Oolite Bulletins

Thargoid wrote:

Except perhaps how quickly you can die...

... and how quickly everything else can die.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

(I can't remember if you save and quit Oolite and restart the commodities are refreshed, but I don't think they are)

Just save and reload the same savegame...the main station's commodities are not changed but the other stations in-system are. But you won't have more from the main station to sell to the other stations and likewise the main station will get where it won't buy any more of a commodity once it has 127 in inventory.

In theory, with enough asteroids, boulders, and shards...you could put a ring around a planet or moon. But your item count in system would have to be >>1000 to make it look good. You'd need to use asteroids to be able to see the ring from more than 25 km away.

Switeck wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

(I can't remember if you save and quit Oolite and restart the commodities are refreshed, but I don't think they are)

Just save and reload the same savegame...the main station's commodities are not changed but the other stations in-system are. But you won't have more from the main station to sell to the other stations and likewise the main station will get where it won't buy any more of a commodity once it has 127 in inventory.

In theory, with enough asteroids, boulders, and shards...you could put a ring around a planet or moon. But your item count in system would have to be >>1000 to make it look good. You'd need to use asteroids to be able to see the ring from more than 25 km away.

That confirms what I remember - eventually the main station runs out of things I want to buy and sell to the Constore...

I can't help but chuckle at this conversation...

@McLane: I am well aware that Oolite is a game, but it is built USING a programming language. I'm a professional programmer, and the owner of a software company, so I'm speaking out of a combination of experience, research, and knowledge.

@Everyone: Thanks for the encouragement, the ideas, and the posts that make me think in more detail on how to accomplish this goal! Looking forward to even more input as time goes on.

Dragonfire wrote:

I can't help but chuckle at this conversation...

@McLane: I am well aware that Oolite is a game, but it is built USING a programming language. I'm a professional programmer, and the owner of a software company, so I'm speaking out of a combination of experience, research, and knowledge.

@Everyone: Thanks for the encouragement, the ideas, and the posts that make me think in more detail on how to accomplish this goal! Looking forward to even more input as time goes on.

If it is your goal to accomplish a new functionality within Oolite I'd suggest you seek contact with the development team. That would be the natural thing to do. Oolite 2 is in the early stages of making, and it will be a deviation from what Oolite 1.x is anyway, within certain parameters. So you can certainly make the suggestion of making ships switchable via script (and you wouldn't even be the first to make this suggestion). Being a programmer you can even go one step further and implement the necessary code changes. As far as I understand the development team, new hands are always welcome, especially if they are already experienced. Ahruman has already stated earlier in this thread which kind of contribution he would be interested in. If it's the kind of thing you'd be interested in contributing: bingo! Everybody wins.

If you, on the other hand, want to develop Oolite in a direction different from where Oolite 2 is going, you're also free to do that. Oolite's license explicitly allows you to do with it whatever pleases you, as long as you publish the result under the same license.

As a third option, you can try to come up with clever workarounds for the ship-switching problem. I've been there and done that, so I know that it's not trivial. In the end I decided that it was okay to use it as a one-time gimmick in a very special situation during a mission (you'll find that in  Cataclysm.oxp), but the process has its clear disadvantages, and I found they are too big to make it a general feature. Perhaps you can come up with even cleverer ideas that minimize the disadvantages. I was just voicing my skepticism, because I know that other people independently of me also have been there and done it, and they were equally dissatisfied with the result.

@McLane - offtopic - but do you have any plans to update Cataclysm to work with 1.75 + ?? I'm a fair way off having a commander with the necessary kill count and missions under by belt to play it, but am kind of hoping it'll be working by then.

Capt. Murphy wrote:

@McLane - offtopic - but do you have any plans to update Cataclysm to work with 1.75 + ?? I'm a fair way off having a commander with the necessary kill count and missions under by belt to play it, but am kind of hoping it'll be working by then.

Yes, I do. But I get distracted all the time. So I can't say anything about the 'when'.

Commander McLane wrote:

If it is your goal to accomplish a new functionality within Oolite I'd suggest you seek contact with the development team. That would be the natural thing to do. Oolite 2 is in the early stages of making, and it will be a deviation from what Oolite 1.x is anyway, within certain parameters. So you can certainly make the suggestion of making ships switchable via script (and you wouldn't even be the first to make this suggestion). Being a programmer you can even go one step further and implement the necessary code changes. As far as I understand the development team, new hands are always welcome, especially if they are already experienced. Ahruman has already stated earlier in this thread which kind of contribution he would be interested in. If it's the kind of thing you'd be interested in contributing: bingo! Everybody wins.

If you, on the other hand, want to develop Oolite in a direction different from where Oolite 2 is going, you're also free to do that. Oolite's license explicitly allows you to do with it whatever pleases you, as long as you publish the result under the same license.

As a third option, you can try to come up with clever workarounds for the ship-switching problem. I've been there and done that, so I know that it's not trivial. In the end I decided that it was okay to use it as a one-time gimmick in a very special situation during a mission (you'll find that in  Cataclysm.oxp), but the process has its clear disadvantages, and I found they are too big to make it a general feature. Perhaps you can come up with even cleverer ideas that minimize the disadvantages. I was just voicing my skepticism, because I know that other people independently of me also have been there and done it, and they were equally dissatisfied with the result.

Thanks for the suggestions. I had considered making my own build of Oolite (or suggesting the changes to the main), but I'm going to see if I can get it working without that, first. If it doesn't work, then I'll look into actual program modifications.

In the interest of time, I'm not going to pursue the multiple ship concept (I submitted a program feature request for that, tho). Instead, I'm going to focus on the more achievable.

