Random Assassination Contracts

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 9:35 am

I'm stumped too, as I'm sure you can fly between subentries as long as the gap is big enough.

I'm sure the "spokes" on Murgh's Torus Station are made of subenteries and you can fly between them, as long as you are quick enough and don't get clonked by a rotating spoke.

That said the gap between the spokes is pretty big. Will do a playtest and see how far I can get to a spoke without being blown up. Maybe as an experiment you could make the gap between subentires massive to test wheather the problem is due to the subentiries.

As an alternative, could you maybe use a really long docking port tunnel (but with no "back") to get into the internal structure?

EDIT : Yeap, flew through the spokes no problem. However, the Torus is massive, so maybe that is why. Maybe increasing the size of the Model would help. Having the Burger twice the size of a Torus would look cool as well!

Arexack_Heretic · Post by **Arexack_Heretic** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 10:23 am

Using inverted 'dockingport'-like entities is no way to get inside: you'll end up docked.

I may increase the size of the station a bit yes.

but the gap I am talking about is 1000m+ in diameter, I left off the upside hullsections, so it looks like a flattened pumpkin with the top sliced off (or a fish bowl).
When I try to get inside I blow up.
Same with the trench. (Which might be solved when I devide the 16sectors up into 3 parts each.) (!!Argh subentity overdose!!)

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 10:50 am

Hmm could just be the number of Subentires as Murgh only uses 4 spokes. Really can't see why a 1000m gap would cause a problem as the gap between the spokes is smaller.

Arexack_Heretic · Post by **Arexack_Heretic** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 11:04 am

I may be the way I made the SEs.

They are automatically offset ~2km towards Z or X, then just rotated around Y by quaternion.
Maybe I need to center them fist on the origin...
but that will open a big container of inacurate coordinates/SE placements.

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 7:04 pm

Finished the final playtest!

Have completed all missions in a well equipped Cobra III. A lot of my hit fees went on repairs, Hard Head Missiles and e-bombs, but the OXP gives out a lot of cash so I'm happy with the balance!

During the final test Ramon completed another new ship (so the Triads are kitted out now with Military versions of the Wasp), as did Commander Wyveren, so the Triad Boss now flys his ship.

Added another News Broadcast to explain how the Traids got their paws on these ships. Improved some of the planet textures. Polished some of the Mission Briefings and added another 30 odd comms hails! Found one minor bug (the Navy Battlebots were joining in too early in the defence of Geteve against the Bugs, as I'd missed a mission_assassins_navybots equal 1 out in the script adding them!) Squashed it! Pretty confident I've now got a bug-free version ready to upload. At least once the problem with Ossat is fixed, dosn't seem anybody can log in at the moment!

Done an unlock code so you'll see Assassins ships appear (very rarely) as Traders, pirates, police and Military Ships in any Galaxy once you complete all the assassins missions.

I'll take a few screen grabs to put up on Ossatt with the download file, but basically, my family can have me back and I'll put assassins on ice, whilst construction of the burger is finished. Once thats done, it'll take me about a day to cut n past in and test the burger mission with the finished station, then I'll upload!

I think we'll be talking a 9 Meg download zip though (sorry its the textures for all the new ships and planets). Hope Ossat can cope!

Exactly 3 months from start to finish!

MtKlima · Post by **MtKlima** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 1:25 pm

Judging from the scale of this project, I know that I'll take away more than 90 days of enjoyment from it. Looking forward to it. Thanks to all involved for creating another mission. Perhaps it is my personality, but I need a task, and have trouble with assigning them to myself in this free-form game.

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 7:30 pm

Cheers. Hope it lives up to expectations!

I too really like the missions, which was why I started this project. There is simply no way one person could have done it! I was just working on the script, mission code, AIs hails, planets and the plot - Its Ramon, Heretic, Griff, & Wvyern who've done the new ships and it features some Guest Ships from Giles, Murgh & Sleezen (no changes to your stats guys - just added the word Rebel: to the name of Sleezen's Cobra). I borrowed and retextured Wobats model for the Minesweepers. That said scripting was hard! The script has nearly 800 commands and uses 10 mission variables (which operate indepentley) and has nearly 40 new AIs.

I hope the joint effort will give the best of both worlds: loads of missions and stuff to do but also more variety with 20 odd brand new ships, plus some old friends behaving as individual "characters", and by making individual systems and populating them with approapte characters, planets and places to dock adds a bit of depth. Go to a The Mafia's system, you'll find Wise-guys in sidewinders on patrol and Mafia Annaocaders ferrying MegaWeed from the tropical moon to the planet. Go to the moon, you'll find a Wiseguy Waystation in ordit. The system data is also changed appropratley (and changes when things happen to a system). The mission ships only appear when you have a hit (or other mission) in the system, but there is aways somthing going on in the changed systems (and whats going on changes depending on the actions of the player and NPCs).

