Sorry, the weekend has been long and there was a lot going on here since I last visited. Also it took some time to write this. So, after the distraction that ended in a thread of its own, here is now my ultimative an-answer-to-all-of-it monster-post to Wolfspirit's suggestions.
Wolfspirit wrote:Ultimate Elite (Oolite)(IMHO)
Now that's another impressive list of wishes and suggestions. Some of them have been suggested and discussed before, some would easily find a lot of supporters, some will meet doubts or resistance.
But I'd like to add my thoughts one by one.
Wolfspirit wrote:Random mission generator: combination UPS missions random bounties and millitary missions ect
UPS and millitary missions should continue the same way although they should be more common
Bounties: a random list of bounties available in system and galactic wide, these bounties could be marked in a special way by having thier ships "tagged" specially such as Villan or wanted
For now the UPS-missions are there. There is also
SpecialEvents.oxp, by now only as a raw draft on my harddisk. It won't see the light of the Ooniverse anytime soon, I'm afraid. But it's there and in progress. More on that below.
And the idea of having random bounty-hunting missions is the very core and ignition of
Anarchies.oxp, which in the process of writing has developed into the most complex OXP to date. You should definitively play it when you have arrived in Galaxy 7.
And for the rest of it,
the gang has been quite busy over the weekend.
In general I support the demand of having more missions, especially "small" missions, like special deliveries. Just for the excitement of having a mission screen popping up every once in a while, when I dock at a station. We all have to admit that "normal" trading can become a little bit boring when you have done it long enough.
Wolfspirit wrote:Multiple Planets per system:
anywhere from 1 to 10 planets (possibly multiple stations as well)
Planet fall:
Id like to be able to land on planets and do some hunting and mining ect. maybe collect furs and pelts ect or set up a mining rig
The simple equation 1 system = 1 sun = 1 planet is a heritage of the old Elite. In Oolite planets can (relatively) easily be added, and it has been done before. There are a couple of OXPs that add planets (or moons) in specific systems, like
Diso.oxp (includes also an additional station),
Lave.oxp or
Tianve.oxp. There is of course
Assassins.oxp, that makes use of this feature a lot. I myself have added two planets to a system in Galaxy 3 in Ghosts_from_the_past.oxp (WIP). Admittedly this is a long step away from having multiple planets in
every system, but it's a beginning, and scripters are free to reshape more parts of the Ooniverse.
One thing should be clear, however: Having multiple planets does not in any way mean that the result will be a working planetary system. Oolite is not
Celestia, although even that has been on the wishlist before. First of all, the Ooniverse is completely out of scale, as far as distances and speeds are concerned. In a realistic planetary system simulator you never would
see much of the other planets (as little as you see the other planets from Earth: tiny, tiny dots), and it would take ages to travel between them, so in-system trade would be very boring. Second of all, in the Ooniverse all system bodies, suns, planets, moons, are fixed to each other. No movement, no orbiting, Kepler would be very disappointed. Whenever you enter a system, the sun, the original planet and all additional planets and moons are exactly at the same position.
The possibility to actually land on planets has been on the wishlist before, too, and I agree that it would be a nice feature. Especially as you even now can approach planets and see atmospheric changes. I guess it is mainly a question of lack of programmer-manpower that we are not likely to see this implemented.
Wolfspirit wrote:Greater diversity in Commerce:
Id Like to see more diverse cargo for trade:
a few examples are:
Construction Materials
Copper
Silver
Ship parts(can be trated for repairs at stations to build up repair credit maybe?)
Rare Gem Stones
Weapons grade Gem stones (some of the most powerful lasers we have are using diamonds and rubies as focusing lenses)
Along with this id like to see greater fluxuations in prices.(perhaps a sub routine can be written in the commerse portion that can create a "demand for certain goods or a surplus" due to bad planetary weather or a rich harvest ect ect)
Also a 127 unit limit OUCH!!!!!!!!!! sometimes ill gather more than that in gems gold and platinum in 1 battle with pirates so that needs to be increased
Having more trading commodities has also been asked for before. The simple answer to this is that it is not going to happen, because of the Elite legacy, which consists of exactly the commodities that are also present in Oolite. And if you don't want to replace some of the existing commodities with new ones, which would create new gaps in order to fill the existing gaps, you also have to deal with the simple fact that the commodity screen is full. There is no space for adding anything. (Keep in mind that currently there is no scrolling mechanism for any of the screens!)
