Oolite Bulletins

kanthoney wrote:

cim wrote:

We haven't even really started getting to the "breaking things" part of the release cycle at the moment

Hey, I'm trying my best!

And a very good best that is, best of the best!

cim wrote:

There's a bit of a visual indication of nearby ECM bursts now. See what you think...

First time I've managed to get out there and have a look at this - a little too much judder on the scanner, perhaps?

Cody wrote:

cim wrote:

There's a bit of a visual indication of nearby ECM bursts now. See what you think...

First time I've managed to get out there and have a look at this - a little too much judder on the scanner, perhaps?

That's the ECM indication? I thought my scanner malfunctioned!!!

Cody wrote:

a little too much judder on the scanner

Definitely too much, I feel as I dropped into a gigantic spacequake.

The first iteration was quite a bit bigger than that - by the time I'd reduced the numbers two or three times it by comparison looked quite reasonable. Coming back to it later, yes, still too large. I've reduced it again.

Other changes:
- the OXP manager will now ask before downloading dependencies automatically. Options are "download all", "download next one and ask again", "download none"
- Multi-Targeting System, if you fire a missile and the next missile has no target, will assign your current target to that missile. (A subtle bug with calling removeEquipment on a missile other than the player's selected one is also fixed)
- there's now a player.ship.multiFunctionDisplayList property to read the current MFD settings.

Do I spy a commodities branch containing a trade-goods.plist?

Trade goods work is coming along fairly well. As well as plist-coded prices for trade goods, which should handle the simple cases (including a few things not possible with commodities.plist), you can now specify a "market script" which allows you to set prices per trade-good, per station, or per system. If you try to do all three, the following happens:
1) The per-trade good script sets a standard price and quantity for the system's economy and any other data it considers
2) The per-system script can then modify this price and quantity
3) The station takes the price and quantity from the system, and scales the quantity to the capacity of the station market
4) The per-trade good script runs again in "secondary station" mode, to modify the price and quantity again
5) The per-station script runs to make final adjustments to price and quantity
Generally one OXP wouldn't do all three, though.

On the player side, to cope with there being potentially a lot more trade goods available, the F8 screen can be sorted ('/') and filtered ('?'). That may be some use even without OXPs adding extra goods.


There's a little more adjustment and testing to do, and then I'll document it and put it in the nightly builds.

Love that sorting. Is that increasing or decreasing? And can we switch between the two?

While you're working on that side of things... any chance of adding colour coding based on legality?
It would be nice if items that would get you a price on your head just for launching with them were made to stand out somehow.

- Neelix

Currently available:
Filters: all, all currently tradable, in hold, in stock, legal, illegal
Sorts: default, alphabetical a-z, price ascending, stock ascending, hold ascending, mass unit

I'm liking the new commodities screen. The ability to use both the sorting and the filtering together is a nice touch:

Any chance of making it possible for an OXP to specify a sort order? I use Market Observer OXP and I'd love it if it could sort by profit margin.

- Neelix

From Market Observer's point of view, there has to be a way to read the current filtered commodity order for it to work at all.

I second the color-code illegal stuff idea, especially now that we'll be able to define different goods as illegal

Colour-coding: maybe. There are four possibilities, though (transport legal, export illegal, import illegal, transport illegal), so I'm not sure colour coding is necessarily the right approach - and having experimented with it elsewhere, the GUI screens look quite messy if more than a couple of colours are used.

Neelix wrote:

Any chance of making it possible for an OXP to specify a sort order?

Not easily, no. There are ways for OXPs to modify the default sort order, but not reliably. Adding custom sort orders would probably mean implementing all of the existing ones in JS as well, which would be quite a bit less efficient.

spara wrote:

From Market Observer's point of view, there has to be a way to read the current filtered commodity order for it to work at all.

Filter, sort and display offset, and even then it might have trouble catching up if the player was cycling through them at any speed. I'll see if I can think of a sensible alternative way of providing additional notes on a trade good by OXP.

The economic changes thread is probably a better place to continue discussion on possible features, though.