Oolite Bulletins

Sounds good to me too !
So where and when I can download it ?

Got my vote - there's so many little things in 1.72.2 over 1.65 that sold oolite to me once at for all, so a stable release ASAP gets my vote, and then we can start branching and playing with features again and lots of people can hit individual things, so you don't feel like you're the pinch point. Sort of like the Linux kernel approach...

Release 1.73 as essentially feature-complete.
Fix loads of bugs, hopefully including subentity collision stuff.
Release MNSR as 1.74 or 1.75.

So 1.73 is a Release Candidate in effect...
1.74 is RC2 or if we are REALLY lucky, MNSR - w00t!
1.75 has the minor (hopefully) fixes from 1.74 wider testing and might be the MNSR, or we might need RC3/1.76 if lots of obscure bugs pop out when more people upgrade from 1.65.

Is that what you meant?

Sometimes you have to cull your original plans to get the things done that are really important to you to finish.

With such a long developmental time like this, it can get difficult to find out when and where to stop.

So good plan Ahruman, don't burn yourself out on this, you've accomplished lots with this great game.



L

prallo wrote:

Sounds good to me too !
So where and when I can download it ?

If you're the impatient type, you could try here...

@Ahruman

Good release scheme.

Thanx for the continuing support. Also hadn't much time lately. Mostly due to work related RL (TM) issues. But whatever commercial game I play I ALWAYS (yes with capitals) coming back to play or Mod Oolite. So it's simply the best space game ATM. Other just don't cut it.

After release I'm thinking about taking Famous Planets beyond Galaxy 1.

I just love this community (commoonity) - it's the best on web - ever - anywhere...

What is MNSR ?

Mythical Next Stable Release. (The last "Stable Release" was 1.65, not that it was actually that stable.. the current official "testing" release, 1.72.2, is actually more stable)

I just want to announce two new AI functions for the 1.73 release

- "randomPauseAI: xxx yyy" This does the same as the old "pauseAI: xxx" but now takes two space separated numbers as parameter and chooses a random value in this range. (It does not matter if you put the lowest value first or not)
With this command it becomes possible to create variable pauses between AI UPDATE evaluation

- "launchIndependentShipWithRole: nnnn" As the name says, it launches an independent ship. Like the launchTrader does but now by a role of choice. When escorts are defined in the shipdefinition, it also launches these escorts.
The ship will have no relation with the station. This in contrary to the already existing "launchShipWithRole: nnnn" that launches ships that belong to the station group. Within a group friendly fire is not seen as an attack and within a group ships can send groupAttack messages. The old command will launch no escorts. (never did) Station ships don't need escorts as the station defenders should do that job.

Added for JS a playerBoughtNewShip(ship) eventhandler for version 1.73. Could be useful for some equipment oxp's to reset equipment. Specially for equipment that sets a variable to block other equipment. It returns the bought ship that is of cause the same as player.ship.

Added a checkSelfLegalStatus AI command for version 1.73. It does the same as the current checkTargetLegalStatus but now for itself. can return:
SELF_CLEAN, SELF_MINOR_OFFENDER, SELF_OFFENDER, SELF_FUGITIVE or SELF_THARGOID. (Thargoid was added because it uses special rules for bounty and is actually a special league)

Already for Oolite 1.71 there were new aegis messages added for AI navigation in multi-planet systems but never announced properly. I added a few more last month that were missing according to me. An overview of the current status is found here
Basically it comes down to that a ship is warned when entering the zone of 3 planetary radii around any planet.

AEGIS_CLOSE_TO_PLANET and AEGIS_CLOSE_TO_MAIN_PLANET for the main planet.
CLOSE_TO_SECONDARY_PLANET for any other planet than the main planet
CLOSE_TO_MOON for a moon (moon is planetary body without atmosphere)
CLOSE_TO_SUN for the sun.
AEGIS_CLOSE_TO_PLANET for any planet or moon except the sun.

Problem will stay an intersecting aegis. Only in case of the main-planet, the main planet message is priori-zed over others.

---

Added AI command setSpeedToCruiseSpeed. This sets the speed to 80% of maximum speed. But with exception that when the ship has escorts, the cruise-speed will never be higher than the speed of the slowest escort. This to prevent the current problem that interceptor vipers often fly faster than some of their wingman. Oolites own interceptor is already a bit to fast for its slowest wingman, but oxp's often define even higher top speeds.

auto_ai was often badly understood by scripters. This was partly due that it worked different in different situations. The way auto_ai works is now changed for 1.73 in a way that it works consistent, without exceptions.

auto_ai is only used for the internal roles: "asteroid", "escort", "hunter", "interceptor", "miner", "pirate", "police", "trader", "scavenger", "shuttle", "sunskim-trader", "wingman".
When a ship is added in one of these roles, the defined AI is ignored and a predefined AI for that role is given. This becomes useful when giving one ship different roles. e.g. trader and pirate. After adding it will have the correct AI for his role.

Default is always yes, so setting it to yes is the same as not defining it. Defining is only needed when you want it to be "false" and it is one of oolites own roles on above list.

Starting with 1.73 also ships added with the populator will also use this auto_ai. So it will no longer be necessary to change the ai with launch_actions for some of the internal roles. Just defining auto_ai = false will make sure traders and pirates will always use the ai in the ship definition.

Also bounty will be more consistent: script added traders will always be clean while script added pirates will always have a bounty. This bounty setting can be overruled by setting auto_ai = false. In that case bounty in shipdata will be used.

And just to make sure: all this is only necessary when using some of oolites internal roles for your ships. auto_ai does nothing with custom roles.

Oolite (trunk) is now 64-bit native under Mac OS X 10.5 and later (x86 only; there is no practical advantage to 64-bit PowerPC). This will primarily be useful in Snow Leopard, where it may avoid loading an extra set of shared libraries if no 32-bit processes are running. It seems to work, except for a bug in the in-app JavaScript console.

Changed the reporting of legacy script syntax errors to provide some information on where they are. There’s no good way for Oolite to identify the file and line for an error, so instead we report the structural position, i.e. the path through dictionaries and arrays that gets you to the error. For example, this old favourite: becomes: This means (starting from the back):
Array entry #0 (i.e., the first) of
  dictionary entry “conditions” of
    array entry #1 of
      dictionary entry “do” of
        array entry #321 (i.e., the 322nd) of
          dictionary entry “do” of
            array entry 0 of
              the dictionary entry named “assassins” of script.plist.

Finding the 322nd item of an array by hand won’t be easy, but for smaller scripts it could be helpful – and if you’re using Mac OS X 10.5 or later, you can follow the path easily in Property List Editor.

The homebrew plist parser is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet, well, Winston, I presume.