I thought of an additional feature to the personal base - instead of it being a stationary dockable, make it somewhat mobile. While it does not have cruising capabilities or fuel injection, it can enter into witchspace and galactic hyperspace, allowing you to dock just beyond the witchspace beacon and launch your ship, flying to the planet and back, then witchspacing the base to the next planet.

Here is a summary of what I'm planning on:
>Fuel Converter
This converts 1 ton of radioactives to 7 LY of fuel. This fuel can either power the base, or be used to fill your ship.

>Witchspace/Galactic Hyperspace capability
This uses twice the fuel of a standard ship - 14 LY of fuel for a 7 LY jump.

>Homing Beacon
This would help the commander find his base, and if possible, engage autopilot to drive right to it.

>Repair Robots (They need parts: computers and machinery.)
This can repair any of your equipment, but requires parts and base energy (taken from fuel)

>Defense Systems (They need parts: radioactives, computers, and machinery.)
This destroys any ships that attack you while you're within its (very small) range. Indestructible industrial strength iron hide.

>Storage
1000 ton cargo bay, a dozen passenger berths. This allows you to transport massive amounts of cargo from one system to another (though you have to manually fly it from the space station to your base at the witchspace beacon.)

>Armory
Allows you to empty the contents of your pylon mounts. In theory, this would allow stockpiling weapons, though I'd want to set a limit to the number of missiles you can leave. Energy bombs can also be stored, though transport is quite difficult (you have to travel to the station without one and pick it up, then return.)

These bases will only be purchasable from planets with a tech level of 10 or more, for a LOT of money.

So, what features would YOU like in a personal base? (Again, we're avoiding the "multiple ship" issue right now. I can do that in a later version without much trouble).

Dragonfire wrote:

In the interest of time, I'm not going to pursue the multiple ship concept (I submitted a program feature request for that, tho). Instead, I'm going to focus on the more achievable.

I think you owe an apology to all the people you couldn't help but chuckling at.

That sounds interesting DragonFire... and nothing jumps out as essentially not doable although I imagine it will take a lot of headscratching to get right.....can't think of any additional must have features as yet. Re the homing beacon you can give the base a custom letter on the Advanced Space Compass which is the simple solution.

Are you going to make an NPC version that players can sometimes come across? With a suitably tooled up and ironassed NPC owner who gets a bit twitchy when you go to close?

Misjumps will be fun......the Thargoids will think it's Christmas.

>Witchspace/Galactic Hyperspace capability
This uses twice the fuel of a standard ship - 14 LY of fuel for a 7 LY jump.

This one will be hard as everything in game is hardcoded to have 7 LY as a limit (a deliberate choice).

Fuel price has recently been made dependent of ship mass, and this might be useful to achieve a similar effect.


Check what the fuel price for the homebase ship per LY would be, then add a new equipment that holds x LY fuel for a price of twice that of the homebase fuel cost for x LY.
Add a sell option for this equipment that is only valid for the homebase, and make this the only way homebase can get fuel.

An alternative approach would be to use mission screens to achieve the same result.
Note : afaik you can't create new cargo types.

Well, in that case, I may just leave it as the standard 7 LY. I still like the idea of converting radioactives to fuel, tho. It has a number of advantages...maybe I'll just change it to taking TWO tons radioactives for ONE LY of fuel.

Wildeblood wrote:

Dragonfire wrote:

In the interest of time, I'm not going to pursue the multiple ship concept (I submitted a program feature request for that, tho). Instead, I'm going to focus on the more achievable.

I think you owe an apology to all the people you couldn't help but chuckling at.

Not at all...I was chuckling at the fact that the conversation was repeating. And I still hold my position that it is possible and doable - I just don't want to invest the time right now, since I have a lot of actual work to do elsewhere.

Dragonfire wrote:

Here is a summary of what I'm planning on:
>Fuel Converter
This converts 1 ton of radioactives to 7 LY of fuel. This fuel can either power the base, or be used to fill your ship.
>Witchspace/Galactic Hyperspace capability
This uses twice the fuel of a standard ship - 14 LY of fuel for a 7 LY jump.
>Homing Beacon
This would help the commander find his base, and if possible, engage autopilot to drive right to it.
>Repair Robots (They need parts: computers and machinery.)
This can repair any of your equipment, but requires parts and base energy (taken from fuel)
>Defense Systems (They need parts: radioactives, computers, and machinery.)
This destroys any ships that attack you while you're within its (very small) range. Indestructible industrial strength iron hide.
>Storage
1000 ton cargo bay, a dozen passenger berths. This allows you to transport massive amounts of cargo from one system to another (though you have to manually fly it from the space station to your base at the witchspace beacon.)
>Armory
Allows you to empty the contents of your pylon mounts. In theory, this would allow stockpiling weapons, though I'd want to set a limit to the number of missiles you can leave. Energy bombs can also be stored, though transport is quite difficult (you have to travel to the station without one and pick it up, then return.)

These bases will only be purchasable from planets with a tech level of 10 or more, for a LOT of money.

So, what features would YOU like in a personal base? (Again, we're avoiding the "multiple ship" issue right now. I can do that in a later version without much trouble).

This looks very interesting, and I like the concept. But this actually sounds like a mother-ship to me, and calling it that makes more sense to me as well, since it can actually move and hyperspace.
Any way, urge you to be careful so that you don't break the game play with this. What it would take to break game play, I don't know, but I'm sure you will get plenty of feedback once the first alpha or beta versions come out.

Wish you luck and am waiting in anticipation for first release.