There are, however, a couple of ways to expand the somehow limited trading mechanism with scripts. (And, by the way, the mechanism has already been expanded since the days of Elite by adding the contract screen with passenger- and cargo-contracts! These simply didn't exist in classic Elite.) Scriptable expansions make use of the mission screen instead of messing with the commodities screen.
UPS-Courier.oxp and
Oo-Haul.oxp are two examples of this kind.
There also exists the embryo of an OXP that scripts a greater fluctuation of prices, influenced by disasters, temporarily rised demands or surplusses, called SpecialEvents.oxp, on my harddisk. This also will work by using the mission screen instead of changing the commodity screen. The basic idea
has been discussed on the board and is that by any of a number of randomly chosen events the price of one commodity in a certain system temporarily drops or rises. If you are fast enough to reach the system before things normalize, you can make a good profit. I guess, however, that it will still take some time until the OXP is ready.
Anyway, there is another limiting factor to too much price fluctuation, and that is the basic formulas by which the prices and quantities are calculated.
There is a lengthy survey of these formulas, if you want to know the details. The bottom line is that all prices always have to be in a range of 0.0...102.0, there will never be more than 63 units of a commodity available in any market and no market can take more than 127 units of a commodity at any given time. But within these boundaries and with an intelligent choice of values in commodities.plist we can do amazing things. I myself, once I had really understood how the markets work in Oolite, have made my peace with it.
Wolfspirit wrote: Cargo Containers ( i love the different containers thanks for that cargo and wrecks OXP) but id like for each type of cargo to have its own style of container. You dont see meats packed the same way as you see plumbing supplies.(trust me i work in warehousing)not even the long distance cargo ship containers are different.
No objections against this one. All you shipdesigners: Design more cargopods!
Wolfspirit wrote: Salvage: id like to see more than just alloys drift away from blown up ships. parts would be great and this would take care of everyone wanting to salvage the entire ship.(just flying along on my trade run trying to make enough money so i can get those docking computers i so desperately need! so i can start working on my injectors and ECM system! and lo and behold theres a galcorp viper ripping apart a fugitive in a cobra mkIII so i jump in to help out (being the law abiding citizen i am armed with my trusty beam laser)not to mention im hoping to get that kill shot in for the bounty) BOOM up goes the cobra and i get to scoop up the few containers of cargo and the ship pieces and WOW i get a working ECM out of the deal too ready for install once i dock!
The idea of salvaging ships has been around for quite a while. Up to now it has lead to nothing, as far as the player salvaging complete ships is concerned. In
Anarchies.oxp there will be Salvage Gangs, special asteroids, inhabited by salvagers who semi-legally take old ships apart and sell whatever spare parts are still usable, for a bargain price. They even offer the possibility with a littte bit of luck to clean your legal record, by installing a new transponder to your ship, whose former owner ...eerm... doesn't need it anymore. But of course you could also be unlucky, if said former owner happens to be Mac Ducky the Copslayer. I think you get the idea.
Shooting working equipment out of another ship may be a tempting idea for somebody who is desperately trying to build up enough capital to buy the most coveted upgrades for his ship (read: any noob), but, trust a veteran trader with more than 4 million credits in his possession (read: me) on this one: over the course of time money is simply not an issue. It just comes in and mounts up. And after you have spent what may look to you as an horrible amount of it for your dream-ride and whatever it can be maxed out with, it still just comes in and mounts up. You will, sooner than you expect, reach the stage where you can do absolutely nothing anymore with all your money. Then you will come back here and plead for purchasable, customized planets. And Slartibartfast will answer with a heart-warming little speech about fjords. No, seriously, there is no shortcut to getting equipment (except perhaps the
Bank of the Black Monks, but woe to him who doth not pay back his loan (and interest!) in time!).
And last but not least: Simply for the sake of realism (realism? hey, we are talking about a space trade and combat game here, with intergalactic jumps! realism?!), yes, simply for the sake of what little realism there has to be in a game like Oolite: Scooping a working ECM from a ship you (or somebody else, for that matter) just blew up? No! I mean, you wouldn't earnestly expect to salvage a working auto pilot from an airplane that just crashed, would you? Even if you take the whole mechanical and electronical mess to Emmit's Fix-It Shop. No way! What you get off a wreckage is ... wreckage. And a bit of its cargo, if you're lucky. If you happen to be Robinson Crusoe and your vessel was made out of wood, you will be able to salvage some wood and probably build a hut from it. If the vessel was made out of metal (which a space ship probably is), you will salvage alloys. Period.
