Oolite Bulletins

two weeks? oh deah!

I'll have to get on with it then.

Well you know what it's like, you always find things you can improve!

But I think I've got to set myself a deadline otherwise I'll just keep revising it again and again and I'll never release it!

I'm starting to get hte hang of scifi meshes....greebles!! ... drat over 100.000polies.

On a bit of a tangent myself with the BattleBots, worth it though! They almost match your new Thargoids, weak but a lot of them! The Navy strikes back!

As resualt will probaly have script finished by end of month (its over 500 commands!). Thereafter, will be ready to upload with a final playtest and putting the burger in!

Had a slight worry about the Deathburger. The player shouldn't be able to q-mine the subentires then just hit the core. Give a ship scanClass Station gives some protection, but I'm not sure that sub-entires can have their own scan-class (or maybe the take the scanclass of the main ship ship, so it would make the whole thing a scanClass Station).

However, when playtesting by the "repair yard" I've blown up the station seveal times with a q-mine, depite it having normal station stats. I think this is due to the number of parked ships nearby causing so many overlaping blasts, that the shields shields just "cant take it". There'll be loads of ships near the burger so it is likley to happen. Giving the subentries absudly high amounts of energy won't work as the core would have to have an indetructable amount of energy as well, otherwise it will blow up, completing the mission and it needs to be destroyable.

Come up with a wheeze, but need a bit of help on the AI. The dictatorship bans such weapons and deploys satilites by the beacon and main station which transmitt a field which desstabilises the casing of q-mines causing them to blow. As a result anyone bring a mine into the space lanes will be destroyed by their own mine. I'll mention this in the planet's description so the player is for-warned.

I'd put in the script a code to do a check for equipment Q-mine, planet number equal 13, galaxy equal 6, do add ship minekiller. Have two commands so one is by the beacon and the other by the station.

The minekiller's AI would just need to serach for player, Target found = ?

? I need somthing like "make target bigexplosion" or a perform scriptaction on target, detonate. Think this is valid, just not sure how to express it. Any ideas?

EDIT : As a plan B I could put 10 ships with timebombAI (modded so their is no pause) so that they blow up the players ship, bit he might be able to escape with a fast enough ship!

Subentities do not have scanclass of their own.
Otherwise, they would be blips on the scanner and selectable as a target.

Thought that was probebley the case, but given the demise of the Augeaian Orbital Repair factility several times to overlaping cascades, I'm not sure a scanClass Station will protect it! Need to get the minekillerAI working as a failsafe!

EDIT: Actually what would be better is that rather than killing the player, the satilite kills the mine. Sort of a Q-Mine ECM before the mine can detonate. I still need a way though in AI to under the Target Found Q-MINE, have a "make target exposion" or script action on target detonate, where I define Detonate as a small pop! I could put this in the burger's AI and dispense with a satilate. The player would find that any q-mines he deploys near the burger would fail to go off, as the burgers AI would find them and make them explosions before they went off.

better yet:
This should deactivate the qmine, and render it ECM-able. As it has a max_speed of 0, it will not intercept or explode on it's own.

Maybe add to that :
edit:
I think it would be better to have some dedicated disruption drones around, as the burgerAI is bound to be very busy and might be delayed in scanning for qmines in the updates.

edit2: the burger will always be vulnerable to weapons with a blastradius larger than 500metres. should a missile find it's way inside, there could be trouble.

Cool! I'll go with the satilities and make them indestructable! Wombat gave me permission to borrow his Thargoid Satilite in another project, but I got too involved with Assassins. I'll repaint it to make it less Thargoidish and put a few round the burger.

If a stray missile gets through, well there it is. Woudn't have thought the player would be able to target the core without going inside the internal structure though.

Give those satelites a few missiles while you are at it.
And have them attack only when target_player gets within say 2-5 km.

Already have the Clusterbombs on the case for that!

- No lasers, 6 missiles, speed of 0 and sanner range of 1km. Once a non-military / police ship is detected they switch to attack ship. As they have no other way to attack they fire missiles at the target. These guard an area of a system closed to civilian trafic, where the player needs to go to make a hit. I'd give them a fire on non-imperialAI for the ones near the burger.

Instead of switching to missileAI, thought I'd do a switch to a customAI. This AI pauses for the same time the q-mine does before blowing, but instaed of blowing, sends a comms message complaing that it CPU has been fried and switchs to nullAI. Ditch the become explosion bit - be quite cool for the deactivated bomb to just sit there tumbling.

Shame the q-mine has a top speed of 0, otherwise I'd then have it switch to hardmissileAI with the player as the target instead of nullAI "Bomb 20 you're out of the cargo bay again!"

EDIT : In the respray might put some CND logos on it and tie the anti-mine satilatie to the idea Drew deveoped in Status Que of a ban the bomb campain. Perhaps have some around the repaire yard, mafia station and other OXP stations to stop the player q-mining my OXP stations with overlapping cascadies from the ships nearby! Have a news Broadcast relating to some rich supportor of the Ban the Bomb Campain paying for anti-mine satilities in certain places. The rotten dictatorship nicked some and put them by the burger! The comms message from the player's deactived bomb could be somthing like "Code Corruption Error : Unable to detonate. Give peace a chance!"

EDIT2 : Although above idea would be cool, I'm running out of steam! Already got 15 news braodcasts, the 10 hits, 6 submissions and several "events" (nearly 40 mission breifing screens ). Already feels like I'm writing some Oolite fiction as well as an OXP! Think I'll just go for a "Mine-Sweeper Satilate". Respray it with some hatchings or yellow / black panels. Some of the more advanced systems have these new devices deployed.

Got the Mine Sweeper working. Q-mining within 60kms of its position is futile! Even fireing off 6 as fast as I could, it knocked every one out instantly! Only Navy Bases will be issued with the satilate, as this is a brand new piece of experimental tech. I explain it's indesctructable nature by the fact that it is right next to the station and so the station is able to extend its own shields around it!

So...one will be able to scoop the qmines as thargons?
but without any effect when scooped such as cargotype=alienitems or awardEquipment: EQ_Q_MINE

Think so in theroy. Griff's battlebots are scoopable and as they have a charcater entry you get a "You have captured a malfunctioning battlebot" messege and are paid a bounty, but you don't get BattleBot 1t on the cargo manifest. Had to use the become uncontroled thargon as had problems with the AI change. It worked but often not quickly enough!

Shoudn't be a major problem. The mines are so tiny they would be very difficult to scoop and around the Burger the player will have other things on his mind than scooping his decativated mine!

EDIT : Might see if become metalfragment is valid. That should have the same effect if it works and if the player scooped it coming up as Alloys would make sense, the mine has had all its working parts fried by an EMP blast! Could just use become explosion, but I quite like the effect of the mine just tumbling and failing to go off.

As long as it does not change into a thargon-model, I'm OK with it.

Scoopability is dependant on the cargo_type entry.
If= CARGO_NOT_CARGO then unscoopable.
To make scoopable use: CARGO_SCRIPTED_ITEM or CARGO_FOOD (etc).