Oolite Bulletins

mossfoot wrote:

pagroove wrote:

Cody wrote:

I like the way they appear as and when you move about the charts - cool stuff by Svengali.

Yeah so it should be cool if this new map also gets that sort of features.

Also in addition wouldn't it be nice if you cross the border of a region or if you are on a trade route that there would be a message. "Welcome to the Old Worlds". Only on the border planets of a region of course. Or "Commander you are now on Space Lane 1".

I like that idea. Should be added to the relevant OXP

Speaking of which.. BGS now needs a new maintainer. See this thread for details.

One largish change to keep an eye out for side effects with: graphics rendering is now split into two regions "near" and "far". The theoretical effect of this is that on older graphics cards (and quite possibly many more recent ones) you should no longer be able to see "through" large entities like rock hermits to the docking tunnels inside. (The Kiota stations from the Wildships OXP are also good to test this with) There are bits of this which can go wrong and leave you being able to see through objects entirely, though.

A bunch of small changes.

• You can now define descriptions.plist entries like
  "long-range-chart-title-0-7" = "The Old Worlds";
• Damaged equipment is now pushed to the top of the F5 list.
• As you enter a planet's atmosphere, the space dust will fade out (note, if you try this: as a consequence of an earlier change it's a lot easier to burn up in the atmosphere if you fly in too fast)
• Alloys from ship explosions should be back
• OXZ manager dependency requirements should be updated properly after every install/remove
• Subentities launching escape pods now works properly (note that subentities are always uncrewed they'll need to have at least two escape pods defined - one to not launch the crew, and at least one to launch the passengers)
• Text to speech around the 'Cr' abbreviation for credits should now not pick up words like "Crosshair" or "Craft" as well
• Various bugs with masslocks from the earlier change to move status updates out of the HUD rendering should now be fixed.

The OXZ manager is now set up to automatically download missing dependencies - have a go in tomorrow's nightly build.

It should work with any dependency situation, though if you do something like "A depends on B and C; B conflicts with C" or other OXPs which are actually impossible to install that might confuse it. I'll be doing some tests on that sort of problem later.

It certainly works with "A depends on B; B depends on C and D" - you install A, it installs B for you, and then notices that won't work yet either and installs C and D as well. (I think the HyperRadio music packs are the only example of that sort of chain at the moment, but I might have missed one)

The colours and messages for OXZs with dependency issues have been changed slightly - "requires something else" is still orange; "conflicts with something already installed" is now brown.

cim wrote:

The OXZ manager is now set up to automatically download missing dependencies - have a go in tomorrow's nightly build.

Download verbosely or sneakily? I don't want to click on Ambient Tweak (< 1Kb) and have Oolite start downloading Mega Shipset (> 200Mb) without lots of Windows style "Are you sure?" moments.

Verbosely in that it will tell you that it's downloading it and why, and verbosely in that "Ambient Tweak" will be coloured orange and have a label below it saying "if you install this, Oolite will also install some other stuff". Sneakily in that it won't ask for confirmation before moving on to the dependencies (though the cancel button will still work)

At the moment, anyway: confirmation before downloading dependencies is on my list, because once that's in Oolite can also ask about the optional_oxps list in a sensible fashion.

Wildeblood wrote:

cim wrote:

The OXZ manager is now set up to automatically download missing dependencies - have a go in tomorrow's nightly build.

Download verbosely or sneakily? I don't want to click on Ambient Tweak (< 1Kb) and have Oolite start downloading Mega Shipset (> 200Mb) without lots of Windows style "Are you sure?" moments.

That's an awesome and funny way to describe problems with an auto-downloader.

Random Hits is the only OXP I know at the moment that sort-of does something like that, but at least it's an obvious connection.

We also have the issue of OXP/OXZ conflicts, both partial (via side-effects) and full conflicts. A Realistic Systems OXZ coupled with Distant Suns OXZ could move the star twice over to an extremely distant location from the planet as an example. Avoiding all conflicts is impossible once many OXZs/OXPs are added.

