Oolite Bulletins

maik wrote:

Also, what option would we have to not make some lines wrap around on lower resolutions? Either abbreviate the descriptions even more, use an even smaller font, or remove columns. I would like to avoid all of these options now.

I'd be interested to know how many people are using resolutions below 1280px wide.

But as I said before, all I would do is add a line at the top telling people that it's optimised for such large display widths.

Thargoid wrote:

I'd be interested to know how many people are using resolutions below 1280px wide.

Google is your friend: "screen resolution survey 2010" yields http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

About 75% use a screen resolution of 1280 and higher.

OXP page is now live. I have renamed OXP_Expansions to OXP_List.

Thargoid, there was much debate about the table. A fixed width table would allow all rows to be on one line but you would have to scroll to see author and date of release. Cdr. McLane said it was better that the lines wrap at a lower resolution and that those columns be visible, so I turned on the wrapping and he edited to the table to make it expand to full width and that is how it is now.

What I do when I'm using a lower resolution is use Firefox's zoom out. This will make the text small, so that every row fits on one line, then I scroll down to where I want and then zoom in again.

maik, thanks very much for sorting out the categories - it must have been tedious going through all those wiki pages, so we're all grateful to you for that.

Thargoid wrote:

Also it may be co-incidence or everyone now going there and looking at it, but the page on the wiki just took well over a minute to load?

Just tried it several times... comes up here fast enough.

Dear fellow Commanders,

mcarans, Smivs, and maik proudly present the new OXP overview page.

Thank you all for the constructive discussions that took us through 3 release candidates to the final version.

The sortable table allows us to easily find updated OXPs, OXPs by category, by (main) author, by name, and by compatibility. You can even sort by two columns by first sorting the secondary and then the primary column.

While going through the existing categories we felt there were too many that had too few OXPs and too many OXPs that didn't quite fit. So we reworked those as well and came up with 12 categories:

• Activities: OXPs that allow the commander to carry out a new activity or task, e.g. racing, gas giant skimming, taking out loans, etc.
• Dockables: OXPs that mainly add new objects that the player can dock with, e.g. carriers, space bars, casinos, fuel stations, new space stations, etc.
• Ambience: All OXPs that have the main goal of changing or adding to the scenery visuals or sound effects. This includes planet skins, adding new planets and/or moons to systems, moving suns further away, dimming nebulae, adding monuments, etc.
• Equipment: Stuff that can be added to your ship but which is not a weapon
• Mechanics: OXPs whose main function is to change the game play in a specific way, e.g. changing market mechanics, adding more pirates
• HUDs: Modifications of your dials, gauges, and other read-outs
• Missions: OXPs that have the main objective of adding missions.
• Retextures: All OXPs that mainly retexture existing objects, either by replacing or adding variations, but without adding objects that did not exist before
• Ships: OXPs that add any number of new ships, except dockable ships
• Systems: OXPs whose primary goal is to change multiple star systems in a number of ways, e.g. changing main station and local police ships, adding new stations, ships, activities, missions
• Weapons: Stuff that you use to blow up the baddies.
• Misc: OXPs that don't fit into the other categories, e.g. debug consoles, internationalisations, config mechanisms, demo OXPs

Note that there is no multi-category: every OXP is categorised once according to its main purpose. Also note that Misc is really meant as an exception. If too many end up here the category scheme has failed. The categories are linked to the automatically generated Wiki pages based on the category assignment in the OXPs' Wiki pages. Since the categories have been reworked, there will be some OXPs that are listed under a different category than before. We already updated the OXP Wiki pages with the suggested categories. If you are unhappy with our choice, please let us know.

The descriptions try to capture the essential information from the old OXP A-Z list, including the information from the ships and stations columns. They always start with the OXP's name to enable sorting. Some explanations have been left out to keep it concise. In order to work towards the goal of keeping the list short, we restricted the description to one line (about 140 characters) and in our humble opinion it works out rather well. As the list is meant as an overview, all OXP details that go beyond the brief teaser description should go into the OXP's Wiki or web page.

Adding the author column required quite a bit of archaeological savvyness for some OXPs. While the vast majority should be attributed correctly, there will still be the odd case where we made a mistake. Note that we list the main authors, all contributing authors can be added in a tooltip next to the main authors' names. In some cases we might have picked the wrong author as main author or missed contributors. Please accept our apology in advance; no offense meant. Let us know and we will fix it or, if you have a Wiki account, go ahead and fix it yourself.

Filling in the date column also required a fair bit of research. We took the information from the OXP documentation, file dates, the BB, and even Oosat.

The information in the compatibility column comes from our own experience and the OXP documentation, but for many OXPs it is still empty. Please help us filling in the blanks.

Some author and date fields have been left empty, we just couldn't dig it up or were not sure enough. Pointers towards filling in the missing bits and pieces are greatly appreciated. Wiki authors filling them in themselves even more so

Cheers,
mcarans, Smivs, maik

El Viejo wrote:

Thargoid wrote:

Also it may be co-incidence or everyone now going there and looking at it, but the page on the wiki just took well over a minute to load?

Just tried it several times... comes up here fast enough.

I think the Wiki needs to pre-compile it once, so the first loaders get to wait until this is done.

Ok I've added something about the resolution. [EDIT: maik did it better so I removed my change]

I find that the wiki is variable regarding loading any page. Sometimes it loads them almost instantly, sometimes it seems to hang for ages. [EDIT maik's explanation above would account for this]

Thargoid wrote:

Like I said if I were you I'd add a line at the top saying it's designed for 1280px wide or greater.

Done.

Thargoid wrote:

But given how these things go, I'm sure someone else will have a brainwave and the whole thing will change again in 6 months time...

And why not...?! Improvements welcome!

mcarans wrote:

Ok I've added something about the resolution.

Heh. Me too. Thargoid, please go ahead, pick your favourite one and delete the other.

maik wrote:

Thargoid wrote:

Like I said if I were you I'd add a line at the top saying it's designed for 1280px wide or greater.

Done.

Thargoid wrote:

But given how these things go, I'm sure someone else will have a brainwave and the whole thing will change again in 6 months time...

And why not...?! Improvements welcome!

As long as it changes for the better, I'm all for it.

maik wrote:

mcarans wrote:

Ok I've added something about the resolution.

Heh. Me too. Thargoid, please go ahead, pick your favourite one and delete the other.

I deleted mine - yours was clearer and better placed

Good work, guys... thanks.

maik wrote:

The information in the compatibility column comes from our own experience and the OXP documentation, but for many OXPs it is still empty. Please help us filling in the blanks.

Fighter Hud certainly seems to work fine with 1.74.2, so I guess you could say it's compatible.

El Viejo wrote:

Good work, guys... thanks.

maik wrote:

The information in the compatibility column comes from our own experience and the OXP documentation, but for many OXPs it is still empty. Please help us filling in the blanks.

Fighter Hud certainly seems to work fine with 1.74.2, so I guess you could say it's compatible.

Thanks. Fighter HUD info is updated now. Those with Wiki edit rights certainly don't have to let us know but may just go ahead and update themselves. It's a Wiki after all.

I've corrected the link in http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Equipment (that you get to from the main Oolite page) to point to the categorised Equipment page rather than the old All_OXP's_by_Category page which I've marked as deprecated.

While I was at it, I added the discussion forum to the main page. Let me know if you have any problems with it. I just think that the forum is important enough to be linked from there.

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Main_Page