Oolite Bulletins

maik wrote: ↑Fri Jan 15, 2021 3:20 pm

montana05 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 15, 2021 11:59 am

It's been some years

It has, great job!

The wiki page mentions a mission OXP, Spylarn, which I never came across. Has anyone heard more about it? Was there ever a release?

The wiki page history has this note: 13:32, 16 October 2010‎ Maik . . (940 bytes) (-45)‎ . . (→‎Download Link: changed download link of old version to point to box.net. Also repackaged the RAR compressed OXP as ZIP compressed as this is more common.)

There is a brief discussion here: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=22140#p22140.

Milinks last logged in a year and a half ago. His last post was 4 years earlier. Tinker, who also worked on it, disappeared in 2014, around the time of Milink's last post.

It took a bit longer than expected but SIRF V 2.60 is now available on the expansion manger, links and further details could be found at S.I.R.F. wiki

montana05 wrote: ↑Sat Feb 13, 2021 7:05 am

SIRF V 2.60 is now available

SIRF introduces some Geko-a-like with lasers far more powerful than a stock Military laser and shields more effective than military shields.
SIRF gets removed from my system.
These events are not unrelated.

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 12:20 am

montana05 wrote: ↑Sat Feb 13, 2021 7:05 am

SIRF V 2.60 is now available

SIRF introduces some Geko-a-like with lasers far more powerful than a stock Military laser and shields more effective than military shields.
SIRF gets removed from my system.
These events are not unrelated.

Better than a single military laser ? Certainly, with 4 front lasers, beam combined with military lasers, there is a lot of firepower. Please note that 4 lasers overheat soon as well. All shield improvements are set to 0, so I am not sure from where this strong defense is coming.

montana05 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 12:25 pm

Better than a single military laser ? Certainly, with 4 front lasers, beam combined with military lasers, there is a lot of firepower. Please note that 4 lasers overheat soon as well. All shield improvements are set to 0, so I am not sure from where this strong defense is coming.

Whatever it is, it's effective. Certainly not what I signed up for in an interesting sounding station type. (I can't see the one-line description from the add-in manager any more, since the OXZ is gone.)

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 1:26 pm

montana05 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 12:25 pm

Better than a single military laser ? Certainly, with 4 front lasers, beam combined with military lasers, there is a lot of firepower. Please note that 4 lasers overheat soon as well. All shield improvements are set to 0, so I am not sure from where this strong defense is coming.

Whatever it is, it's effective. Certainly not what I signed up for in an interesting sounding station type. (I can't see the one-line description from the add-in manager any more, since the OXZ is gone.)

The idea of this Gecko was strong offense and close to no defense for some kind of balance. Do you have by any chance N-Shilds installed ? This OXP sometimes awards "Extra Energy Units" even if the shipdata.plist restricts it.

montana05 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 12:25 pm

Certainly, with 4 front lasers, beam combined with military lasers, there is a lot of firepower.

Crikey! And I thought the Green Gecko was extreme, with its double-barrelled (over/under) military laser!

montana05 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 1:35 pm

Do you have by any chance N-Shilds installed ? This OXP sometimes awards "Extra Energy Units" even if the shipdata.plist restricts it.

I'll check. I'm just in the OXZ manager to check if SIRF mentions these

cody wrote:

"crikey!"

monsters in the "oneliner" description. They're not mentioned, in the main screen, or on the "i" screen.
Nope, no "N-shields"
What is mentioned is that the SIRFs are found in "systems with reasonably safe governments". So, you have a reasonably safe government, and a non-governmental entity allowed to have something like a full-on military assault rifle. Manned by a psychopath I might add - I was never doing anything threatening like flying in vaguely the direction of the SIRF - I've got passengers to deliver to a schedule, not systems to explore (yet).
If you want your killer ships, that's fine. Someone on a mission to have fights would probably love picking a fight with them in a pimped-down Adder with a port-flank pea-shooter. But they don't seem associated with a space station that is restricted to "reasonably safe governments". They sound like something to go into a distinct OXZ. If your station OXZ were loaded without the putative "GeckoDragon OXZ" give them a defence force of (say) stock Ferdies with fore-and-aft MilLasers from the base game. Or only allow the SIRFs to go into (say) Dictatorships/ Anarchies if the "GeckoDragon OXZ" is also loaded?
How closely integrated are the killer ships to the SIRFs? Is there some story element or mission that requires them - which also isn't mentioned in the "oneliner"?
Hmmm, while nosing around in the OXZ manager, there's another chocolate fireguard cluttering up the furnishings. Having a URL for the OXZ's wiki page is a fine idea - but there doesn't seem to be a way to get the URL into the clipboard, or to launch the browser with the URL. That's ... well, it's an SEP. I'll try to find the relevant thread for that. Meanwhile, manually entering the wiki link to check what you say there ...