My pet peeve is how "crowded" interstellar space is made by OXPs. If another OXZ wants to add a secret base to an interstellar space location, it will find lots of surprising visitors.
Even the core game changed from v1.76 to v1.80 concerning interstellar space -- seems it randomly adds new arrivals every 15 seconds to a minute. I'm guessing this is the result of discussion of people wanting to fight more Thargoids and not being stranded in interstellar space so easily?

With some difficulty, unwanted ships can be removed or thanks to populator avoid some being added...but the hassles to make OXZs "play nice" with all other OXZs/OXPs is not worth the trouble.

Switeck wrote:

... concerning interstellar space -- seems it randomly adds new arrivals every 15 seconds to a minute. I'm guessing this is the result of discussion of people wanting to fight more Thargoids...

<grins> No, not exactly!

another_commander wrote:

Regarding enabling the non-linear scanner: We now have two new Javascript player ship properties, which are boolean and read/write: player.ship.scannerNonLinear and player.ship.scannerUltraZoom. The first sets or unsets the linearity of the scanner, while the other chooses between standard 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1 and enhanced 1:1, 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, 16:1 zoom sets. Use in the standard way in scripts:

Code: Select all

player.ship.scannerNonLinear = true/false;
player.ship.scannerUltraZoom = true/false;

In addition to this, the scanner non-linearity and zoomability can take default values from the hud.plist settings scanner_non_linear and scanner_ultra_zoom. In the standard game we have them both set as false to have an initial unchanged scanner behaviour, but you can adjust this as you see fit. Any combination of the two settings is possible, although I personally quite like the result when both are set to true.

Can these get reset by any events in the core game (like buying a new ship) or is it sufficient to set them in this.startUp?
(I've set up a script to do just that, so that I don't have to worry about tweaking my HUD which I also just changed from my tweaked Combat-HUD-WS to the bog standard Smart-HUD-WS)


Oddly enough I could find no record of these properties in the wiki on the playership reference page, was I looking in the wrong place?

- Neelix

Yes, buying a new ship will reset them to the values in the hud.plist of said ship.

As for the wiki, I know I haven't done anything there for a while now, it could very well be that this information is indeed missing.

I missed those as well. Added documentation now.

Is there any way for the script illiterate to get the non-linear scanner to work. e.g. an already-existing file that can be edited?

ffutures wrote:

Is there any way for the script illiterate to get the non-linear scanner to work. e.g. an already-existing file that can be edited?

In the file hud.plist, change settings scanner_non_linear and scanner_ultra_zoom from "no" to "yes". (Apparently.)

Wildeblood wrote:

ffutures wrote:

Is there any way for the script illiterate to get the non-linear scanner to work. e.g. an already-existing file that can be edited?

In the file hud.plist, change settings scanner_non_linear and scanner_ultra_zoom from "no" to "yes". (Apparently.)

Or add them, if they don't exist.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Wildeblood wrote:

ffutures wrote:

Is there any way for the script illiterate to get the non-linear scanner to work. e.g. an already-existing file that can be edited?

In the file hud.plist, change settings scanner_non_linear and scanner_ultra_zoom from "no" to "yes". (Apparently.)

Or add them, if they don't exist.

Tried it, in hud.plist and hud-small.plist (not sure what that's about, I don't have other huds installed at present) but nothing seems to have changed. I also noticed I'm not getting a light for the cloaking device, shown at the end of both files.

Forgot to say that this is Oolite version 1.80 if that makes a difference.

hud-small.plist is the plist for the small HUD as used by the Adder and Cobra Mk I.
Are you changing the HUD plists in the main game folders? This is not wise - you should make a copy of them to edit, then place the edited copy in a folder called Config and place this in your AddOns folder.
Also, remember to hold down the Shift key when starting the game to clear the cache.