Nova Mission.

[Screet]

<muttley>medalmedalmedal!</muttley>

Hmmm...I must admit that I liked those traders which did thank me for shooting down Erics ship very much

However, at some point I got a medal (from an oxp) which did look like a WC...quite some award in space Yet I miss the ability to watch the awarded medals...

Wasn't there something about the players title being set to "archangel" for doing that mission on some Elite version?

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[Eric Walch]

It's probably safer to also send a message when the player exits witchspace!

That was my idea: let the w-buoy send the message. However, I just found a bug in the nova script by witch it became impossible to not-notice that the player jumped out of a nova system. The timer that sends all ships away keeps firing until the player docks. I never anticipated that the player would leave without going for the mission goal.

Now, when the player refuels and jumps to the next system, also there ships are jumping out the system. This keeps happening until the player docks. When I look good, the player than even gets its briefing in the wrong system. So this jump without visiting main station was guaranteed never unnoticed. (It worked correct in the old legacy script version)

[Eric Walch]

Thargoid showed me his save file were novacount was indeed zero and no other strange things were present. Looking deeper in it, I now can confirm that the nova mission does contain a serious bug. The jump counter keeps hanging at zero and the mission never starts. (Setting it manually to 1 in the save file will help) The mission was repeatedly tested befor release but to speed things up, it probably never was tested starting from a zero count. What went wrong?

Initially novacount is set at zero. And than on every jump it does:

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if (missionVariables.novacount) missionVariables.novacount++;

It was mend that if the variable novacount existed, it should increment the counter. But it is not only false if it does not exists, but also when it has a value of zero! As is now is, it only starts counting when 1 or higher.

The test should be:

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if (missionVariables.novacount !== undefined) missionVariables.novacount++;

as this is what we want to know: is the variable defined and not if it is true!
I just show this to warn other scripters to not make a similar mistake as I did.

[Screet]

Finally I've managed to have the nova-fun

First time I didn't even notice it. I had the fuel leak and instantly went off-lane, which turned out to be a bad decision, as a bunch of pirates attacked and destroyed me with a kamikaze move.

Second time I knew that it would trigger *now* and thus selected an obsolete anarchy system as target

As I did not want to run into another pirate ambush, I did chose the lane this time. That was pretty bad, as there were so many wormholes that it was impossible to use torus drive. I decided to "cheat" a little and use the pylon mounted tanks, but they drained away. However, the fuel collector slowly filled my tanks. Too slow, all too slow, especially as those wormholes just didn't go away, many of them were so big that they would last thousands of minutes. It was like navigating through a field of q-mine explosions.

Then I had some luck: A rock hermit buoy did show up. It launched a few pirates which tried to shoot me down, but I was able to dock and refuel. The pirates used that little spare time to flee

Interestingly, I had the possibility to do a normal jump instead of using the galactic hyperdrive to evacuate the poor anarchists. This leads to the main reason why I write this.

As a result, I was able to see the altered planet info of that system. The text does display a different system name than the planets, although the f5-info, which does list the refugees, shows the proper name!

EDIT: extended bug report for the TRUNK build
1) the system name displayed in the info text is that of the current system, not of the system which went nova
2) after jumping to the system which went nova, there's a witchdrive malfunction (OK), a sun (??????) and as soon as I hit the system info key, oolite simply closes itself. stderr and log do not contain usable info.

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[Eric Walch]

Interestingly, I had the possibility to do a normal jump instead of using the galactic hyperdrive to evacuate the poor anarchists. This leads to the main reason why I write this.

That is no bug in itself. But to not spoil anything:

Jvgubhg nal bgure bkc'f gurer ner gjb fbyhgvbaf:

1) Hfr lbhe Tnynpgvp qevir.
2) Urnq sbe gur fha, ershry gurer naq qbpx jvgu n shyy gnax.

Gur jubyr zvffvba vf ohvyq nebhaq shry fubegntr. Orpnhfr bs gur znal shry njneqvat bkc'f, guvf zvffvba unf fgebatyl qrtenqrq gb n zvffvba jvgubhg nal punyyratr.

Lbh hfrq lbhe shry gnax gb fbba. Shry yrnx bayl fgbcf vgfrys nsgre pbzcyrgr qenvantr. Hfvat vg gb fbba, nyfb gung shry jvyy yrnx njnl.

When you understand orcish or rot13