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Re: Progress
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2014 7:27 pm
by cim
spara wrote:1. Does this mean that only ships added by the populator (in systemWillPopulate or systemWillRepopulate) will get their equipment revised? So if I add an assassin using addShips outside of the populator and the ship I get is a Cobra III, it will not have injectors?
Correct. Of course, you can call the populator sub-methods directly - e.g. worldScripts["oolite-populator"]._addAssassin(position) if you want that sort of behaviour.
(OXP populator methods called in
systemWillPopulate can make whatever modifications they like to ships being added, though doing so to ones without
auto_weapons set isn't polite)
spara wrote:2. Does this mean that equipment is only added to the ships, not removed? So that if a ship is added as a pirate-light-fighter and it has full missile load configured in the shipdata.plist, those missiles will not be removed from it?
Equipment can sometimes be removed - downgrading of lasers is fairly common, and ships returning from battle will often have fewer missiles than normal.
auto_weapons is essentially permission for the populator to
modify the ship's equipment from the preset values.
Re: Progress
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2014 7:36 pm
by spara
Thanks for the answers cim. Looks like auto_weapons should mostly be on in the ambiance parts of oxps like Rescue Stations and Random Hits. Unless the ships in question have some very special weapon/equipment layouts defined, which in these cases is not the case. I'll better review the aforementioned oxps and update them accordingly.
Re: Progress
Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2014 9:33 pm
by cim
A few more bug-fixes during the freeze. Could those of you testing the nightly builds please check that nothing else in these areas has been broken as a result:
- Plasma turrets now are drawn and work properly again.
- Sun glare shouldn't suddenly reappear while entering the docking tunnel of a station facing away from the sun (there are still bugs around large but flat objects like the Torus station, which aren't going to be fixable in time for 1.80)
- Windows uninstaller won't remove OXZs installed through the manager
Re: Progress
Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2014 10:49 pm
by Cody
cim wrote:Sun glare shouldn't suddenly reappear while entering the docking tunnel of a station facing away from the sun...
Tested that very briefly* with the Kiota station used in HIMSN, and it seems to be fixed.
*I'm unable to run the game for any amount of time due to problems with my right eye.
Re: Progress
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2014 5:31 pm
by Smivs
Wow, unexpectedly take a week off to be ill
and come back to new-version fever!
Excellent work as always from the Dev team.
Now, can somebody point to me any documentation on the new sound options, like how the 7.1 surround thing is going to work etc...
Re: Progress
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2014 6:34 pm
by cim
Smivs wrote:Now, can somebody point to me any documentation on the new sound options, like how the 7.1 surround thing is going to work etc...
As far as I can tell, the process should be: plug in 7.1 surround speakers; play Oolite. I've been testing it with headphones, not really having the space to put that many speakers around my computer desk...
If you have a soundset OXP installed, then all the sound files in it will need converting to mono if they're stereo, or the positioning won't work. Unfortunately this hasn't been important before, so I expect a lot of sound sets will have a mix of stereo and mono sounds with no particular consistency - I had to spend an hour or two converting half of the core sounds to mono when this first went in.
Port and starboard lasers are good ones to test if it's working, while the "being hit" noises are the ones with the most positional variation in the game.
Re: Progress
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2014 10:40 pm
by Smivs
This is perhaps not as straightforward as I thought - new thread started
here.
Re: Progress
Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2014 7:21 pm
by mossfoot
Question: How do you guys decided what becomes part of the "Core" game in terms of upgrades (graphics, features, etc) and what is OXP?
Re: Progress
Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2014 8:40 pm
by Cody
mossfoot wrote:Question: How do you guys decided what becomes part of the "Core" game in terms of upgrades (graphics, features, etc) and what is OXP?
<grins> It depends on the cookie index!
Re: Progress
Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 8:51 am
by spud42
i see what you did there.... lol
Re: Progress
Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 10:24 am
by cim
mossfoot wrote:Question: How do you guys decided what becomes part of the "Core" game in terms of upgrades (graphics, features, etc) and what is OXP?
Very carefully ...
So, this is just the sort of things I think about for these decisions - the other devs have their own approaches.
I think there are essentially two semi-contradictory factors here, in that:
- Oolite is as popular as it is and as good as it is in large part because of the community and the OXPs developed by the community. Being a game which people can easily expand and modify is a key aspect of the project.
- Oolite is a game, not a generic engine for making space games. It needs to be a really good game in its own right even without any OXPs installed - especially since I think there's perhaps only one OXP which the community might unanimously recommend installing.
So for any particular feature there are (not in any particular order) these factors I personally consider. The other devs of course have their own views:
- Feel of the game. We're going for a particular style of space trading / combat game here.
- Difficulty of the game.
