Oolite Bulletins

I added a download link for v5 to the Wiki page and some credits to the overview...

I guess the template for OXP Wiki pages ought to have a credits section really!

Ooh, nice. Thank you.

Was the link on the main OXP list updated as well?

EDIT: Well, it seems that it leads to the Galactic Navy wiki page, so all's well and good.

Again, thank you very much.

No problem. Now all I have to do is play up to a rank that I can actually tackle some of the missions, only just restarted and I've just realised the last time I played even Frontier was at least 5 years ago, never mind Elite with original controls!

With the release of 1.73 impending, I plan to wait on further development for Galactic Navy.

The next versions of Galactic Navy will be designed for 1.73 and later.

Again, if anyone has any ideas, thoughts, comments, or suggestions to share, I'd love to hear them.

Hello

When I do the (awesome) Galactic Navy mission where the Navy fights a big Thargoid fleet, the Thargoids kept getting pasted and I investigated more closely.

As well as the usual problems they have like waiting until they are on fire to launch their Thargons (too late!) and that Thargons seem to go inactive after their mothership is destroyed (even if there are others nearby), they also have the following handicaps:

1) They seem to have a very short scanner range and will stop attacking ships that fly away from them, even if they are pretty near. This means that they never destroy the behemoth as it just accelerates away from them.

2) They seem to be happy to spend a lot of time chasing irrelevant small ships rather than focusing on the big ones that can blow them away very quickly.

3) They get far too close to ships with plasma cannons and get annihilated.

Not sure what can be done about 2 and 3, but there you go.

This fight is sometimes fair, but usually ends up with 30 inactive Thargons floating about a couple of outmatched motherships.

Most of these can likely be dealt with through the AI.

I'm not sure how much I can do about Thargons going inactive. It most likely has to do with the fact that there are so many flying about. I'm speculating, but it may be that it takes too long to inform all of the Thargons that there are still motherships about. That, or each mothership can only command so many Thargons. I'm going to use the latter as the lore excuse, provided no one objects.

I won't change the fact that Thargoids wait until they are low on energy to release their Thargons, again for lore reasons.

1. I'm not sure about how to deal with this one. I'll poke through the AI and shipdata and see if there's a fix.

2. I'm pretty sure that there's a way in the AI to determine what ships they'll go after first. That or a ship script.

3. This one's pretty simple. Check their target and if it's a turret-bearing ship, tell them to stay clear of it. Unfortunately, unless there's a quick and easy way to tell whether a ship has turrets, each possible one would have to be programmed into the script.

I've also noticed that the Thargoid fleet goes up quite nicely if you Q-bomb them. You need Witchfuel Injectors and plenty of fuel to pull this off, of course, but if you can, the results are spectacular. I think that this is too easy. The Thargoid navy needs minesweepers. The code can be taken from the navy minesweepers, but I don't have a model for a Thargoid minesweeper.

Unless someone has already made a Thargoid minesweeper, I would need someone to make the model for me since I can't make models very well.

I wonder if Thargoid has made a minesweeper. *goes off to check*

Nemoricus wrote:

Most of these can likely be dealt with through the AI.


I've also noticed that the Thargoid fleet goes up quite nicely if you Q-bomb them. You need Witchfuel Injectors and plenty of fuel to pull this off, of course, but if you can, the results are spectacular. I think that this is too easy. The Thargoid navy needs minesweepers. The code can be taken from the navy minesweepers, but I don't have a model for a Thargoid minesweeper.

Unless someone has already made a Thargoid minesweeper, I would need someone to make the model for me since I can't make models very well.

I wonder if Thargoid has made a minesweeper. *goes off to check*

Yes that's a very good point. In the original Elite, Thargoids were immune to energy bombs. I don't use them in this, but use Q bombs instead as people can use fuel injection to get clear. However Thargoids don't seem to have this so need minesweepers otherwise it's too easy.

Nemoricus wrote:

2. I'm pretty sure that there's a way in the AI to determine what ships they'll go after first. That or a ship script.

Thargoids are chaotic in choosing their target by design. Its just how thargoids are. With Ai there is only little to gain, in combination with a ship-script you can do selective targeting.

thargoid wrote:

If you want it to become more of a challenge, install Second Wave. Then not all of the Thargoid warships and Thargons will be quite such a push-over or will act like that
...
I'd still like to see the full irridescent type shading we spoke about before on such a model.

Indeed I'd like to have suitable hardware that could show any damn shaders, but that's my own problem

The graphics of your second wave is crippled when one has freaky Thargoids.oxp or Neolite.oxp installed and one is using a computer with shaders. In these cases the second wave ships inherit the shaders from those oxp's and ignore the internal material definitions.
[Rubbing salt in thargoid wounds] On my new computer I added Ahrumans freaky thargoid shaders into second wave in a way they are not overwritten by other oxp's: Second Wave with shaders[/Rubbing salt in thargoid wounds]

Hope you don't mind this Thargoid but as I know you can't see it, let others say how they like it.

Just to be really clear (and I'll add the definite answer to the Wiki page)... this OXP needs Behemoths, but:

1. Behemoth 2.5.1 doesn't run under current trunk
2... are the neolite Behemoths a good replacement?
3... is OSE WiP 0.5 upwards a good replacement?

I am pretty sure 3 is right because it says over in the OSE WiP thread that "Galactic Navy V5.2.1.+: When OSE WiP V0.5+ is installed together with Nemoricus & Eric's upgraded Galactic Navy, GN also uses OSE ships."

So Galactic Navy will need:
- OSE WiP 0.5
- which in turn needs BigShips 1.01 - or is that now included?
- PROFIT!!

- and can I just pause to boggle at the amount of work that has gone into everything mentioned above.

EDIT: OK, I lied, Behemoth does work on trunk, I think my cache was mangled. But I still can't work out for sure if you need that AND OSE WiP.

zevans wrote:

1. Behemoth 2.5.1 doesn't run under current trunk

Since when? It works fine for me.
Except that I was forced to replace one file because one behemoth
model variation had one exhaust extra pointing in void.

Thargoid wrote:

If you want it to become more of a challenge, install Second Wave. Then not all of the Thargoid warships and Thargons will be quite such a push-over or will act like that

I do have Second Wave and yes some are a lot tougher

You don't need OSE 0.5 to run Galactic Navy. However, if you do you'll see Galactic Navy use ships from OSE 0.5.

By the way, has anyone checked this out? I haven't looked for myself yet.

It doesn't seem as thought there's a minesweeping Thargoid ship. As I can't make the model for one myself, is there someone who would be willing to make one?

zevans wrote:

Just to be really clear (and I'll add the definite answer to the Wiki page)... this OXP needs Behemoths, but:

2... are the neolite Behemoths a good replacement?

This will for sure spoil the internal mission. I tested it. GN needs the Behemoth data for its mission and the neolite version overwrites it with its own.

On the behemoths and trunk. There IS a problem with its docking vipers. But that is a current trunk problem and affects all carriers (and stations).