Oolite Bulletins

@ Griff: And now you end up having not one, but two suggestions on your table. Decisions, decisions...

Yay those magazines were fun to make...
't was a web-page script-site Murgh found.
You could upload the picture and then add trim colours, title and bullets.

I remember your Boa being pretty tough anyhow...just scaled far to huge.

First and foremost, I apologise for the Thread Necromancy being performed...

In the 5-6 months since I first stumbled across Oolite, I've seen numerous references to - and screenshots of - the fabled Griff Boa.
Being busy with all sorts of less important stuff, I've only recently managed to dredge through the forum to find a download link.
(What finally did the trick was a search for GriffBoa/Griff_Boa; any other combination I tried had this thread buried on page 7 or thereabouts...)

With the download of the Wyvern version no longer working, I decided to do a bit of tinkering with the specifications myself.

Ignoring the turrets (a dangerous thing to do, I know), the three versions of the ship can somewhat simplified be summarised like this, sorted in order of deadliness:

Original: Identical to the Boa, except for worse pitch/roll and 4 extra [8] missiles.

Wyvern: Identical to the BCC, except for 50T less cargo and 3 extra [8] missiles.

LittleBear: Identical to the Wyvern, but sacrifying 50T cargo, the 3 extra missiles and a bit of roll (2/2.5) for extra speed (380/312), energy (600/525) and energy recharge (4/3.2)


Now, the consensus seems to be that the Original version was underpowered. (I'm not sure if that's the right word, though. It would clearly beat a regular Boa if it came close enough for the turrets to bear. I think it's maybe more of a looks-tougher-than-it-is thing.)
Looking at the other two models, it seems to me like LittleBear took the Wyvern version and souped it up into a Bounty Hunter/Pirate version. (Yes, I know that's the reverse of the chronology of the posts, but I'm building rationalisation here... )

So, the next logical step in this train of thought is this: Why settle for just one version of the GriffBoa when I can have two? Or three?

Which all leads to the question part of all this.
(Yes, there is actually some sort of point at the end of all my ramblings.)

Am I right in assuming that getting two (or more) versions of the GriffBoa is a simple matter of copy&paste in the shipdata & shipyard plists, followed by the appropriate renaming and tweaking?

I've looked at a lot of plists, and have managed to figure out the simple stuff. However, most things pertaining to turrets are still too advanced for my feeble brain. If I were to fiddle with the power of the turrets, where are those values hidden? And is there any benchmark values floating around to save me from doing something completely ridiculous to them?

If, for some perverse reason, I should decide it would be a brilliant idea to give all versions of the ship the same name, so that the player would have no way to tell exactly which version s/he was up against (the rationalisation here being that the differences are all internal and as such non detectable except by observing ship performance), would I run into some sort of unforeseen trouble?

Okay, that's all my addled brain can come up with right now. I'm sure there will be more as I dive into this.

CheeseRedux wrote:

Am I right in assuming that getting two (or more) versions of the GriffBoa is a simple matter of copy&paste in the shipdata & shipyard plists, followed by the appropriate renaming and tweaking?

Yes.

CheeseRedux wrote:

If I were to fiddle with the power of the turrets, where are those values hidden? And is there any benchmark values floating around to save me from doing something completely ridiculous to them?

Turret's power is in its shipdata.plist entry. Somewhere in the shipdata.plist there's an entry fo (something like) griff_boa_turret and there a line that reads ,where NN is between 1 and 50.

CheeseRedux wrote:

If, for some perverse reason, I should decide it would be a brilliant idea to give all versions of the ship the same name, so that the player would have no way to tell exactly which version s/he was up against (the rationalisation here being that the differences are all internal and as such non detectable except by observing ship performance), would I run into some sort of unforeseen trouble?

As long as each version has its unique entry in shipdata, you can give them all same name: .

One place to see similar tweaks done is my Far Arm Ships OXP.

After confirming my assumptions,

Zieman wrote:

Turret's power is in its shipdata.plist entry. Somewhere in the shipdata.plist there's an entry fo (something like) griff_boa_turret and there a line that reads

Code: Select all

weapon_energy = NN;

,where NN is between 1 and 50.

Ah, of course. Each turret's power etc is defined by its subentity. Silly me was looking further up in the list, where the turret positions are defined.

Thanks for that. Now off to do some diving in plists for clues & inspiration.

