Oolite Bulletins

Wildeblood wrote:

Making beaconCode read/write has been requested by several people over the last year or so, although I don't really see the point, myself.

So OXPs like Escape Pod Locator can be made about 80% slimmer. You are normally very anti 'bloat'.

I also like the station/nav buoy situation as is....

There seemed to be enough people admitting to problems lining up the triangle to try a more symmetric shape, so I've put the diamond in experimentally to see if it works better for people. The rest of the changes to station beacons are out. (The bugs regarding the main station compass target if the original main station is destroyed are still bugs, but not, I think, given the consensus here, severe enough to fix unless it can be done without changing normal behaviour)

What is the bug as regards a destroyed main station? What's the expected behaviour? I know there's the idea that there are several stations in orbit around each planet, but this isn't the case (or is it?). If the main station gets destroyed, isn't the best solution just to not have a main station in that system until either the player jumps out and jumps back again, or some arbitrary amount of time has passed?

Such a cataclysm should be so far outside the norm that players shouldn't be surprised if navigation equipment doesn't work like it's supposed to.

cim wrote:

There seemed to be enough people admitting to problems lining up the triangle to try a more symmetric shape

That's funny - I put the triangle in the middle, then spin the ship to see which way the triangle moves, then shuffle up / down / sideways accordingly until the triangle doesn't move as I spin. It only takes a couple of seconds and I find it more accurate than the sun / planet circles.

Horses for courses, I presume. Maybe this is one of the manoeuvres that's easier with a keyboard.

Remember that changing the triangle to a diamond for the station nav buoy beacon will require also a change in the Oolite Reference Sheet, in one of its tricky parts: images. Thankfully, we have the RS source file on SVN, but someone will have to take care of this. The trickiness is making it look nice and professional by generating a graphic image for the beacon that has the diamond representation on it, but otherwise looks exactly the same as the currently used image.

That, or we just leave it as triangle. Any takers?

Edit: Changed station beacon to station nav buoy beacon for clarity.

SandJ wrote:

cim wrote:

There seemed to be enough people admitting to problems lining up the triangle to try a more symmetric shape

That's funny - I put the triangle in the middle, then spin the ship to see which way the triangle moves, the shuffle up / down / sideways accordingly until the triangle doesn't move as I spin. It only takes a couple of seconds and I find it more accurate then the sun / planet circles.

Horses for courses, I presume. Maybe this is one of the manoeuvres that's easier with a keyboard.

Same here, the problem seems to be that people assume it's an equilateral triangle so get it off centre on their first attempt more often than they expect to.

Pet peeve: than for comparisons, then for consequences.

another_commander wrote:

Remember that changing the triangle to a diamond for the station beacon will require also a change in the Oolite Reference Sheet

Ordinary arbitrary beacons are triangles, not the station beacon which is a square.

another_commander wrote:

Remember that changing the triangle to a diamond for the station beacon will require also a change in the Oolite Reference Sheet

... plus  the Wiki and every other location that has a screenshot of the triangle.

Wildeblood wrote:

more often than they expect to.

Pet peeve: than for comparisons, then for consequences.

Don't be peeved. It was a typo missed by indolent complacency, not ignorance.

Disembodied wrote:

What is the bug as regards a destroyed main station? What's the expected behaviour?

Whenever the main station is destroyed, the game will begin to treat the dockable object that is closest to where the main station was as the new main station. As far as I remember this is a convenience, in order to still allow saving your game in that system. Now, sometimes it may happen that the only other dockable in the system is a Rock Hermit halfway to the sun, or a Constore behind the witchpoint. Therefore, from now on until you leave the system, the square station compass symbol points to that faraway dockable. However, the square compass symbol is only displayed at all when you're close to the planet. This leads to an odd behaviour: if you're actually heading for the ersatz main station, it's compass symbol disappears as soon as you leave the planet's vicinity. Out in the system you don't get any clue where to find the ersatz main station.

This gets worse, of course, if there are no other stations in the system, and therefore a moving object like a Behemoth happens to become the ersatz main station.

That's the bug cim is referring to. (Also, the security zone, where the 'S' is displayed on your HUD is now around the ersatz station, which is another oddity.)