Got to say I'm really pleased with the final result!

My Avanta shows in game shots of a few of the new planets / gas giants and Ramon's Deamon Class Cruiser. The Crusier is really big, but is being dwarfed a bit in the Avanta due to the size of the planets!

Dr. Nil · Post by **Dr. Nil** » Fri Oct 06, 2006 11:46 am

I can't wait to install it.

Any ideas as to when it'll be finally released?

I have a confession. I've played a lot of 8-bit Elite on the CPC464 and Frontier on the A1200 and quite a bit of Oolite since I came across it a few weeks back, but I am

a mission virgin. It's true. I've only seen a mission screen in real life twice - when this Hoopy Casino started to show up in some of the systems I visited yesterday - and I guess that doesn't count for anything. I remember my Taekwondo instructor telling me as a kid about some ship he was chasing for some queen on the C64 back in the 8-bit day, but I'm not even sure if missions were implemented in my Amstrad version...

Don't spoil it for me, though. Trying to understand the mission scripting I did have a glance at the script.plist from The Long Way. But I won't spoil it further by finding the name of "planet 3".

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Fri Oct 06, 2006 12:09 pm

Once Heretic finishes the Massive Destroyable Station, then its ready to go! However, if you've been following the posts, you'll know this is a massive task. I don't think anybody has tried making a Massive station out of sub-entries so you can fly inside it and blow up it's reactors to destroy the whole thing!

So it may take him a while.

On the missions, you can find the triggers by looking at the Wikki on the link below. In terms of Novice missions, Longway a round and the Black Barron are available in G1 (and you don't need many kills to qualify). Roberto's new Headquaters also features a mission in G1. Ionics takes place in G2 and is excellent. Depossessed is also really good. Lovecats in G4 also looks really fun! Military can take place anywhere.

If you hang out in G1 the Military will contact you in due course. There are a lot of missions available (must be about 20 odd now and many OXPs contain multiple missions), but most need a certain kill count to trigger, partly to avoid a noob in a basic Cobra beeing blow to bits by an army of OXP ships!

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Missions

Dr. Nil · Post by **Dr. Nil** » Fri Oct 06, 2006 1:27 pm

LittleBear wrote:
Once Heretic finishes the Massive Destroyable Station, then its ready to go! However, if you've been following the posts, you'll know this is a massive task. I don't think anybody has tried making a Massive station out of sub-entries so you can fly inside it and blow up it's reactors to destroy the whole thing! So it may take him a while.

Ok. It sound like there's quite a task ahead of the team yet. I just got all excited by the many 'nearly finished' posts.

LittleBear wrote:
On the missions, you can find the triggers by looking at the Wikki on the link below. In terms of Novice missions, Longway a round and the Black Barron are available in G1 (and you don't need many kills to qualify). Roberto's new Headquaters also features a mission in G1. Ionics takes place in G2 and is excellent. Depossessed is also really good. Lovecats in G4 also looks really fun! Military can take place anywhere.

If you hang out in G1 the Military will contact you in due course. There are a lot of missions available (must be about 20 odd now and many OXPs contain multiple missions), but most need a certain kill count to trigger, partly to avoid a noob in a basic Cobra beeing blow to bits by an army of OXP ships!

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Missions

LOL. I don't want any of those spoilers. But I did install the Constrictor_more_hints.oxp and I guess it just payed off. And away I go on my first real mission in my nearly 20 years as a space commander

(I've got quite some kills from terrorizing pirates' coves with q-mines

)

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Fri Oct 06, 2006 2:44 pm

Dont worry! We are nearly there. All the ships and code for 15 of the 16 missions is fully complete and all the code for the planets, systems and "events" is done. Construction of the last ship is underway. Heretic's Station features in Mission 14. You need both a high Guild rating and a high Elite rating (and have done a lot of other things) before you would be offered this mission. If you installed as a noob, I reckon you need about 500 hours play to meet all the qualifing conditions. Even as an old hand, already with a lot of kills, I still think it would take 50 hours plus of play to reach this point. I could upload as a sort of Kill Bill Part 1 and by the time anybody was anywhere near getting to Mission 14, the Station would be finished and I Could release Kill Bill Part 2.

I don't want to do it this way though, as I'd rather people got the whole thing in one go.

