Oolite Bulletins

Posted: **Sat Jun 16, 2007 10:01 am**

Ahruman wrote:
I recently used Secret Developer Powers

i Guees those Secret Developer Powers is a mac version only, looks kind a handy instead of having me putting beacons on ships and go chase them in order to look how texture looks ingame....

To bad i´m on PC...

Posted: **Sat Jun 16, 2007 10:54 am**

You killed a Balrog just with ordinary lasers!

Thats strange. I gave it energy 50,000 and recharge 100 (same as a station), so I thought it would be invincible to anything except a Q-mine (which in the mission won't work due to the Minesweepers) or the special missile (with weapon energy 9999999).

In the mission the Balrog (has the role victim9) is in the middle of the system being attacked by loads of Iron Ass rebel Cobra Njxs and Areon Class Friggates. Take you a while to get there ((as the govenment Navy have cloak jammers and fuel disrupters disabling your fuel injectors) and in playtesting the rebels never got him, they were just cannon fodder for its 12 plasma turrets. I playtested this one a lot to make sure I hadn't made it too hard for the player (loads of Plasma Sentry Drones, Mongoose Fighters and Scorpion Frigates are present with AIs to attack both the player and the rebels). Odd!

I'd vote for being able to specify that a thing can be made invunerable. Shoudn't be used for ships, but extra stations orbiting extra planets should really have the same strength as the main station. BTW when testing the special missile I orginally gave it normal missile AI and it was able to blow up the main station!

You can't buy the special missile in game. You have to go to the abandoned rebel outpost and explore the station on foot (with a retro text adventure using the mission screen) and find it.

Posted: **Sat Jun 16, 2007 11:06 am**

Using all the lasers on rotation didn’t give it much change to recover. Keeping at a good range let me live. :-) (Not hard – turrets activate at about 5 km, it’s easy to hit from 25 km.)

Yes, the Secret Developer Powers are Mac-only (because it would take at least ten times as long to implement in a cross-platform way). I might actually make them available through an “enabling OXP” in future testing releases, but again Mac-only.

However, a script to make your ship appear by the station when you launch isn’t hard:

Code: Select all

// Configuration
this.role = "griff_krait_rich_pirate";
this.count = 3;

// Standard attributes
this.name           = "Spawn-" + this.role;
this.author         = "Jens Ayton";
this.copyright      = "This script is hereby placed in the public domain.";

this.version        = "1.0.2";
this.description    = "Script to make several ships of a given role appear at the witchpoint after every jump.";


this.willLaunch = function()
{
	var existing = system.countShipsWithRole(this.role);
	var count = this.count - existing;
	if (count > 0)
	{
		system.legacy_addSystemShips(this.role, count, 1.0);
		LogWithClass("shipTest.spawn", "Generated " + count + " " + this.role + " for testing purposes.");
	}
	else
	{
		LogWithClass("shipTest.notSpawn", "Not generating any " + this.role + " -- there are already " + existing + " in system.");
	}
}

(Name it script.js and dump it in your AddOns folder. Requires 1.68; can’t be bothered to find the plist equivalent.)

Edit: Actually, for just texture testing, you can use demoships.plist. Press left arrow on the demo screen (“Press Space to Continue”) to go to the end of the demo ship list; if you remove all other OXPs, this will be your ship.)

Posted: **Sat Jun 16, 2007 11:13 am**

That would explain it. In the mission though you woudn't have time to do this though and would need the special missile, as the Balrog has a hugh number of Mongoose fighters and Plasma Sentrys escorting it (spawned within 25km of the Balrog and the Drones are basically like a missile - 0.75LM vitually no shield but with a plasma turret and AIs to attack both rebels and the player). They'll rip your shields to bits in a matter of seconds, so you need to get a missile lock and get out of dodge pretty fast!

EDIT: Looked at your screenies and saw you'd spawned it with the role balrog. This is a test version (which I should have deleted) and only has energy of 8000 and a recharge of 3 (so can be destroyed). I used this one whilst developing to test the ships death_actions and it was working right as a ship before tweaking it into the mission ship. The version used in the mission is "victim9". The low-energy version does not normally appear in game. Guess that was how you were able to get him!

Posted: **Wed Jun 20, 2007 9:49 am**

Ahruman wrote:
yes, the invulnerability of the main station is hard-coded. The ability to make specific entities invulnerable might be useful, but could also lead to a new überness escalation. Comments?

Probably not quite what you mean, but I honestly think it would be pleasant to give each entity a Q bomb-effect Y/N parameter. It's not just asteroids and canisters and things; for example, Sidewinders and Vipers don't have witchdrives, but I'm willing to bet they get destroyed in a Q bomb blast too. Same with all the various transports and other non-WS ships. It's fun from a game perspective to destroy everything, but all horribly inconsistent.

But what I think would be more fun... imagine if the blast wave caused massive damage, but did not auto-destroy non-witchdrive ships. Then a means to beating certain missions could be to pilot in a non-witchspace capable ship, and take sufficiently little damage before you could drop a Q bomb so that the blast wouldn't kill you (but if you'd been careless and taken too much damage already, it would). But of course if there were any other non-WS capable ships there, you'd still have to high-tail it out before they recovered enough to hunt you down...

It could even be possible to script a mission where you follow another ship through their wormhole, destroy the target, then have to return back to the drop-point in time or wind up stranded in that system... until you could get close enough to another random ship that was jumping out. (Which might cause a penalty because it would take you longer to get back to the station where the mission was based from.) Or perhaps be carried there and back in a larger ship, like a Behemoth.

I bet there are lots of other clever strategic things you could do with it too...

Posted: **Wed Jun 20, 2007 11:21 am**

Pause wrote:
But what I think would be more fun... imagine if the blast wave caused massive damage, but did not auto-destroy non-witchdrive ships. Then a means to beating certain missions could be to pilot in a non-witchspace capable ship, and take sufficiently little damage before you could drop a Q bomb so that the blast wouldn't kill you (but if you'd been careless and taken too much damage already, it would). But of course if there were any other non-WS capable ships there, you'd still have to high-tail it out before they recovered enough to hunt you down...

It could even be possible to script a mission where you follow another ship through their wormhole, destroy the target, then have to return back to the drop-point in time or wind up stranded in that system... until you could get close enough to another random ship that was jumping out. (Which might cause a penalty because it would take you longer to get back to the station where the mission was based from.) Or perhaps be carried there and back in a larger ship, like a Behemoth.

I bet there are lots of other clever strategic things you could do with it too...

Alas though, the ships which are not jump-capable are NPC only. The only way to get one is to use the illicit-unlock.oxp, but this adds a hyperdrive to the ship.

Captain Hesperus

Posted: **Wed Jun 20, 2007 11:38 am**

Captain Hesperus wrote:
Alas though, the ships which are not jump-capable are NPC only. The only way to get one is to use the illicit-unlock.oxp, but this adds a hyperdrive to the ship.

Bugger, I forgot.

Well, if someone was being really adventurous, they could script a mission that included a special transport ship so you were meant to do it that way...

Edit: The point about not all enemy ships getting destroyed, though? It would be a very cool way of taking down a lot of pirate ships without necessarily damaging any Vipers... but if there were any innocent traders caught up, or even worse, a Behemoth too close to the blast, the result may be something akin to taking a tennis racket to a beehive!

Posted: **Wed Jun 20, 2007 2:04 pm**

Pause wrote:
the result may be something akin to taking a tennis racket to a beehive!

More like a cricket bat to a hornet's nest. Bees die after they sting, hornets (like Vipers) just keep stinging!!

Captain Hesperus

Posted: **Wed Jun 20, 2007 4:33 pm**

Pause wrote:
Sidewinders and Vipers don't have witchdrives

ironically...I swear I've seen Vipers (and possibly sidewinders...can't remember) use fuel injectors...which (as far as I can tell) require that the ship has whichdrives...although, I'll admit that there's always the possibility that I'm getting confused with other ships (such as the Viper Interceptor)

Posted: **Wed Jun 20, 2007 4:48 pm**

drdenim wrote:
Pause wrote:
Sidewinders and Vipers don't have witchdrives
ironically...I swear I've seen Vipers (and possibly sidewinders...can't remember) use fuel injectors...which (as far as I can tell) require that the ship has whichdrives...although, I'll admit that there's always the possibility that I'm getting confused with other ships (such as the Viper Interceptor)

A ship can have WFI without a hyperdrive, it just means they get a full 7ly worth of injecting.

Captain Hesperus

Posted: **Wed Jun 20, 2007 4:51 pm**

Captain Hesperus wrote:
A ship can have WFI without a hyperdrive, it just means they get a full 7ly worth of injecting.Captain Hesperus

ah..."And all was light"

Posted: **Sun Jul 01, 2007 9:18 am**

Pause wrote:
Edit: The point about not all enemy ships getting destroyed, though? It would be a very cool way of taking down a lot of pirate ships without necessarily damaging any Vipers... but if there were any innocent traders caught up, or even worse, a Behemoth too close to the blast, the result may be something akin to taking a tennis racket to a beehive!

Too easy. Superweapons should have a downside.

In any case, I have so many posts here of people positioning a Q-bomb to take out a station, just for the heck of it. Why deny them that pleasure?

Best wishes,
Oscar

Posted: **Fri Jul 06, 2007 10:36 pm**

I don't even think stations are invulnerable. What about the stations being destroyed when launching an Ixian Battleship?

According to the shipdata.plist a station has a max_energy and an energy_recharge_rate. Both are very high, but that doesn't make the station absolutely invulnerable.

BUT if not properly scripted in an OXP, the game wouldn't remember that this specific station was destroyed, so if you jump into that system the next time, it would be there as if nothing had happened. In that sense main stations are indestructible. (Of course that can be explained with A_H's argument: there are a couple of stations orbiting each planet, we just are led to one of them.)

As far as the Q-bomb and the cascade are concerned: It always struck me as odd that the monuments in Tionisla Orbital Graveyard do cascade. It looks cool, no doubt, but, hey, it's monuments. No witchdrive, no fuel. How can they cascade?

Posted: **Sat Jul 07, 2007 9:43 am**

Commander McLane wrote:
I don't even think stations are invulnerable. What about the stations being destroyed when launching an Ixian Battleship?

The main station is invulnerable. However, it can be sent flying off at great speed.

Posted: **Sat Jul 07, 2007 10:53 am**

Even the main station can be destroyed if you hit it with an object that deals a stupidly high (999999999999999) weapon_energy. This is how the Doomsday Asteroid destroys the main station in AsteroidStorm and the Gravition Missile destroys the Balrog in Assassins. But nothing that normally appears in the game has enough weapons_energy. As CM says though the station will be back next time, unless the OXP script is set to remove it.

Oolite Bulletins

Q-Bomb should destroy stations.