Oolite Bulletins

Cool!

This is a really dumb question, but is the player's role "player"?

I am going to do two versions of the AI for the Dictators ships. The Station's defence ships will go for the player (so I need them to search for the player's role). The Dictatorship ships that are partroling the system will go for the rebels.

Eszausve gains a moon and a Gas Giant...

(The Mars-type planet in the middle is the standard sytem planet, as I'm running dajit's mega cool new planet texture .exe - This adds both Mars and Earth type worlds to the Universe. In this particluar system dajit's code has replaced the standard Oolite planet with a Mars type planet. In other systems his code adds Earth-type planets. As he developes, he is adding Ice worlds etc to the Ooniverse. Only the Gas Giants and the moon are OXP features. This OXP will add the Giants and Moon. You only get a dajit world if you also have his code running!)



Close up of the moon:



I probabley need to play about with the positions so they are not quite so artifically in a line. I have added them using the addmoon code, rather the addplanet code, as I've noticed that the planet textuers for added planets don't work if you are running the new textured planets .exe. This should work on both versions. I'll fire up my old exe to test it.

those planets looking fine.

and the answer to the Q above is yes, if yer still wondering..

You won't belive how easy they were to texture! Feel a bit of a cheat!

I was orginally going to have the moon as a water-world, so I downloaded a picture of some water from Photobucket, changed it to a PNG file and stuck it in my OXP texture file. The picture had a white boader and so when I stuck it on the moon, it looked nothing like water, but did look rather like Neptune!

The moon uses a picture of Earth's moon. The was a little bit of space in the picture, so I overlaped with paint, to get rid of the black of space. My first go had a black stripe on it! If you look very closely at the moon, you can just see the join, but it looks pretty good!

I can probabley use a perspective trick to make Hertic's Deathstar look bigger than it really is.

Hit a rendering bug with the Gas Giant dominating the planet; the planet kept going transparant as you approached it. So I've moved the Gas Giant:



The Giant is actually 50 times the size of the planet, but it is also 50 times further away, so appears about the same size. (I don't think this is quite right astrophyisics wise, but close enough!)

I'll do a red one as well I think. Just for fun, I'll put a Dodec-Station by each one. If you fancy a bit of inter-planatary travel they'll be a place to dock when you get there! Take a pack lunch through. It's about 20 minutes away at J speed!

Looks very good, LittleBear! I'm looking forward to visiting this system!

LittleBear wrote:

I'll do a red one as well I think. Just for fun, I'll put a Dodec-Station by each one. If you fancy a bit of inter-planatary travel they'll be a place to dock when you get there! Take a pack lunch through. It's about 20 minutes away at J speed!

Why a station? One would think there were no commercial stations near the construction facility of a Death Star (there certainly wasn't in Star Wars). You'd want to build that thing as far away from prying eyes as you can get it (20 min J distance should be enough).

Nice to be able to dock, of course, but hardly functional story-wise. One small gritty coriolis outpost to provide support for the early construction crews would make more sense..

Not to diss your lovely work, BTW, looking stunning so far!

Best wishes,
Oscar

A 5 star hotel offering a stunning view of the gas giant Aqua, complete with full health spar facilities. Less than 30 minutes flight from the main space lanes. Get away from it all for only 800 Credits a night!

Or perhaps a small scientific reaserach station with the same sort of commodities as a rock hermit.

There is no real reason to go to the Gas Giants. They are just there to pretty up the system. But as it only takes 5 mins and 3 lines of code to add a station by each one, thought I might as well. (And Elite has always been opened ended, so if the player wants to go to a Gas Giant for no reason, then for the sake of 3 lines of code, then he should be able to!)

PS: The DeathStar only appears once (and is attcking the moon where the rebels are based).

The planets are permanent feature of this system. This is the system where the Death Star battle just happens to take place.

At other times it is a system with it own features. One of the things the OXP does, is change the systems over time depending upon the player's actions. At the start of the OXP, it is a thrithing system. Of course at the time of the Deathstar battle it is a wreack! Perhaps they can rebuild if you are sucessfull....

