Oolite Bulletins

Hmmm, my Word spellchecker has both vaporise and vaporize, so I guess it will still have to be proof read. If you email it to me when it's ready I'll give it a go.

Hi!

Oolite 1.72 complains:

[shipData.load.error]: ***** ERROR: the shipdata.plist entry "griff_spacebar_subent_template" specifies no model, ignoring.

Fixed. There is a more serious problem as the player entry for whom functions in JS is now "player.ship" rather than "player", which will cause all player kills to be regarded as NPC kills on 1.72. This is fixed for the 1.3BETA. I'll upload this next weekend after I've done some more testing with 1.72!

Adding V1.3 BETA to the Wikki Page. This will work on 1.72 of Oolite.

UPDATE TO VERSION 1.3 (beta).

- Code changes so that the OXP works on 1.72 of Oolite.
- Improved Script (the OXP now runs a lot faster).
- Names of Victims, Hunters and Henchmen now shown on the ID Computer.
- Bug fixs for the code to detect who killed a victim and how. Should now be a lot more reliable.
- Docking at a bar now costs you a couple of credits for you bar bill.
- Distance to the Victim's system now shown on the BB. (Note this is only yet implemented for Galaxies 1 and 2. The full version will do this for all Galaxies).
- Improved the AIs and behaviour of Escorts for Marks. They now fight more as a group. The ships escorting a mark are now also randomised.
- Killing victims can now have consequences. Somtimes family members will put out a contact on you!

Direct link below, you can also download it from the Wikki page.

http://www.box.net/shared/545uxtipng

LittleBear wrote:

Adding V1.3 BETA to the Wikki Page. This will work on 1.72 of Oolite.
- Killing victims can now have consequences. Somtimes family members will put out a contact on you!

So, you walk into a bounty hunting bar, (wondering why everyone has eyes like cup saucers) leaf through the wanted adds to the unnerving sounds of hand held energy weapons being charged. Then 3 pages in you realise what all the fuss is about as the view screen does a passable impression of a mirror.

I'll - be - leaving - now......

seriously though how does this work? Do you get a steady stream of bounty hunters coming after you? More if you complete contracts?

The Bounty Hunters Guild is a law-abiding organisation and does not under any circumstances permit the termination of Clean Commanders. Any hunter doing so will be dealt with most seriously. There are however criminal organisations out in the big black such as The Assassins Guild, who are less particular about whom they kill.

No, you won't see Contracts on you on the BB as you didn't committ a crime when you liquidated the law breaker. Even criminals have families and loved ones though, so you may find that your victim's lover / brother / mother etc has sworn vengence and will start tracking you.

When you are paid for a hit there is a chance of a revenge ship being sent after you. If the dice chose the option of no chase, then nothing happens. If the chance of a chase is chosen a single ship (possibly with escorts) will be sent after you. Sooner or later your paths will cross and the assassin will attack you. If you kill him, then thats that, he's dead. Unless killed though they will keep on your trail interceping you from time to time. You won't know whether an assassin is on your tail until he or she attacks!

In this beta version some mission varables are displayed by a console message when ever you make a jump, which will tell you that an assassin is on your tail and how far he is away from you at the moment. If no varables are displayed then there is no hit man after you. This will be removed in the final version, but for testing the state of the hit ship is displayed.

LittleBear wrote:

Adding V1.3 BETA to the Wikki Page. This will work on 1.72 of Oolite.


- Code changes so that the OXP works on 1.72 of Oolite.

http://www.box.net/shared/545uxtipng

Great. I just did my first mission on this oxp and was blown away by the scripting of the enemy behaviour: escorts, messages, hyperspacing away etc. REALLY impressive.

Cheers! I'm still not happy with the Hunter's and Bars AIs, these function as intended but still need some more improvements as they can be a bit dumb or slow to react. The Marks and Escorts AIs are quite cunning though! I wanted to make the challenge of the missions more that the ships would act sensibly and put up a decent fight without just making them really powerful. If a guy is in a Cobra III then his ship is just the regular Cobra III but the Commander is a bit smarter than the average bear!

Disembodied wrote:

"–ize" endings are Oxford (as in Oxford English Dictionary); "–ise" endings are Cambridge. The "z" is more common in the USA, although a lot of UK academic publishers use "–ize". Both are indeed correct; standardis/zation is the main aim! The reason I flagged a few "–ize" endings is because most of the others in the description.plist (neutralise, authorise, sterilised, etc.) use the "–ise" ending.

My glib thought on this topic was that there were 6 words that have to be ise, no one can remember which six, so everyone in the UK played it safe and changed all the ize ones to ise

Exanding on what Disembodied said, and filling in my glib thought above, Wikipedia explains the situation more fully
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ize_vs_ise#Greek_spellings
for those that get a kick out of this sort of stuff

Scince when do Q-bombs talk? After this message the bomb went off. I managed to escape but in the station it was said that the hit was killed by another one

pagroove wrote:

Scince when do Q-bombs talk? After this message the bomb went off. I managed to escape but in the station it was said that the hit was killed by another one

If it wasn't for talkative Q-bombs I would have been toast many times I suppose when we buy them we should be writing our own messages on them.

@Pagroove. I can see you're on V1.2 of Random Hits. This won't work properly on 1.72 of Oolite. This is why you're not getting the credit for the kill. You need to update to 1.3 (beta) of Random Hits. Talkie Q-Bombs are intended though. Only the Victim Ships in R_H have a chance of carrying one. "Bomb 21, you're out of the hatch again."

@Pagroove. I can see you're on V1.2 of Random Hits. This won't work properly on 1.72 of Oolite. This is why you're not getting the credit for the kill. You need to update to 1.3 (beta) of Random Hits. Talkie Q-Bombs are intended though. Only the Victim Ships in R_H have a chance of carrying one. "Bomb 21, you're out of the hatch again." Wink

Just checked. You're right. I did download the Beta but is wasn't installed properly by me (the OXP dir is still in the other directory) and the old random hits wasn't removed from my add-ons dir.

Recently having fun with this oxp though after oxp'ing Famous Planets.

I like the Q-bombs that talk

I upgraded Random Hits recently; I removed the old one and dropped in the new one.

One minor bug to report: The 'subject' line in the offered missions part of the space bar BB is borked. It displays 'subject: random_hits_blah_blah_mission' or something, I can't recall exactly. The subject line displays correctly if you accept a mission.

And something else: Anarchies suddenly got as safe to fly in as your average high TL Corporate State. The hunters patrolling the system from the bar wipe every pirate from the system. Is that a bug?

Its not a bug as such, it's just that I havent finished the code yet! If you are in G1 or G2 the subject section of the board tells you how far away the victim's system is. I havent done Gs 3 - 8 yet, so at the moment you get a mission variable. The finished version will have this feature in all galaxies. Hunter's should rarely venture more than 25kms from the bar, so whilst the bars have a safe zone the rest of the Anarchy should be as dangerous as ever. Improving the hunter's AIs is the next thing on my to do list for 1.4, so I'll be checking if they are wandering off. Hunters only ever appear if launched by a bar in respose to pirates / thargoids / criminals within 25km of the bar. Once all targets are destroyed there's an 85% chance that the hunter ship will witch-out, only 15% of hunters launched will go on an in-system patrol. I may be launching too many hunters though, resulting in too many heading off to clean up the town! The intended effect is that pirates venturing within 25km of the bar will be destroyed, but pirates in the rest of the system will remain unmolested!