Oolite Bulletins

phkb wrote: ↑Sun Feb 15, 2026 9:17 pm

Wildeblood wrote: ↑Sun Feb 15, 2026 5:31 pm

...on for 1/2 second then off for one second. I can do this with one timer, but it involves some kind of modulo arithmetic or somethin'?

I would have though just a boolean switch would have been sufficient: if the timer is on a 0.5 second repeat, flipping the boolean value would allow you to switch the effect on and off.

Yeah, anyway Moving right along...

Could I please get a definitive answer to the (mysterious to me) question of if, and when, one needs to clean up timers in world-scripts?

this.shipDied = this.reset = this.someoneLookedAtMeFunny = function () { /* code to stop and delete timers */ }

Using shipDied() should be sufficient for ship-scripts(?), but in world-scripts this seems to have been subject to changing fashions over the years.

Addendum: it says here (https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolit ... onstructor), "You should use entityDestroyed in ship scripts to clean up timers." But, it makes no mention of world-scripts.

Query: F7 screen "planet descriptions".

Ignoring the one-liner addons ("This planet has rings"), there are two possibilities for the planet descriptions - the vanilla game goat-soup one and those provided by eg. Famous Planets/The Assassins Guild etc.

Is there any way of a second OXP selecting the display of Goat Soup F7 vs Famous Planets F7 - and then swapping the F7 description later? Or would this really need a rewrite of Famous Planets itself? I understand that the most recent F7 variants are stored in the Jameson save file.

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Thu Mar 05, 2026 10:57 am

Query: F7 screen "planet descriptions"...

Is there any way of a second OXP selecting the display of Goat Soup F7 vs Famous Planets F7 - and then swapping the F7 description later? Or would this really need a rewrite of Famous Planets itself? I understand that the most recent F7 variants are stored in the Jameson save file.

They are swappable. I made a demo... what was it called?... Wildeblood's Manor. But you claimed it didn't work for you?

They aren't really swappable anonymously/generically - you would have to know the details of the other OXPs you're interacting with. But, there's a lot of unused potential in SystemInfo that has been waiting to be discovered for years. Tell us more of what you have in mind?

Wildeblood wrote: ↑Thu Mar 05, 2026 1:04 pm

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Thu Mar 05, 2026 10:57 am

Query: F7 screen "planet descriptions"...

Is there any way of a second OXP selecting the display of Goat Soup F7 vs Famous Planets F7 - and then swapping the F7 description later? Or would this really need a rewrite of Famous Planets itself? I understand that the most recent F7 variants are stored in the Jameson save file.

They are swappable. I made a demo... what was it called?... Wildeblood's Manor. But you claimed it didn't work for you?

They aren't really swappable anonymously/generically - you would have to know the details of the other OXPs you're interacting with. But, there's a lot of unused potential in SystemInfo that has been waiting to be discovered for years. Tell us more of what you have in mind?

Wildeblood's Manor did work for me eventually. I apologise for not confessing this to you earlier.

My question is inspired by Murgh's new alpha Mission oxp. It is based on the vanilla goat soup F7 descriptions. The division of economies/political systems/species into exactly eight each. And the descriptions: The world Xequerin is fabled for its weird volcanoes and the Xequerinian mountain lobstoid / Tiraor is a revolting little planet. / The planet Rabedira is well known for its inhabitants' ancient loathing of sit coms but ravaged by dreadful civil war. Why is it all so simplistic and bizarre?

But there are a number of other OXPs which overwrite the goat soup descriptions (Famous Planets, Riredi OXP, The Assassins Guild etc.). I was wondering if might be another way of dealing with that (other than declaring those OXPs as "Conflict OXPs" in his manifest.plist).

What makes sense to Murgh's mission is another matter... but I was dreaming of a piece of equipment (your retro-encabulator, perhaps?) which allows one to toggle between the various F7 descriptions.

