Oolite Bulletins

Bizarre lead ship behaviour: I'm running the OXP that is currently the latest (or near the latest) on 1.80. I'm right now on an escort contract to an anarchy system, and the lead ship is not heading for the station. I thought at first he was taking a conservative path off the main route, but he never once called for injectors, and never once did a synchronized jump even though our status has been green all the way. There was a fight as soon as we entered the system but nothing since......other contracts have always flown straight for the station and used injectors/jump drive a lot. I'm about to abandon the contract since it seems the main ship has gone a bit loopy: it's constantly spinning on it's axis and heading out into empty space past the station and planet. Does that mean it was badly damaged perhaps in the fight? I'm confused as to what's going on, is there any way to "check" with the main ship to see what it's doing?

Well I just abandoned that trip and reloaded the saved game and the did the escort run again, and this time it behaved normally. Except at the end where it paid me 77000 credits, and afterwards I had 77,901,377,138 credits in my account. Now I'm not complaining about good pay for a job well done (I fought off a large pack and took out 2 or 3 of the attackers), but something seems fishy here.

By the way, something that I did out of the ordinary was that I saved the game after accepting the contract, and came back to the saved game another day on a fresh run of oolite.

No comment on the above strangeness? Another weirdity: on another run, the python lead ship inexplicably stops dead in space just a minute away from the station and just sits there. I get bored after several minutes of this and leave towards the station, the second I'm outside of scanner range he calls me to say he's under attack, I jet back but it's too late. It sure would be nice to have some way of "ping"ing the lead ship to make sure it's still making progress towards the station.

Similar problems reported before as you can see in this topic, but the original author and contributors are missing a while. I tried to locate the payment bug but after an hour I gave up without any success (except that there is no obviously wrong part in the code), sorry.

The problem is that the script uses the same variable name - at different times - for an array and a number, so if at any point it tries to read the array when it's expecting to read a number, there are problems like this.

On saving, many of the script variables get saved into the mission variables - quite possibly in some circumstances it's trying to save an array into a mission variable, which isn't supported.

I really like the escort contracts, it's very challenging staying alive against large pirate swarms and yet simultaneously not losing track of the mother ship. Switching to a flying a dedicated bounty hunter ship (Contractor) helps somewhat (don't get shredded instantly in a hostile furball) but it's still not easy. But some of those cargo skippers area really morons:

1) They *turn to fight* a giant swarm of pirates when even one of them goes hostile, when simply injecting on past would solve the problem (in fact, "injecting on past" is the answer to almost every problem the cargo skippers face).

2) *I* get the poor reputation when, after I clean up the whole attacking horde and turn to finish the last one off, he collides head-on with it and explodes. And I had just fought my way back to "neutral" standing. Ah well, I live to fly another day at least.

Bogatyr wrote:

2) *I* get the poor reputation when, after I clean up the whole attacking horde and turn to finish the last one off, he collides head-on with it and explodes. And I had just fought my way back to "neutral" standing. Ah well, I live to fly another day at least.

It always seem's to be Boa Cruisers against FdLs which ram each other on full injectors when I play escort.
I tend not to do it very often now as the freighter's AI is just too frustrating.

Also, what's up with the other escorts? They disappear after the witchspace jump every time, never form up properly, never use injectors so they get left behind. Not once has another escort fighter made it to the station along with me and the mother ship.

Is the original author of this oxp still active? If not I may try my hand over time at fixing it up and improving the AI a bit, it's really a great concept.

Bogatyr wrote:

Is the original author of this oxp still active? If not I may try my hand over time at fixing it up and improving the AI a bit, it's really a great concept.

Capt. Murphy has not been here for over two years, sadly, so does appear to be MIA. The OXP has the normal CC3 licence, so you can tinker with it under those terms. It might be worth dropping Murphy a PM first though out of courtesy.

Although I made what I believe are fixes for that save-then-load bug about nine months ago or so... I still have not tested it as I stopped playing Oolite long before then!

So... if you want to test it:
http://www.keeper1st.com/Oolite/Escort_Contracts.js

Download that updated script file.

Can't comment on the AI as I never touched any of that.

"Other escorts"? What other escorts? You're the only one!

Thanks for the update, I uploaded into the manager as version 1.6.

Keeper wrote:

"Other escorts"? What other escorts? You're the only one!

Except if you have anothers from  Hired Guns or  Escort Deck.

So it works then?

I think I tried testing late one night before bed, but I died before completing the contract, so couldn't tell if it worked, and had no more time to try another run. Haven't started Oolite since then -- several months ago, alas.

Keeper wrote:

So it works then?

I compared the code changes and seems to be ok so I uploaded due to at least the same or better imho but we need testers to confirm.

I've made a little "on the fly" test, and this is the result:



No values for reward/bonus for every mission (plus no hints in the log).

Marte wrote:

No values for reward/bonus for every mission (plus no hints in the log).

On which OS, Marte? If it's your Mac this might be the same problem expanding mission text that afflicts Trading Assistant, but if its windows then Keeper has definitely messed up.