(Sorry to resurrect a thread that's been dormant for four months, but I had to ask!)

Whaaaat?!

I just happened to be in the market for a new ship, so have been prowling the shipyards with an eye out for something good. And I popped into a nice high-tech system just now and there on the showroom floor was a brand new Griff Boa! Ooh, shiny! And the price tag was ... wait a minute ... 150000? No, I didn't lose a zero, it's really a hundred and fifty thousand credits, same as a Cobra Mark III. I even checked the shipyard.plist to make sure it wasn't some sort of Crazy Eddie sale or something. I sweartogod I haven't touched the OXP since I downloaded it.

So what's that, some kind of April Fool's joke I missed the memo on? Earlier in this thread LittleBear suggested a "Base Price of around 560,000" for it, which sounds a lot more reasonable. The stock Boa is 450k and it doesn't even have plasma turrets.

No, of course I didn't buy it. But don't think I wasn't tempted.

Due to shader errors with certain ATI drivers (as reported here https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=11056 ) i've decided to finish off normalmapping this ship (i've had the normalmaps waiting to be used for about 3 years now!) and replace all the .fragment shaders with ones that don't use a macro for the lighting. Same download link as before
oh, i've implemented carcals price change request too, the boa now costs 560000 credits as LB suggests

oo, a bit of time travel! - I've updated the 'turrets' section in the shipdata.plist to the more modern format as posted here:
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... 06#p175006
plus i've fixed a couple of flipped polygon normals in the mainhull object that i didn't notice in the last update that added the hard/soft edges to the models

Finally got around to fixing this oxp's shaders, should work OK again now
Same download link as before so that any links to it around the place don't break:
http://www.box.net/shared/7pvjecjbks (3.0 MB)

Right, question time again!

As outlined seven posts above, I've made my own personal three-in-one version of this OXP. But since then, we have new and improved versions out, and I obviously want to upgrade as well. Now, diving into the shipdata.plist, I notice it is about half the size of the one in my old version (pre-tinker): 488 lines vs 947. Part of that is due to my old nemesis, like_ship. Where the old one had energy and speed etc defined, here it is simply like_shiped to a template_boa.

So, in words a 6-year old could understand, how does like_ship work exactly? Does it copy things wholesale and leave it at that, or is it a case of Unless Defined, Use These Values? For instance, if I wanted to make a super-fast but otherwise identical version, would it be sufficient to toss in a max_flight_speed = 480 without defining any other attributes?

Also, what are the limits to the powers of like_ship? My tinkered-with shipdata.plist comes in at a whooping 2623 lines. Although some of those are caused by inserting some extra whitespace, it is mainly because I simply did a copy and paste and paste before starting my edit, essentially creating three independent plists. Is it possible to make this shorter by like_shipping v2 and v3 to v1 (griff_prototype_boa-NPC/PLAYER), and then limiting the definitions of those two to the values that need changing?
Eg a v2 which was faster than v1 but otherwise identical would work like this: Finally, one of the changes I made to one of the ship versions was to have the four turrets use individual colours; Red and green for port and starboard, cyan and purple for top and aft. (It actually comes in quite handy both when flying the ship and when fighting against it.)
I did this by simply defining four differently-named turret subentities, giving them each a different laser_color. During that process I discovered that the naming in the plist is incorrect: They are listed, in order, as Top, Rear, R Side, L Side, while their correct positions are Right, Left, Top, Rear. I see this has survived unaltered into the latest version.
I probably should have mentioned something earlier, but it was about that time that Real Life™ was starting to get intrusive again…

CheeseRedux wrote:

So, in words a 6-year old could understand, how does like_ship work exactly? Does it copy things wholesale and leave it at that, or is it a case of Unless Defined, Use These Values? For instance, if I wanted to make a super-fast but otherwise identical version, would it be sufficient to toss in a max_flight_speed = 480 without defining any other attributes?

Yes, it seems that you're understanding it correctly.

So: gives:
Ship A: energy 100, speed 200, name "Ship A", auto_weapons default value, auto_ai default value
Ship B: energy 150, speed 200 (from like_ship), name "Ship B", auto_weapons yes, auto_ai default value (because neither it nor the like_ship specify)

Excellent! (Now to go figure out what the heck auto_weapons and auto_ai are. They look important. And new to me.)

Cheers!