@Ahruman: Update "stderr report"

[Commander McLane]

Well,

Hmmm. Actually I don't know whether it's working. And you don't know, too. Because (that's why I'm insisting on you actually understanding what you are doing) as long as you - due to lack of programming knowledge or whatever - can't compare the input (the plists) to the output (what it does in-game), you can't even tell whether it is working as expected.

Until now, on my system, it is working exactly as intended. As yet. And also as yet, no one has told me otherwise.

It`s the same with Anarchies, isn`t it? Until now, I have not observed problems with it. But that doesn`t mean something couldn`t come up. But until that happens, I`ll say Anarchies works as expected - as yet.

Well, for a start Anarchies was tested thoroughly with and without other OXPs, before I released it. Still, as you said, nothing is fool-proof, and I have indeed recenty discovered a small bug that will cause the Hacker Outpost not to appear in a quarter of all cases. This will be corrected in an upcoming version, which also will fix a small problem which was caused by the transition from 1.70 to 1.71.

The difference is: The amount of testing (pre-release!) I put into Anarchies seems to be considerably bigger than in the case of Realistic Shipyards, while the amount of big words and announcements I made for Anarchies seems to be considerably smaller than in the case of Realistic Shipyards.

I took the Interstellar Explorer as a test ship, jumped around between a few higher and a few lower TL worlds, looked into their equipment docks and shipyards, had a look at the SIRF stations when they appeared, and as a grand finale made a mis-jump to meet with some thargoids. Survived the mis-jump, landed at a station, ended the game.

Everything seemed fine and to work as intended (obviously, as far as can be deduced from the bit flying around & looking).

Just to repeat the obvious: Serious playtesting means that you do the same thing with each and every ship that is made available by your OXP, not only with one test ship! I guess you don't need to go through the complete exercise every time, and you don't need to actually buy each ship, thereby wasting a lot of time just looking for it in a lot of shipyards. Hacking your save-file for giving you a ship is fine. And then you can at least test whether it is actually created around you, with all textures etc., and with all views and lasers working.

This here:

<list of non-player ships>

... must be when the game finds a ship in the shipyard.plist and doesn`t find it in the shipdata.plist. Not much I can do about that, since I won`t merge non-ship-OXPs into this but still want their prices & TL spans rewritten by my OXP.

Is there an alternate solution perhaps for that?

Yes, delete all these shipyard.plist-entries, once and for all. Your argument is wrong, because for ships that don't exist there are no prices or TL-spans. And those ships don't exist.

[LittleBear]

@Lestrade.

This may be why some players are getting empty shipyards a lot. The errors for non-existant ships won't come up if the player has all the OXPs installed but will if the player doesn't have an OXP installed where you have included the shipyard entry in Realistic Shipyards but not in shipdata (obviously if the player has the Original OXP installed Oolite used the entry from the orginal OXP, but without this it generates the error).

I'm not 100% on this, but I think the way Oolite calculates the ships in the ship yard is to add all ships and then remove the ones with too higher / lower tech level. If Oolite has "decided" to put a load of the broken ships into a tech ship yard, then with those OXPs installed the shipyard is populated with these ones. But without them installed you get an empty shipyard.

Its a tricky one, as I can see that its a good plan to have Realistic Shipyards cater for all OXP ships (even the ones not installed), BUT by doing this ships that have a shipyard entry from your OXP but no workable ship (due to no model / texture or shipdata entry - as no OXP installed) will be broken. It shoudn't crash the game, but some odd results in shipyard (and maybe shipLANE as well) population could occour.

[Lestradae]

Hi to both of you!

McLane, your argument ...

Yes, delete all these shipyard.plist-entries, once and for all. Your argument is wrong, because for ships that don't exist there are no prices or TL-spans. And those ships don't exist.

... and LittleBear, your argument ...

Its a tricky one, as I can see that its a good plan to have Realistic Shipyards cater for all OXP ships (even the ones not installed)

are equivalent.

Partially, I am already catering for the problem by merging really all ship OXPs that are 95%+ ONLY shipoxps into the Realistic Shipyards. In the next version, 85 ship OXPs will be merged and only five left which I won`t merge as they are a) still potentially in development and b) have much more stuff inside than just ships (them being, if you want to know, Assassins, Commies, Hotrods, Ionics-1.2.1 & Zz-Oo-Haul).

But as LittleBear said, I want to cater for all ships possible concerning the pricing and so on, and the solution with a "zzzz oxp" was actually Ahruman`s suggestion! Really, if the problem was exclusively that the stderr report shows something I`d shrug it off.

But, there is another problem with the Strict and Standard Edition.

This may be why some players are getting empty shipyards a lot. The errors for non-existant ships won't come up if the player has all the OXPs installed but will if the player doesn't have an OXP installed where you have included the shipyard entry in Realistic Shipyards but not in shipdata (obviously if the player has the Original OXP installed Oolite used the entry from the orginal OXP, but without this it generates the error).

I'm not 100% on this, but I think the way Oolite calculates the ships in the ship yard is to add all ships and then remove the ones with too higher / lower tech level. If Oolite has "decided" to put a load of the broken ships into a tech ship yard, then with those OXPs installed the shipyard is populated with these ones. But without them installed you get an empty shipyard.

I have had this same suspicion for quite some time now and it is the main reason for me discontinuing the Strict and Standard versions of my OXP, before with rising ship count they one day became the Empty Shipyards V1.0.

The next version will simply be an again-expanded Realistic Shipyards V3.01 which will cater for only a few ships outside itself (those of the five semi-dependent OXPs up there) and I will strongly recommend simply also installing those five - all five are good imo anyways.

Just to repeat the obvious: Serious playtesting means that you do the same thing with each and every ship that is made available by your OXP, not only with one test ship! I guess you don't need to go through the complete exercise every time, and you don't need to actually buy each ship, thereby wasting a lot of time just looking for it in a lot of shipyards. Hacking your save-file for giving you a ship is fine. And then you can at least test whether it is actually created around you, with all textures etc., and with all views and lasers working.

Commander McLane, you are, considering the amount of data I put in there, simply asking too much. I have playtested many, many things and I have used the trick with awarding me a ship that costs 1 Cr and is available always and everywhere, and the ships I changed myself were tested as good as from every angle.

But I merged 85 OXPs in there of which I can only hope that they have been tested quite a bit, too. Those of which I knew, suspected or found out to be buggy I repaired (like the NavyStarships which were a pain in the ... for a week until I got them right).

I just happened to want some things in my game or having some things behave more logically in-game and suddenly, to my surprise, found out that I could. So I did. And I thought that perhaps other people might want it too, so I publish it as an OXP, too.

And the RS Ultimate Edition has been downloaded 85 times in four-and-a-half days!

I mean, perhaps the error reports will start flooding in at some point, but until now it`s not even a trickle. Due to your and Ahruman`s feedback (and thanks again for that), I have now squashed all bugs but two that still show up in the stderr log:

One of them seems to be a problem of the core game engine of 1.71.1 as it also shows up with an empty AddOns folder. The other is the no shipdata for shipyard entry thing.

It all boils down to me using my stuff only for myself or of publishing it, and letting the players beta-test them a bit. If then five out of three hundred ships have one or the other hiccup - so be it, and I will fix this ASAP when I`m informed about it.

the amount of big words and announcements I made for Anarchies seems to be considerably smaller than in the case of Realistic Shipyards

Well, I can get quite enthusiastic when I`m fond of something, you mustn`t take that too serious. Honestly, the Realistic Shipyards is much more a community product in the meantime, what with all the feedback and material I`ve used from other people, as it should be with a(ny) freeware project!

And it IS something to show off in-game

All of Oolite is a rip-off, if you think about it. Ages ago, Braben & Bell created Elite, Giles made Oolite as a remake of that, Ahruman & others have built on that, many people made OXPs and now I am using those OXPs and Oolite to make a de facto Extension of Oolite out of it. That`s creativity for you, isn`t it?

At last, ...lite can become everything I always wanted it to be - or you, or someone else, and we can even choose. That`s good, isn`t it?

Again, as I get carried away answering: In my newest thing, there is only one real error left. And that can be solved by installing five further OXPs. And until now, all works fine.

So. Thanks for your feedback and reading this stuff.



L

[Star Gazer]

I suspect many people would prefer the description 'homage' to an outstanding original, rather than 'rip-off'!!

...after all, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...

Imitation is an advanced behavior whereby an individual observes and replicates another's

[Lestradae]

I suspect many people would prefer the description 'homage' to an outstanding original, rather than 'rip-off'!!

I agree completely ... I was being ironic.

Imitation is an advanced behavior whereby an individual observes and replicates another's

Another adherent of memetics, it seems?

Have a nice evening (if it is evening for you)

L