Oolite Bulletins

cim wrote:

ffutures wrote:

So you're firing two guns with half the power but you heat up twice as fast? Sounds a bit odd.

No. You're either firing two guns with half the power and heat up at normal rate or you're firing two guns at full power and heat up twice as fast.

OK, that makes more sense. Can you choose which you get, or is that determined when you buy the lasers?

ffutures wrote:

OK, that makes more sense. Can you choose which you get, or is that determined when you buy the lasers?

It's a fixed property of the ship hull.

cim wrote:

Diziet Sma wrote:

Would it be possible to open that up to OXP control, so that ship builders could do all the hard work of figuring out the quaternions themselves, if they chose to do so?

Allowing a non-fixed quaternion at all is the hard part. Working out what it should be - especially for basic convergence control - is relatively easy, as is allowing OXPs to set non-fixed quaternions if they're possible.

Understood.. consider this a request to file this idea under under "nice feature to add next time I'm in the mood to twist my brain into a pretzel", then..

cim wrote:

ffutures wrote:

OK, that makes more sense. Can you choose which you get, or is that determined when you buy the lasers?

It's a fixed property of the ship hull.

Having two lasers, or the firing rate?

ffutures wrote:

cim wrote:

ffutures wrote:

OK, that makes more sense. Can you choose which you get, or is that determined when you buy the lasers?

It's a fixed property of the ship hull.

Having two lasers, or the firing rate?

Both the number of mount points and whether they split or multiply are fixed.

OK, so basically when you buy the ship you choose between having an immense amount of firepower but lasers that overheat quickly or roughly the same amount of firepower but looking cooler and a slightly decreased accuracy. Could you combine the options for different facings, e.g. the two weaker ones forward, and two full power ones aft? Or is this only going to be available as a forward weapon?

You can have any number of mounts on any of the four facings - but you must have all facings as "split" or all facings as "multiply".

You can simulate having a mix of "split" and "multiply" facings by using custom weapons - in your example, you could set the ship to "multiply", but equip a custom laser on the forward mount which had half the heat, damage and energy use per shot of a standard laser.

Awesome work with the multi laser stuff Cim!

Griff wrote:

Awesome work with the multi laser stuff Cim!

Absolutely! I like the way it's been implemented (half damage or double heating).
The Krait just got a lot cooler

Redspear wrote:

I like the way it's been implemented (half damage or double heating).

Hey, waidaminit! Is it the same for NPCs? Have the insanely dangerous OXP ships with six lasers insta-magically become survivable?

Wildeblood wrote:

Have the insanely dangerous OXP ships with six lasers insta-magically become survivable?

No - the old "extra forward weapons on subentities" method still works for NPCs and hasn't changed how it works. The ships will need manual conversion.

If the lasers are seperate mounts, shouldn't they be totaly independent on heating and power out though would double power use?
And as for target convergence, a simple crystal prisim arrangement on each laser, controlled by your targetting array (it does tell range) would make it infinitly adjusting.
As with the Imperial courier, I have often taken it's lasers out one at a time for fun.
Just a thought.

Alex wrote:

If the lasers are seperate mounts, shouldn't they be totaly independent on heating and power out though would double power use?

I think the idea is to make player ships that look good, without creating Uber-Commanders into the bargain.

Alex wrote:

And as for target convergence, a simple crystal prisim arrangement on each laser, controlled by your targetting array (it does tell range) would make it infinitly adjusting.

Heh.. at least your handwavium is "simple".. the in-game implementation, however, would be even tougher than what I originally suggested..
(I do love your idea, though!)

In tonight's nightly build we will be able to query the game via JS for the current array of resource paths used. This array can be easily used to retrieve the list of installed OXPs, even if they don't contain any worldscripts.

The commit enabling this is 4bdcf8e, the property is oolite.resourcePaths and an example of output is shown below: OXP, OXZ and actual default location paths are included. Fnding whether an OXP exists or not can be done by simply using standard JS string methods to look for the OXP name in the result array.

Note: When in strict mode, the Basic-debug.oxp may be in-use and active, but it will not appear in the list returned by oolite.resourcePaths.

<Wipes dust off thread>

A quick little featurette for tormorrow's nightly. Two new JS methods under the JS Player class, namely audioMessage("message") and stopAudioMessage().

The first one is available at speech options setting Comms Only and higher and basically speaks the message given as argument without displaying anything on the screen. This is its main difference to the player.consoleMessage method, which does display the string given and speaks it only at the All spken messages level. Also, it does not prefix the message with "Incoming Message", as player.commsMessage does. It just speaks it and that's it. Chatty passengers anyone?

The second one just stops any spoken message that happens to play at the time of its execution.

Examples: