Oolite Bulletins

Ahruman wrote:

I don’t see the logic in lumping them together, since they’re entirely unrelated.

Perhaps to programmers they are. To me they are both groups of commands used for programming and contain within their name the name of an island mainly known for growing coffee

Ahruman wrote:

I’m not a huge fan of JavaScript, but seriously… compared to the plist scripts it’s incredibly sane.

That's another problem

But besides being insane plist scripts also have the advantage to me that I sat down and learned how to do them when I had the time to do so.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

Why is that my Nihilistic brother?

I guess that the nihilist answer to just about anything done or not is simply because that's what I feel like. (the same could be said if I at some time decided to break the fictitious oath). I started out learning Basic then I switched to machine code programming for the Zilog Z-80 (writing hex codes with pencil and paper using a manual and a handwritten decimal to hex table). I thought that programming was a great art - until I was introduced to structured programming (Pascal or whatever it was called) where oceans of resources were wasted. It made me sick, and my love was forever lost.

Since then I've only done a little very simple html until I discovered Oolite and had to learn making plists because of the DIY spirit of the community. A spirit which made it too embarrassing to ask others to produce those OXPs I found missing (and ceause I wanted to dis religion, communism and capitalism).

blah blah blah. CUT!

Have to agree with the Doc there. Although I've turned out a few faily complex OXPs I have no idea how to programe at all, and the only "programing" I have ever attempted was the old style scripts for Oolite OXPs. I figured it out "empiricly" mainly by asking a lot of questions on the BB and looking at Giles's native .plists and the .plists of Murgh, Wombat and other authors. I made no attempt to write an OXP until I'd played loads of missions and made Deadly.

I knew (for example) that Murgh must have "done somthing" to make his HoOpy scripts happen only when you were at a Casio from playing the game. So when I wanted a script to do somthing only I a specific station I looked at Murgh's script. I knew Wombat had "done somthing" to space out his news broadcasts in Deposed.

I'd sort of figured stuff out to do all the things I wanted to in the OXPs I submitted, but the new Java stuff looks really scary!

Its no bad thing though. Oolites a growing project and people contribute as the urge takes them and stop when they get tired of fiddling. The project however carries on!

@Doc. I think (somewhere on the boards) Daljit posted the script (in .plist form) for my Asteroid Storm Mission alongside the script to do exactly the same thing in the new Java type thing. I can see that the new version is much more compact and efficant, but I found it very hard to understand (cos I'm a moran as far as programing is concerned ). But having a look might help if your trying to work out how to do stuff using the new system.

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=2784 is the link to the comparison between plists and javascript.

From my point of view the new system is far preferable to the old but then I'm essentially a newbie and haven't 'grown up' with plists. That and I'm a java programmer! Lol.

I do intend to provide some more side-by-side translations (ideally, all of the built-in scripts, for starters) and a detailed explanation of everything that’s going on.

I think most everybody who has/wants to write some scripts would really appreciate that, big A...

D-H and A are quite right. Its just a question of relearning stuff. Just that in the Real World, I've just sent 8 hours on line doing my CPD hours to understand the Fraud Act. As far as I can tell this is another New Labour waste of time redefining most of the Theft Act with different words!

A's new scripting methods (unlike the Fraud Act!) actually improve things rather than just changing things for the sake of it, but they do need you to relearn things. And I've only so much free time (due to trying to keep up with an average of 100 new laws a week from the UK govenment as well as trying to practice law, Oolite, and family!). I do think though that the new methods are better, if you are learning from scratch!

Of course I appreciate the work being put into a new and more mainstream way of producing OXPs. I hope that it will give us a lot of new expansions.

Unfortunately I don't have the time to learn this new way in the foreseeable future.

I second that - Javascript looks to be a good thing as is seems more flexible and efficient, it's just that it's yet another syntax to have to learn. I find it so difficult to spot the errors even in binary plists that I actually do everying in an XML editor so I can validate as I go along. Somehow the angle brackets and array lists seem less daunting to the non-programmer than the mass of punctuation you get in the binaries.

“Binaries”? I’ve yet to see an OXP use the binary plist format. It’s really not very user-editable. :-)

One advantage of JavaScript is that you get precise error messages specifying which line of which file is a problem.