- Hardware requirements. Currently we're really not requiring very much hardware at all, and with the Pandora port that's likely to stay true for a while. Shaders have to be optional for gameplay, and the entity count for a system should be relatively small.
- OXP compatibility. APIs have to stay consistent between stable releases if at all possible. We try to avoid having core changes significantly change OXP behaviour even with the same API too, though 1.80 is stretching that a bit.
- OXP flexibility: how much customisation should a feature have to let OXPs rewrite the game in that area? Does the core game need to set a default at all, or can it be entirely up to OXPs?
- Canonicity: lots of details about where and when the game is set are deliberately vague and get specified in different ways by OXPs, fiction, and so on.
- Time: trying to have reasonably frequent and mostly bug-free releases limits how many extra features can go into each release. It's often much easier to say "Here, have a couple of extra JS properties and give it a go" than it is to build the feature properly into the core. OXPs can also have a much more rapid release cycle for testing and prototyping.
Maybe if I give an example: there's a comment in the code dating back to March 2008 that says
Code: Select all
// FIXME: give NPCs shields instead.
There are a couple of OXPs - [wiki]NPC-shields_OXP[/wiki] and [wiki]CustomShields[/wiki] - which give NPCs shields anyway. We could do that kind of thing in the core game relatively easily. However...
- Difficulty of the game: just giving all NPCs essentially an extra 256 points of damage is quite significant. Various things would need to be rebalanced.
- Feel of the game: NPCs should use their shields reasonably sensibly, like the player does - turning to take hits on the stronger shield.
- Feel of the game / hardware requirement: We need a good "hit on shield" visual which gives the player an idea of what they're up against, without requiring shaders.
- OXP compatibility: lots of ships and fights - especially in mission OXPs - will have been balanced with particular ship toughness.
- Difficulty of the game: the player takes equipment and cargo damage if hit without shields. That needs to be applied to NPCs too - which can help counterbalance the difficulty increase by making them more likely to run as soon as their shields go. But what does it mean in-game if an NPC has their Scanner Targeting Enhancement damaged? Lots of equipment does absolutely nothing for NPCs at the moment but is important for the player beyond being ablative armour.
- Feel / difficulty of the game: okay, so we give NPCs equipment so it can be damaged in a fight to encourage them to flee (and maybe not come back, since they're now limping back to the station for repairs). How much equipment is appropriate to give a particular NPC in a particular context?
- Hardware requirement: all of this has to be done very efficiently so that older hardware copes with the extra AI calculations.
- Time: that's now looking like a really big project. Can it be fitted into a single release cycle, or will some preparation need to be done ahead of that? Who is going to work on it? Is constructing and testing it going to interfere with developing other planned features for this version?
So for now, at least, that's an OXP feature.
Another more modern example - Oolite 1.80 adds a lot of scope for extra NPC comms. The core has virtually no NPC comms included, though - just a few messages considered crucial to gameplay - but I did separately write a comms pack OXP. I think that OXP is both too small (with only two personalities per role you hear repeats pretty often, which isn't great - you'd probably need to install four or five such packs for ideal behaviour) and too large (the descriptions.plist for it is already almost as large as the descriptions.plist for all of Oolite) to include in the core game, which is why I did it as an OXP.
As I said "very carefully".
Re: Progress
Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 11:47 am
by Switeck
Is it my imagination, or does Core Oolite v1.79 trunk/beta seem to sometimes have "welcoming committees" of quite a few pirates at Anarchy systems?
This seemed really rare in earlier versions of Oolite.
With the AI improvements, this is often death for me unless I'm cheating.
Re: Progress
Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 1:00 pm
by cim
Switeck wrote:Is it my imagination, or does Core Oolite v1.79 trunk/beta seem to sometimes have "welcoming committees" of quite a few pirates at Anarchy systems?
Possibly. Anarchies aren't particularly likely to have pirates hanging around right at the witchpoint, though, unless they've just returned to the system themselves from raiding elsewhere - they tend to hang back a bit along the spacelanes.
Dumping cargo is considerably more reliably in 1.79 than in 1.77 for getting pirates off your back, though, and most pirate ships won't have injectors so unless you made a long jump you should be able to run. (If that doesn't work, are you sure they're pirates?)
Re: Progress
Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 5:15 pm
by Smivs
<Didn't really know where else to put this...>
I've just had a tally and have had 218 OXZs downloaded so far, and I'm sure others out there will beat this total comfortably. And there are as of now 190 OXZs available in total. This whole set-up of the wiki hosting with counters, and the Download Manager is awesome. It really will transform the way this game is played and viewed. Well done cim and the dev team, maik and Winston on the wiki front, and indeed everybody who has been involved.
Re: Progress
Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 5:50 pm
by Duggan
Sorry I am a little late but in the respect of
Plasma turrets now are drawn and work properly again.
They seem OK and effective on my Dark Rainbow game saved game.