Wiki wrote:

brought back to life by Montana05, October 2020

Oh, sorry, I hadn't realise you're in resuscitation mode on someone else's code.
How difficult does it look to be to separate the "station" parts of the OXZ from the

cody wrote:

"crikey!"

ships. Or, for that matter, the other two ships. The Wiki page hints at something else going on with "Space Security Group (SSG) ", and the "slave surplices" sounds like there is something else going on there too. So there seem to be 6 things going on in this OXZ (3 ships, 1 station, SSG and the slavery element), but the OXZ manager description only implies the station and "trading" elements (part of the "slavery" story, or the SSG?) And that ... divergence between short description and the reality is what irked me.
Is the OXZ a "ships" one, a "mission" one, a "dockables" one? My expectation was a dockable, and my rear shields got incinerated very unexpectedly.

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 6:00 pm

Having a URL for the OXZ's wiki page is a fine idea - but there doesn't seem to be a way to get the URL into the clipboard, or to launch the browser with the URL.

The URL is copied to the clipboard automatically when you press "i" to enter the OXZ's information screen.

another_commander wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 6:27 pm

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 6:00 pm

Having a URL for the OXZ's wiki page is a fine idea - but there doesn't seem to be a way to get the URL into the clipboard, or to launch the browser with the URL.

The URL is copied to the clipboard automatically when you press "i" to enter the OXZ's information screen.

Not under Linux. It seems to be more complex than one would hope, requiring different approaches under different systems.

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 6:00 pm

How difficult does it look to be to separate the "station" parts of the OXZ from the

cody wrote:

"crikey!"

ships.

Actually this has already been done. The resulting OXZ was never intended for a public release of any sort. Just something made to fit into my Ooniverse. Always liked the S.I.R.F. It was my suggestion that lead to its resurrection over in the "Lost OXP" thread. With all due respect to what montana05 has done with said resurrection his vision of it did not match mine so v2.60 got TWEAKED. The Gecko Dragon ships are gone (as active ships, the wreck is still there) as are the variable station tech levels. There are probably other things that got changed as well that have slipped my mind at the moment. My version has been play tested only by myself so there might be a few bugs that a different eye could catch.

What would be the preferred method of proceeding here? Keep it to myself? Post it up somewhere so that montana05 could have a look at it? If he approved could that lead to some sort of limited and/or general distribution? The code for v2.60 belongs to him at the moment. All these humble hands did was cut and paste and rearrange some of that code to make a version that fits into my Ooniverse. No toes are to be stepped on by me. In an instance like this please take the lead. Following is a good thing in these situations.

Also keep the following in mind. TWEAKING stuff is all that my abilities allow for. Cut and paste code, read code, move code around, that is all manageable. Starting with a blank page and creating something from scratch is still way beyond me with JavaScript. A .plist might be doable from scratch but it would take forever. Still working an a ship release that got mentioned more than two years ago. Granted that ship release also involved graphics but... digression. The point of this paragraph is that if my vision of S.I.R.F. v2.60 did get any sort of release there are no skills here to maintain it. That would, hopefully, fall to someone with better code fu then myself.

Likewise, my programming skills only ever really got exercised in an in-house graphics programming language, probably most closely related to BASIC. I've tried levering open the portals of OOP about 4 times in the last couple of decades and I know I just don't get it. When I last studied programming in a classroom, OOP was a theoretical thing which the PhD candidates played with on their PDP-11. SmallTalk, wasn't it? This thing of gathering multiple types of activity into one block of code still seems just wrong.

I could tweak a second version, lets call it SIRF Redux for now. Replacing the Geckos with core-ships is easily done, the same for the variable station tech levels. Probably Night Owls version got most included already. Are there any other modifications you would like to see ?

Regarding the explanation in the expansion manager, I usually use it as a (very) short description while the wiki page offers all details.

Nite Owl wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 10:45 pm

What would be the preferred method of proceeding here? Keep it to myself? Post it up somewhere so that montana05 could have a look at it? If he approved could that lead to some sort of limited and/or general distribution? The code for v2.60 belongs to him at the moment.

The entire OXP is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so you are welcome to tweak and modify whatever you like. As mentioned before I will be happy to publish (and maintain) a second, better fitting to the core-game, version based on your tweaks since it seems there is demand for that.

montana05:

Check your Private Messages. A download link for my "Station Only" version of S.I.R.F. is there - v2.60no. Looking forward to what you think of it. Thank You in advance for your time and effort.