Wolfspirit wrote: Stations: Id like to be able to actually walk around the station go to the trade market the ship yard ect perhaps some simple overhead graphics like in the style of command and conquer star craft ect.
Nice idea. Has my vote. As with much of the innovative stuff LittleBear can lean back and say "been there, done that". Just play
Assassins.oxp to find out why.
Wolfspirit wrote: Casino's:id like to see some more games at the Hoopy's im sure there are some free slot games n stuff on the net you could download and convert into the Hoopy OXP.
May be a good and feasible idea. I don't know. I don't have Hoopy.oxp installed. I like to keep the Aegis clean of too much things going on (question of personal taste).
Wolfspirit wrote: Equipment: i know i put some of this in the original post but some things werent explained i guess and cargo space for equipment was one of them using a real simple picture here
( frnt/pilot[******cargo hold******]Engines ) thats your base ship everything in the ship has its own space now when you start adding things that are big say like witch drive injectors which require more room because although they probably arent that big they still require space say like taking your standard 2 barrel carberator off your engine and adding a fully blown 4 barrel with turbo thats alot of equipment to put in the same space as that 2 barrel you just took off so you usually end up cutting holes in the hood of your car to accomidate this new gear. but thats kinda hard to do in a space ship so you have to take that extra room from some where hence using cargo space now im not saying that every piece of equipment will or should take 1 full ton or more but like the injectors should take say like 0.20 tons. so you end up with this ( frnt/pilot[***cargo hold***]WDI/Engines ) hope this makes sense to you all.
The picture makes sense to me (read: I understand what you are outlining here), but the underlying idea still doesn't. I think this is a misconception of what the ships look like internally. If you compare the size of the cargo hold to the size and total mass of the ships, in most cases you see that the cargo hold takes a relatively small portion of the ship's volume. In fact I would expect the engine and the components connected to it to take up the bulge of a ship's mass and volume anyway. So a ship is not basically an empty hull (= cargo bay) where you have to mount your equipment somewhere, thereby reducing the empty space (= cargo space) in that hull.
Secondly, the number and range of extra equipment and upgrades for ships in the Ooniverse is quite limited. How many possible installments do we have? Something in the range of 15, isn't it? Now I cannot imagine the people of e.g. Cowell & MgRath's not taking all of these into consideration. So I always assumed that all ships come off the production line with mountings for all possible upgrades. Why should each and every ship have to be customized with making room in the cargo bay for a docking computer or an ECM, when virtually every pilot will purchase and fit these devices? Makes no sense to me. And by the way, many of the upgrades have to be linked directly to existing basic components of the ship, so again you wouldn't put them somewhere in your cargo bay. Therefore I think that there are slots for all the upgrades built into the ship. You just have to fill them after time. So again I have to reject the idea of exchanging cargo space for equipment.
Wolfspirit wrote: I would also like to see different grades of equipment so it will allow greater diversity in ships because most pirates arent going to have top of the line stuff in thier stolen and salvaged ships (some might though)
What do you have in mind here? Can you give some examples? There is already at least some equipment that comes in different shades, like the Extra Energy Unit/Naval Energy Unit. Or the shield upgrades, of which you can install either or both. Surely we could think of this kind of diversity for other items as well.
I also thought of the possibility that you could buy second hand equipment at Salvage Gangs, that would come for a cheap price, but without a warranty. E.g. an ECM that doesn't work all the time, or items that fail completely after a certain amount of time, or randomly. The problem is that all these new (or modified and therefore new as entries) items and their altered behaviour would have to be hard-coded. One could, with a lot of effort, probably script the random failure of equipment that has been purchased from a Salvage Gang (hmmm, perhaps I'll try this!), but there is no way to make an ECM not work on let's say every third keystroke in a script.
Wolfspirit wrote: Engines:Different grades of Engines ex. your basic cobramk 3 that a newbie gets gives you a base speed of 0.350 LS now say there were 5 classes of engines class 1 Engines in a cobra MkIII gives a base speed of 0.350 class 2 is 0.365 class 3 is 0.380 and so on. I would love to get one of my Commanders Anaconda up to a whopping 0.250 LS!!!!!!!