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Thu Mar 05, 2026 1:35 pm

Wildeblood's Manor did work for me eventually. I apologise for not confessing this to you earlier.

My question is inspired by Murgh's new alpha Mission oxp. It is based on the vanilla goat soup F7 descriptions. The division of economies/political systems/species into exactly eight each. And the descriptions: The world Xequerin is fabled for its weird volcanoes and the Xequerinian mountain lobstoid / Tiraor is a revolting little planet. / The planet Rabedira is well known for its inhabitants' ancient loathing of sit coms but ravaged by dreadful civil war. Why is it all so simplistic and bizarre?

But there are a number of other OXPs which overwrite the goat soup descriptions (Famous Planets, Riredi OXP, The Assassins Guild etc.). I was wondering if might be another way of dealing with that (other than declaring those OXPs as "Conflict OXPs" in his manifest.plist).

What makes sense to Murgh's mission is another matter... but I was dreaming of a piece of equipment (your retro-encabulator, perhaps?) which allows one to toggle between the various F7 descriptions.

You might be anticipating a problem where there isn't one. SystemInfo data comes in four layers: planetinfo.plist in the Resources folder, planetinfo.plists in OXPs, javascript and priority javascript. Mission OXPs should use the priority layer, only setting it when the mission actually starts, and cleaning up after themselves when they're done.

But, let's say hypothetically, you're so enamoured of the Famous Planets descriptions that you want to toggle back to them even when you're supposedly busy on a mission... then you'd copy the priority description out to a mission variable then delete it from SystemInfo, similar to what Wildeblood's Manor did. But, as I wrote above, there's no general solution: you need to know the OXP identifier you're dealing with to delete another script's priority entries.

Wildeblood wrote: ↑Thu Mar 05, 2026 2:07 pm

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Thu Mar 05, 2026 1:35 pm

Wildeblood's Manor did work for me eventually. I apologise for not confessing this to you earlier.

My question is inspired by Murgh's new alpha Mission oxp. It is based on the vanilla goat soup F7 descriptions. The division of economies/political systems/species into exactly eight each. And the descriptions: The world Xequerin is fabled for its weird volcanoes and the Xequerinian mountain lobstoid / Tiraor is a revolting little planet. / The planet Rabedira is well known for its inhabitants' ancient loathing of sit coms but ravaged by dreadful civil war. Why is it all so simplistic and bizarre?

But there are a number of other OXPs which overwrite the goat soup descriptions (Famous Planets, Riredi OXP, The Assassins Guild etc.). I was wondering if might be another way of dealing with that (other than declaring those OXPs as "Conflict OXPs" in his manifest.plist).

What makes sense to Murgh's mission is another matter... but I was dreaming of a piece of equipment (your retro-encabulator, perhaps?) which allows one to toggle between the various F7 descriptions.

You might be anticipating a problem where there isn't one. SystemInfo data comes in four layers: planetinfo.plist in the Resources folder, planetinfo.plists in OXPs, javascript and priority javascript. Mission OXPs should use the priority layer, only setting it when the mission actually starts, and cleaning up after themselves when they're done.

Thank you for that.

Any chance of an explanation of your comment above? "...there's a lot of unused potential in SystemInfo that has been waiting to be discovered for years" - what sort of thing are you thinking about?

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Thu Mar 05, 2026 2:10 pm

Any chance of an explanation of your comment above? "...there's a lot of unused potential in SystemInfo that has been waiting to be discovered for years" - what sort of thing are you thinking about?

Many things. It's persistent storage that is much better organized than missionVariables. You can store arbitrary data in there, not just the official properties. If you want to add a property like average_house_price for your real estate agent OXP, you can do that. And once created, that data can be used by several OXPs using the layering, which missionVariables doesn't have.

You mentioned the eight government types. Add a government_precise property, then go Dewey decimal in there, specifying in excruciating detail precisely what sub-type of communism Vetitice enjoys.