PS: Now you clearly have a fair number of kills, I'd reckomend you install both Wombats Thargoid Wars and Heretics Thargon Threat. That'll liven things up for you! Don't forget, you'd have to get all the way to G7 to play Assassins, and a lot of things are going to happen to you along the way if you play with all the mission OXPs installed!

EDIT: Up to you, but you won't see any spoilers on the link. Just information on when a mission triggers. Most missions are like assassins and trigger where ever you are as long as you are in a particular galaxy and have more than a certain number of kills. Some trigger at a particular planet. The link just tells you where to go to trigger the mission. As there are 8 Galaxys and over 2000 planets out there, somtimes you do need to know where to go, or miss out on the mission!

Arexack_Heretic · Post by **Arexack_Heretic** » Fri Oct 06, 2006 5:31 pm

Hey it be "the ThargoRn Thread" !!

Building a station from subentities sounded so easy when I started this evil thing.....

(still could use a sendAImessageTo: <role> method it would so much simplify things.)

Dr. Nil · Post by **Dr. Nil** » Sat Oct 07, 2006 11:16 am

LittleBear wrote:

PS: Now you clearly have a fair number of kills, I'd reckomend you install both Wombats Thargoid Wars and Heretics Thargon Threat. That'll liven things up for you! Don't forget, you'd have to get all the way to G7 to play Assassins, and a lot of things are going to happen to you along the way if you play with all the mission OXPs installed!

EDIT: Up to you, but you won't see any spoilers on the link. Just information on when a mission triggers. Most missions are like assassins and trigger where ever you are as long as you are in a particular galaxy and have more than a certain number of kills. Some trigger at a particular planet. The link just tells you where to go to trigger the mission. As there are 8 Galaxys and over 2000 planets out there, somtimes you do need to know where to go, or miss out on the mission!

46 folders in my AddOns folder so far - among them most of the mission oxps. I haven't installed certain ships like the IC and the Über.. eh

Supercobra.

I guess the Thargoid Wars will kick in soon since the Constrictor mission took me to the next galaxy before exploring the first very much. Thargoid combat was always the coolest

About knowing where to go to trigger missions: Call me a purist, but then I feel I might as well edit the savefile to be there already with a top ship. If it's too impossible to come across the missions without consulting entities outside the Ooniverse, it might be because they need more hints spread out through the game. But I like having to fight those odds to come across missions.

I'm looking forward to the Assassins in a month or in a year. And I hope your great work will inspire loads of other massive expansions to this game.

Arexack_Heretic · Post by **Arexack_Heretic** » Sat Oct 07, 2006 3:33 pm

I have just found out that The collision proble lies not with how I made the entities, but rather somewhere else.

Upon removing most elements from the entitylist, I can now approach the vase from the top (only the bottom hull sections are in place) and fly through the ring of hull sections.
However when I flip180 and go back the same way, I collide with the invisible forcefield. :/

Maybe stations are flythrough only from one side?
but why then the +Y side?
docking tube is facing Z+.
there is a problem with the dockingtube textures though. removing them altogether now.

edit: another strange thing when turning inside and heading out one collides with a barrier too.

removing docks makes no difference.
removing hull does, base is now fully flythorougable. shit.

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Sat Oct 07, 2006 10:37 pm

Bah!

Found a possible OXP clash whilst having a final playtest. I set the OXP in G7 to minimise the chance of two OXPs conflicting, but Thargoid Wars runs in G7 and Military can trigger in G7.

The clash isn't fatal to any of the OXPs and it is intermitant. If the OXPs throw up a briefing at the same time, sometimes the Briefs are all shown, the Assassins brief comming up first and then the Military / Thargoid Wars briefing. However somtimes, you only see one of the briefings. The mission state of all the OXPs advances and the description on the F5 briefing changes, so you can do the Assassins mission even if you missed the briefing (and visa versa with Military), but you miss some of the OXP's plot. In Assassins this could be fatal!

Assassins only triggers in G7, so I can put a warning in the readme that the player should either finish Military and then go to G7 to play Assassins, or if he doesn't have Military installed, wait until he has completed assassins before installing and playing Military.

As WOMBAT's Thargoid Wars cannot be completed and throws up briefings quite often, there is pretty much certain to be a clash if the player tries to play both at the same time. I'll have to put a note in the readme warning that the player should not try to play both OXPs at the same time and would need to remove Thargoid Wars whilst playing Assassins and then reinstall it when he has finished Assassins. It is only the Mission Briefings that can conflict, rather than the ships or planets.

Sorry about this Wombat,

, but I can't see any workaround I can do to make the two OXPs compatable whilst Assassins is still offering breifings.