My basic standpoint on this problem is to ask whether we actually really need an ersatz main station in the first place. Would it be a game breaker if you were no longer able to save your game in a system that has no main station? You can always jump out and save in another system. And in most cases, as soon as you return to the first system, the main station will be back. (Notable exception would be a Nova system, but in such a system you wouldn't survive long enough to be able to reach a dockable object anyway, even if the dockable object would survive long enough.) Also, even with a lot of station OXPs installed, it may happen that there is no other dockable in the system when the main station gets destroyed. In fact, I just did a test by launching in my current system and removing the main station. By pure chance no other dockable was present, and I found myself in a system with no main (or other) station at all. So even the ersatz-main-station-mechanism is no foolproof mechanism against being stuck in a system with no possibility to save your game. For me this intensifies the question why we need this mechanism in the first place.

another_commander wrote:

Remember that changing the triangle to a diamond for the station nav buoy beacon will require also a change in the Oolite Reference Sheet, in one of its tricky parts: images. Thankfully, we have the RS source file on SVN, but someone will have to take care of this. The trickiness is making it look nice and professional by generating a graphic image for the beacon that has the diamond representation on it, but otherwise looks exactly the same as the currently used image.

Yes. I'll take care of that (and the other various bits of documentation) if the diamond works out.

(On that note, should the Wiki's link to the reference sheet really be going to the trunk SVN version of it? Do we have a stable location of it somewhere instead?)

Commander McLane wrote:

Disembodied wrote:

What is the bug as regards a destroyed main station? What's the expected behaviour?

Whenever the main station is destroyed, the game will begin to treat the dockable object that is closest to where the main station was as the new main station. As far as I remember this is a convenience, in order to still allow saving your game in that system. Now, sometimes it may happen that the only other dockable in the system is a Rock Hermit halfway to the sun, or a Constore behind the witchpoint. Therefore, from now on until you leave the system, the square station compass symbol points to that faraway dockable. However, the square compass symbol is only displayed at all when you're close to the planet. This leads to an odd behaviour: if you're actually heading for the replacement main station, it's compass symbol disappears as soon as you leave the planet's vicinity. Out in the system you don't get any clue where to find the replacement main station.

The system, always trying to have a main station is a feature, but a feature that is probably never wanted. Main stations are in-destructable by weapons so in normal game it will never happen. Only scripts sometime destroy it. I only know of two scripts that do that: nova-mission and asteroid-storm-mission. For both it is unwanted to have a replacement and both scripts not only destroy the main station, but destroy every station entity in the system to make sure the player has no way to dock in that system.
Having no main station leads not to crashes or other bad things, so maybe we should get rid of the replacement all together as McLane suggests.

Commander McLane wrote:

For me this intensifies the question why we need this mechanism in the first place.

Hmm ... I think I agree. A massive disaster has just occurred: player convenience shouldn't be the main concern. Perhaps there should just be a broadcast message to the effect that the main system station has been destroyed.

It seems a bit of a hefty workaround for what should be a very rare issue. To me it would make more sense not to have a replacement main station, until it's replaced in the game by the player jumping out and jumping back in again, or – and this might be preferable, to avoid the occasional 4-hour turnaround in station replacement – until a certain number of days have passed, perhaps based on the wealth of the system. Would it be possible to assign a temporary NO_MAIN_STATION flag to a planetary system? This is extra programming work to cover an eventuality that I've never experienced in almost 5 years of play ... but it might introduce some interesting OXP possibilities.

Disembodied wrote:

This is extra programming work to cover an eventuality that I've never experienced in almost 5 years of play ... but it might introduce some interesting OXP possibilities.

The current behaviour has some very interesting possibilities, and just because few or even no OXPs have made use of them yet, doesn't mean someone won't surprise us next Tuesday after lunch. Removing the current behaviour, merely for the sake of appeasing a puritanical ideal, means changing code, and every time code is changed there is the risk of unintended consequences happening. In this case it's an unnecessary risk. Just leave it alone unless/until someone makes a case for a specific change. Spotting a seldom used feature most people don't even know about and suddenly deciding it's a priority for reform makes no sense.

Disembodied wrote:

Would it be possible to assign a temporary NO_MAIN_STATION flag to a planetary system? This is extra programming work to cover an eventuality that I've never experienced in almost 5 years of play ... but it might introduce some interesting OXP possibilities.

In some way this was possible in the past. When Little Bear wrote asteroid storm he changed the default station role for that system from the current to 'none' on failure. That worked, because there existed no ship with that role and no station was added. Current Oolite has all kind of backup mechanisms to assure a station is found. At the end it falls back on the build-in ones. You could exclude a special role from this backup system. e.g. with a given role "NO_MAIN_STATION" don't try to add backup station.

The old role 'none' was a bit dangerous for this purpose as there are also oxps that added a 'none' role to ships. guess what happened....

A thought ...if one wanted to oxp a changed ooniverse where there were different main stations in all the systems, just for fun say, then what is being proposed as a change would close the door on that possibility.

Ummm...if you engineers are looking for something to change to increase oxp possibilities then perhaps maybe start with things people have requested to be enhanced?