How are you going to have it attack a moon?
placing a buoy behind it and attacking that?

My hamburger of Death will have a docking port at the top and turrets around the rim I think.

I haven't got a clue how to design a superweapon...or how to make it function.

Possibly a bulge......or a sunroof....with a death-ray cannon poking out...
ideas?

I think I can do this by a cunning use of the Death Actions Code, AIs and the mission_assassins_rebelkillcount variable!

I don't think it is possible to actually have the Deathstar destroy the rebel base, but it can do the next best thing in this way:

The Script adds the DeathStar.

The Script also adds numerous Ramon Shipyard Deathstar Defence Ships to the vicinity. Both Ramon's ships and your Deathstar have have an AI that causes them to attack any ship with the role "rebel". (this is easy to do by cribbing ThargoidAi and changing "nonThargoid" to "rebel")

The Deathstar also carries a lot of Ramon Shipyard Defence Ships. I have also tweaked the standard stationAI to make it more agressive in terms of launching Defence Ships.

A certain number of Sleezan's rebel Cobras will also be added to the sytem in various palces in the vacinity of the Deathstar and in the paths of the patroling Ramon Deathstar Defenceships ships.

The ships with the role "rebel" have an AI that causes them to attack Ramon's ships and your Deathstar. (as the bad guys your deathburger and Ramon's defence ships have the role "imperial"!)

Whilst Sleezan's rebel cobras are good, they are outnumbered and outgunned by the Deathstar and Ramon's ships. (not only do Ramon Shipyard Defenders have better stats, there are more of them and your Deathstar can keep launching more defence ships until the rebels are destoyed).

To make the player's life more difficult, clones of Ramon's ships (but with a killplayer AI) are also added to the sytem.

Every time a rebel ship is destroyed, its Death Actions increase the rebelkillcount variable. If this goes beyond a certain number, then the mission is failed as the rebels have been destroyed (easy to do as I know how many rebels I added and so if the kill_count is greater than the number of rebels added then the rebels have been wiped out). Even if the player is not destroyed, he will still get a mission fail briefing!

In play terms the player must:-

1) not get killed
2) destroy the deathstar before it (and Ramon's ships) wipe out the rebels.

If the player fails to act, then either he will be killed by Ramon's ships with the killplayerAI or the Deathstar and the Ramon Ships with the "killrebel" AI will wipe out the rebels.

To complete the mission, the player must therefore not only survive, but must stop the Deathstar destroying the rebel fleet.

This will need me to do a lot of playtesting to get the difficulty right!

In terms of your design. I think you only need to make it an armed station. I will play around with the energy value of the deathburger and the stats of Ramon's ships to get the difficulty curve right.

My plan is that your station will have so many of Ramon's ships to launch and in any event there will be enough of Ramon's ships in the system, that failure to destroy the Deathburger pretty soon will invetiabley mean the rebel fleet is wiped out.

What I am going to need to playtest a lot is the exact number of rebels - v - the deathburger & Ramon ships, but I think this plan should work!

I'll playtest by adding more rebel ships to the battle until I reach a point where the mission is hard, but possible! If your deathburger has a high energy level but a low recharge rate, then it can be taken out by the player making a lot of attack runs at it.

So if it gets too hot and I hyperspace out of there, when I come back to the system does the mission start again or are the rebels wiped out and the Battle Station remains?

LittleBear wrote:

Sleezan's...

oh, he ain't gonna like that one!

just teasing!

Too funny!

Not going to be able to hyperspace out easily Ramon!

Too many "gravity wells" from the Deathburger, Aqua, Hades and Vulcan.

"Hyperspace Jump failed - too close to Aqua" - a planet with a radius of 2 million casts a long shadow. He He!

Proto-type Ramon Shipyards Burger Defence ships.

Ok they have a nod to StarWars, but they are Classic Elite in the middle and they look cool!



Getting on with my three Gas Giants!