Oolite Bulletins

Thought about this and wondered if it could be done the same way I used to do it when I wrote text based RPG games for my C64 - I used to define (PEEK, POKE and DATA...) special characters (equivalent of an oolite character from a specialised font) for symbols I wanted in-game that weren't available from even the C64s extended ASCII set.

Complicated shapes were constructed by putting several of these specially designed characters side by side...

Achievement: The Tourist "visit every planet" - worth 10 Gamerpoints.
Collect enought Gamerpoints and one of the devs comes round and washes your car for you on a Sunday.

edit:
Captain Hesperus's legendary tale here:
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... 1&start=14
Achievement: Death by Chocolate "destroy an attacking craft with a cargo pod of food"

About the "no display / interface available" :

Could an oxp not ab/use demoships ?
Can an oxp edit demoships.plist (or any plist at all) on the fly, or change which one of a multitude of provided demoships.plist(s) to be used ?

Displaying the medals you earned so far, or all known medals (like greyed out), but full color models for medals you achieved ?

Plists can generally not be edited on the fly. They are loaded in their entirety at game start.

Personally I dislike demoships.plist. It's quite tiring to go through dozens of ships on the opening screen. On the other had, I usually open my last save-game by double-clicking it (only featured on the Mac) and get to the F5-screen right away, so I generally don't need to care about demoships. If I want to see a ship, I spawn it after launch.

many games uses a system of "award".
"Awards" are not connected to the main scoring of the game, but give an incentive to the player to explore more of the game of change the playing style to be able to gain awards.

For example in Oolite there are only two "scoring": credits and kills (Elite status)

For example "awards" can be given for exploring planets and galaxies.
Or for killing a certain number of pirates, or for accuracy in shooting, etc.

for example:
1-100 bounty credits: Beginner bounty hunter
100-500 bounty credits: Advanced bounty hunter
etc.

Similar for exploring planets and galaxies.

"good Samaritan" award for having answered the distress call (and killed the pirates) of at least 10 ships.

these are just examples.
A full award system may motivate the player to do more in the Oolite world.

I think that any awards made in-game should make sense in the game. Awards made by in-game agencies for doing things those agencies like (e.g. the Federation of Elite Pilots increasing your rank for ship kills, the Random Hits Bounty Hunters' Guild increasing your rank for collecting bounties) make sense. Awards made by the game universe at large seems terribly Facebooky to me, though.

Life doesn't dole out prizes: there needs to be a rationale. Playing the Lave Academy OXP, for example, could give pilots an award for accuracy, but the game-universe shouldn't care. The only award for accuracy that the universe will give you is staying alive a bit longer ...

Disembodied, I agree completely.

Ditto.

And by the way, it would fly straight in the face of Oolite. Elite's/Oolite's USP has always been its Wide Open Sandbox nature. There is no objective and no goal of the game. So how could you get an award for not-reaching-the-non-existing-objective?

Disembodied wrote:

I think that any awards made in-game should make sense in the game. Awards made by in-game agencies for doing things those agencies like (e.g. the Federation of Elite Pilots increasing your rank for ship kills, the Random Hits Bounty Hunters' Guild increasing your rank for collecting bounties) make sense. Awards made by the game universe at large seems terribly Facebooky to me, though.

I agree on this points.
We need a few more agencies then
The point of "awards" is to motivate the player to do more in the game, and "awards" should have a side effect on your reputation giving you access to more advanced missions or larger reward for specific missions.

For example there are several missions asking you to bring X quantity of something from A to B in a determinate time.
A player with high "explorer" rank will get more credits for long range transports or access to more missions of the kind.
It's in the logic of the game (customers will trust more an experience pilot) and it's a way to give more depth to the game itself.

I disagree, but not strongly. The oolite universe is simple, kills are kills regardless of size, legal status or circumsatances, and the main metric is oolite rank, directly derrived from kills.
I think there is a case for the police and or the military handing out awards or ranks, and perhaps religious groups might make you a bishop or something, but in general I dont think it makes a whole heap of sense to have a Guild of the Loop, who give you a medal for going all the way from G1 to G8 and back, and I dont see a need for exlporers to be "rewarded" for exploring. The act is reward in itself, and people are alreadyt incentivised and rewarded for travel through the delivery and pasenger contract system.

This seems to me to be a way of cluttering the screen and manifest pages with loads of daft tokens which dont correlate with my view of the ooniverse. Id much rather not have a medal for killing 100 thargoinds, but perhaps have a hidden counter which once you kill that many they start targetting you, and you have more witchspace mis-jumps -- things like that.

wolfigor wrote:

I agree on this points.
We need a few more agencies then
The point of "awards" is to motivate the player to do more in the game, and "awards" should have a side effect on your reputation giving you access to more advanced missions or larger reward for specific missions.

For example there are several missions asking you to bring X quantity of something from A to B in a determinate time.
A player with high "explorer" rank will get more credits for long range transports or access to more missions of the kind.
It's in the logic of the game (customers will trust more an experience pilot) and it's a way to give more depth to the game itself.

Commander McLane created the Display Reputation OXP which shows your in-game reputation scores, which are used to determine the value of cargo and passenger contracts offered on the F8-F8 screen. It should* be possible to turn these numerical scores into ranks (or to add ranks to the scores), e.g.:

0: Nobody
1: Chancer
2: Cowboy
3: Fly-by-night
4: Steady
5: Reliable
6: Trustworthy
7: Honourable

or something similar.

Some rankings might be hard to achieve, e.g. the Explorer idea. The 8 galaxies are already explored and it's hard to see who might give you any reward for visiting lots of systems. Plus there's the issue of where to display these rankings. Which is not to say it couldn't be done, but you'd need to come up with a convincing justification!

*what I imagine is easy to program isn't always easy, or even sensibly possible, to program ... this would need to be looked in to!

Cmdr James wrote:

Id much rather not have a medal for killing 100 thargoinds, but perhaps have a hidden counter which once you kill that many they start targetting you, and you have more witchspace mis-jumps -- things like that.

Now that would be an award... being put on the Thargoid's 'most wanted' list. I like that idea.

Disembodied wrote:

Some rankings might be hard to achieve, e.g. the Explorer idea. The 8 galaxies are already explored and it's hard to see who might give you any reward for visiting lots of systems. Plus there's the issue of where to display these rankings. Which is not to say it couldn't be done, but you'd need to come up with a convincing justification!

My suggestion is not, strictly, about the "explorer award" but about "awards" or "rankings" in general to add flavor to the game.
The "explorer" was just a very simple example.

The way I see is that OXPs may add several types of ranking and awards for various categories of achievements.
You can imagine an OXP adding an agency that award you ranks for each ship you kill in a communist system or an other one that award you ranks for helping to liberate oppressed people by killing ships in dictatorial systems.
No extra money or direct reward given... just the special rank (OXPs can add specific missions with reward but that's beside the point).

As you can see the ideas are more for adding flavor that anything else.

Where to display the (extra) achievements?
Press F5 three times and you get a page for it.

Disembodied wrote:

*what I imagine is easy to program isn't always easy, or even sensibly possible, to program ... this would need to be looked in to!

I perfectly understand.
I didn't check out the code or studied the OXP scripting (yet), so I'm not yet in a position to evaluate the complexity of such changes or additions to the game.
However, an award/ranking system seems to me a low hanging fruit to add extra depth to the game without having to change the basic code too much (possibly all done with OXP)

wolfigor wrote:

Where to display the (extra) achievements?
Press F5 three times and you get a page for it.

You will need to find a different way. The proposed way cannot be implemented by OXP and requires code changes that are not expected to take place in the (near) future.