Oolite Bulletins

Diziet Sma wrote:

<subtle hint mode>
Is it in a shareable condition?
</subtle hint mode>

My archive as it exists currently consists of 2144 screen shots and is 868 megs. That's all in the Oolite PNG image format and I know I might have only half the planets listed in the archive. I suppose I could make some sort of text listing of my archive.

Now that's what I call 'dedication'...

Solonar wrote:

I suppose I could make some sort of text listing of my archive.

And that would be even more seriously dedicated.. some might say, obsessive, even..

Perhaps it would make sense to split the task of extracting the data amongst a number of people.. I'd certainly put up my hand for a share of that duty.

. I'd certainly put up my hand for a share of that duty.

I'd be down for a share as well.

cim wrote:

BuggyBY wrote:

I found an interesting bug. I had accepted an open contract to ship 25 TC of rum to Zaleriza, but when I got there some other trader had beaten me to the punch. Seeing as I'd paid 105 credits per ton for some booze that was now barely worth 20, I decided to keep it in my hold and see if there might not be a system that would pay me a more attractive price for it.
However, the next time I docked with another station, on my manifest my 25 tons of cargo were no longer listed as rum, but as cotton. As the price for that was even lower, I moved to the next system - and to my surprise, when I docked, the cotton had turned into slaves (Sexe Larsby's Political Dissidents, to be precise). Perhaps even stranger, in the normal cargo trade screen it's still listed as 25 tons of Liquor/Wines. What could explain all this switching around?

Thanks for the report.

The cargo types get re-used, so those are the cargo types for the next open contract. But it's not supposed to be setting up the new open contracts until you've somehow disposed of any cargo from the previous one.

If you sell it on the generic market that will work around the bug - I'll see if I can work out what's going wrong.

It seems this has just happened to me, although I had no indication that some other trader had beaten me to it... I just noticed that my 10TC of what's supposed to be paintings kept changing. I'm using 1.2.3 ... I can provide my save game if that would help.

laxori666 wrote:

It seems this has just happened to me, although I had no indication that some other trader had beaten me to it... I just noticed that my 10TC of what's supposed to be paintings kept changing. I'm using 1.2.3 ... I can provide my save game if that would help.

That should definitely be fixed by 1.2.3 - yes please, the save game would be useful (and your Latest.log as well, just in case)

cim wrote:

laxori666 wrote:

It seems this has just happened to me, although I had no indication that some other trader had beaten me to it... I just noticed that my 10TC of what's supposed to be paintings kept changing. I'm using 1.2.3 ... I can provide my save game if that would help.

That should definitely be fixed by 1.2.3 - yes please, the save game would be useful (and your Latest.log as well, just in case)

Ok, some more details - seems the bug is a bit different. Here's a .zip with 3 snapshots and 2 save games and 1 Latest.log.

I'm nearly 100% sure that I got a contract to deliver 10TC of paintings to Anxeonis. For a while this stayed constant, but at some point (not sure when), the contract changed. 001 is a screenshot of the system before Anxeonis (last save I had before I realized something was up). Corresponding save is "Shiiner.oolite-save". 002 is of me at Anxeonis, corresponding save "Shiinerwtfwtf.oolite-save". 003 is of me going to another system after Anxeonis without having saved or loaded after 002.

Ararus couldn't have been the initial destination because I was right next door when I took the contract. Note that for each of those screenshots, the contracts screen said I had no contract at all. The price and amount is correct in all cases.

EDIT: Oh and the "Sell Specialist Trade Goods" screen says "No specialist trade goods in hold" - but the 10TC of Luxuries are in my main hold (not hypercargo).

laxori666 wrote:

but the 10TC of Luxuries are in my main hold (not hypercargo).

Did the cargo get moved into (and back out of) hypercargo at some point? Not that it really should matter, as HyperCargo has been compatible with New Cargoes for some time now..

Diziet Sma wrote:

laxori666 wrote:

but the 10TC of Luxuries are in my main hold (not hypercargo).

Did the cargo get moved into (and back out of) hypercargo at some point? Not that it really should matter, as HyperCargo has been compatible with New Cargoes for some time now..

Yep I moved it back and forth, I'm sure I saved sometimes with it in HC and sometimes with it in the main hold.

That will be it.

It's compatible in the sense that you can stick NC-tagged pods into the Hypercargo, and they'll still be NC-tagged when you take them out again, but that's all. NC doesn't have a way to inspect inside the Hypercargo to see what's in there ... which means that if you make a jump with the open contract's cargo inside the Hypercargo, NC will notice you have none left in your hold, conclude that you have either suffered some unlucky fight damage or intentionally abandoned the contract, and close it down.

There may be other types of good that are subject to the same mysterious transmutation, though open contracts are the ones that cycle cargo IDs the fastest, and the most noticeable when they break.

I'm not sure if there's anything further which can be done about this without quite a substantial rewrite of both New Cargoes and Hypercargo so that New Cargoes can query the Hypercargo contents live as if they were part of a single large hold. I'll document it on the wiki page as a known issue.

cim wrote:

That will be it.

It's compatible in the sense that you can stick NC-tagged pods into the Hypercargo, and they'll still be NC-tagged when you take them out again, but that's all. NC doesn't have a way to inspect inside the Hypercargo to see what's in there ... which means that if you make a jump with the open contract's cargo inside the Hypercargo, NC will notice you have none left in your hold, conclude that you have either suffered some unlucky fight damage or intentionally abandoned the contract, and close it down.

There may be other types of good that are subject to the same mysterious transmutation, though open contracts are the ones that cycle cargo IDs the fastest, and the most noticeable when they break.

I'm not sure if there's anything further which can be done about this without quite a substantial rewrite of both New Cargoes and Hypercargo so that New Cargoes can query the Hypercargo contents live as if they were part of a single large hold. I'll document it on the wiki page as a known issue.

Ohh okay, that makes sense. That's too bad, I was looking forward to a huge payday, but I just wrote it off as if I had failed the contract.

Could it at least give some sort of indicator when NC decides the contract has been abandoned? Or as a stop-gap, give a warning before you launch, if it notices the contract cargo isn't in the main hold, something like - warning, HyperCargo's witchspace field is extremely volatile and contents are virtually guaranteed to be swapped at random with other ship's holds during a witchspace jump. Or a warning when you take the contract, saying: "Just make sure to not jump into witchspace with that stuff in your hypercargo hold."

laxori666 wrote:

Or a warning when you take the contract, saying: "Just make sure to not jump into witchspace with that stuff in your hypercargo hold."

That's probably best - there's already a warning of that sort in the script noting that you can't use the hypercargo hold to make your ship look big enough to take on the contract, but that's only displayed if you try to take on a contract too big for your primary hold. I'll move that to somewhere a little more obvious for the next version.

Thargoid wrote:

The HC array shouldn't be to difficult for NC to decode it needs. Or else if there's tweaks that could make it easier let me know and I'll look into it to improve the compatibility.

It's more the effort involved in making all the calls in NC that check the player's hold instead go through a function that maybe checks the hold and maybe checks the hold + hypercargo (which because some of these might be called during the buy/sell routines, couldn't really cache the hypercargo results)

Maybe someday if I don't have anything more substantial to work on.

New version of Oolite is out (1.77.1) and I'm back to playing after a long while and this popped to the log:
I created a new commander, saved him, died and loaded. It looks like the save file is somehow corrupted, as I can't reproduce it with another commander . That mission_cargotypeextension_opencontract looks a bit suspicious in the save file.

Here's the save file, if it reveals something.

To fix it you should be safe just deleting the two lines from your save file.

I'll see if I can figure out how it ended up like that.