You could probably do this. But my feeling is that the result should not be faster ships. So in the example of the CobraIII only class 5 should give a speed of 0.35LS, and class 1 be considerably slower!
The speeds, as they are, are more or less balanced. There are a few ships where there have been questionmarks, but generally because they were found to be
too fast, not too slow. And as tempting it could be to have super-fast Anaconda, it makes no sense. A huge ship is a huge ship is a huge ship. Therefore it is sluggy. Anything else would be cheating. And you could do
that just by manipulating your shipdata.plist. No need for changes to the program.
As for the general idea of having engine upgrades: Yes, it could be a good idea for all of us who have already all the extras fitted and are desperately seeking new ways of spending the ever-increasing amount of credits we are burdened with.
Wolfspirit wrote: Witch Drive Injectors: hmmmm maybe 2 types the standards now could be like supers since they out run missiles and have a new standard which uses less fuel but puts the ship at about 0.001 LS faster than a missile for those commanders that want to try thier hands as shooting missiles down? and call the ones that are in use now Turbo WDI's?
I think this one is a special case of the more general category of having equipment in different grades and shades. So, as above: yes, why not?
Wolfspirit wrote: ECM: i think the current ECM system is great and i dont want one that is going to destroy ECM hardened missiles automatically. But how about multi-Pulse ECM so you hit your ECM and its goes PULSE...1...2...3...PULSE...1...2...3...PULSE!!! this would go along the same guides as the standard ECM i.e. same chances as the standard ECM against ECM hardened missiles and the same energy drain for each triggering of the ECM so youd deffinately have to make sure youve got plenty of energy banks!
Ditto.
Wolfspirit wrote: Laser Cooling Equipment: Now i know that this is a topic of some controversy and i suggested it earlier in my first post in this thread but bare with me: 1st Alloy Cooling fins: special fins fitted to the laser increasing the overall standard cooling of your laser by %05. Liquid Laser cooling system: Chambers and tubes of super cool liquids fitted to the laser to provide rapid cooling of the weapon giving an increased cooling rate of %12. Since both these systems are external thay cant be used together so you get either %5 or %12 not a combined %17 and they should be EXSPENSIVE say 5000cr for the fins and 25000cr for the liquid system. this wouldnt give either NPC pirates or the players too much of an advantage but it will IMO make the game more interesting.
No, it
would give the NPCs the advantage. NPCs don't have money at all and don't need to "pay" anything for extra equipment. They just randomly have it. So you would encounter
a lot of pirates with laser cooling, before you could even
think of affording this expensive piece of equipment yourself.
The bottom line still is: Learn how to aim and shoot without missing! Don't waste your laser fire! That's all you need.
Wolfspirit wrote: Extra Energy cells(banks): I think you should be able to add extra Energy banks to your ship (yes im a cargo space hog) at the cost of sacrificing some cargo space. so basically a player will be able to slowly take is standard Cobra MkIII and get it to the level of a super cobra. Now these arent the same as the Energy Units which i believe are the generators.
Apart from the "at the cost of sacrificing some cargo space"-part: yes, why not? Although, honestly, the number of energy banks doesn't mean too much in Oolite. You don't really need your energy for anything, except the ECM and the cloaking device (not sure about the latter, but I think so). And, of course, if your shields have drained completely, fire on your ship eats your energy until you're dead. But for
that purpose four or six banks really make hardly any difference, as a single bank can absorb just very few hits.
Wolfspirit wrote: Chaff and flare System: for those PESKY ECM Hardened missiles that JUST WONT DIE!
This is an idea I like! Designers, listen up! Wouldn't it be a nice challenge to make this work?
It goes without saying, though, that each load would take up one missile slot, doesn't it?
Wolfspirit wrote:This is a question is the advanced space compass ever going to work for v1.65?
And this is the answer: Yes. It always has worked for 1.65. The default key is '\'. It displays the location of the planet, the sun, the station beacon, the witchpoint beacon or any scripted beacons in your space compass, toggling between them in exactly this order.
But perhaps you mean the Advanced Navigational Array, not the Advanced Space Compass? In that case the answer would be: No, of course not. The ANA is not a part of the code of v1.65. And if the necessary code would be added to v1.65, it wouldn't be v1.65 anymore, would it? So, no.
