP to account for this.

You don't actually need to buy the equipment for the OXP to work. If you have the equipment installed then you get the information automagically when you arrive at the witchpoint, but if you don't then you have to get it manually. To do this involves locking your ident scanner onto the witchpoint beacon and waiting 30-60s.

I did consider the subscription option too, but as I already had the existing two methods on the table I didn't want to make it any more complex.

Thargoid wrote:

If you look in the Welcome Mat thread in the expansion pack area, I did a poll as to whether WM should be equipment or not, and the results iirc were about 50/50 split. So I wrote the OXP to account for this.

Sorry thargoid I did know that (I was not around for some time now)

I wrote this idea about welcome mat being a subscription instead of equipment as an example (An idea that I still believe is good for your oxp)
As you can see this idea can be applied to other oxps (like hyperradio as Eric suggested) not necessary yours.

My main concern was to give some alternatives for future oxps not dictate oxp writers to change the functionality of excising ones. To make oxp writers understand that the path towards new possibilities and functions to the game by bringing a new piece of equipment is not the only one (and sometimes not always the best )

I believe that there is a misunderstanding

I am not suggesting that all the future equipment have to be in the form of subscription or something else nor I want to forbid the creation of future equipment oxps. What I am trying to tell is that in some cases that we want to bring something new in the game a non equipment form may be better (and only in the cases that this makes sense). Look what Eric did. He did not change his missile analyzer into a subscription or something else (this would be silly), he changed the escorts in his Ups courier in a none – equipment form (something that is sensible and better).

See!!! There are some cases that a not equipment form is even better. The point here is to make oxp writers to think twice before bringing a new piece of equipment for something that can be and would be better to presented in a non equipment form.

I do not know what you have against subscriptions. Do you remember the newspaper subscriptions in FFE? Subscriptions are not a new concept in the universe of elite. Imagine a future oxp that will bring a new piece of equipment for that possibility and the oxp creator telling us

“Do not buy it” or

“If you think that you have too many equipment in the info screen do not install it. You piece of scum!!!! “

And me or someone else telling him

“Oh man there is no need to have a piece of equipment for the possibility to learn the news – a subscription would be better”

I just want to change the trend of new equipment form for anything new in the game for the simple reason that due to the limits of the info screen you can no longer afford it

Thargoid wrote:

For me it would actually make much more sense to have a re-arrangement of the screens, perhaps with F5 showing player information and mission status etc (as is currently on F5-F5) and F5-F5 being completely (full-screen) devoted to ships equipment. As an extension now we have the sell equipment possibility, when docked the currently unused F4 screen could even be used as a mirror for the F3 buy equipment screen to be a sell equipment screen (if the OXP is absorbed into the main code), by default listing all the equipment that the ship possesses.

This is a drastic solution that needs a lot of effort from the dev team. I have personally suggested something similar (not a rearrangement but the expansion of the 2 F5 info screens into 3) a year ago. I agree that this will solve this problem once and for all but I am afraid that this is a post – next stable release suggestion.

Another way could be to give additional 'equipment' icons (sprites, maybe 32x32px) and a key 'only_displayed_on_hud' in equipment.plist to be displayed on the HUD or 'never_displayed' to avoid it at all - I can hear our HUD'lers saying NOOoooo - not again. But why should they be spared remain in this update orgie :-) Would this be possible?

My suggestion would be a re-write of the GUI, in order to allow scroll bars next to the equipment list on the F5-screen. So the equipment list would get a predefined number of lines on the screen, and if the player has more items, he would be able to scroll down and up.

The same could be used for the list of contracts on the F5-F5-screen, which also tends to flow over, especially of there is also 'normal' cargo listed on the upper part of the screen.

Or, if a scroll bar is too much of a re-write, what about 'More -->' and 'Back -->' as on the F3- and F3-F3-screen? This funcionality already exists in the code, so probably it wouldn't be too tricky to adopt it for the F5-screen-family as well.

@CMcL:

I second that, too. Makes sense anyways in addition to any other solutions (Meta-Items, subscriptions) which might come up.