Oolite Bulletins

Norby wrote:

Thanks cim for the fast making of tag field.

It was already there - I'd just forgotten to write the interface to actually put things in them...

Norby wrote:

Next I suggest to put some suggestion about usual words into the description of tag field in admin page to guide authors what should use

That might take up a lot of space on the form. If you or someone else creates a Wiki page to summarise the various tag schemes in use, I could link to that.

Some common agreement about the tags used would be nice. "Wip" explains itself. "Mdf" and "market" might be useful. "Safe" means newbie safe, right? In that case I would like to here some ideas what are to be considered "safe" oxps and what are not. If it's totally up to the author, then I fear that this tag will be quite useless. To be more exact, what oxp people definitely consider being not "safe"?

Maybe the safe/difficulty rating could be determined via a poll. This way it becomes an index of the players opinion about the oxp/oxz.

So umm.. that's over 500 polls to be conducted, eh?

Diziet Sma wrote:

So umm.. that's over 500 polls to be conducted, eh?

I didn't say my proposal is "safe"

My current balance tag recommendations:
-"safe" is visuals and other harmless addons for new pilots also,
-none for activities and where you can earn a credit or modify your combat chances a bit,
-"uber" is if player and/or NPCs get significant bonus,
-"cheat" if the bonus is so huge or a debug tool (like the all-seeing Long Range Scanner).

Spara: mdf and market is not clear for me, especially within a balance scale.

Norby wrote:

Spara: mdf and market is not clear for me, especially within a balance scale.

I was thinking about the search possibilities rather than balance scale. Sorry for the derailment here, should focus on balance issue.

If someone wants to put most of my output in the "uber" camp I don't mind.
I can't defend it as "none", to try would be an oxymoron.

Would "buff" be better than "uber"? Uber to me sounds inherently game-breaking, while "buff" sounds pretty clear that it's boosting something or other without being specific about what or how much?

And "tweak" rather than "none" perhaps? Since that indicates minor changes, but changes nonetheless?

It is already becoming clear that different words/terms mean different things to different people. Also you are trying to devise a system where you are effectively equating differences which won't work. A market-skewing OXZ helps the player, but so does an uber-ship, yet they are very different things.
I don't plan to get involved in this debate as I can't really see it going anywhere useful, but I am not being negative about it, just realistic. One thing that might work is a sort of traffic-light or colour coding system.
Green is neutral and has litttle or no effect on gameplay - re-textures and ambience OXZs like Delightful Docking).
Amber and Red OXZs have medium and strong affects against the player - Battle Damage would be Amber, for example.
Blue and Violet have medium and strong bias in the player's favour - YAH might be Blue, LRS would be Violet to give examples.

Smivs wrote:

It is already becoming clear that different words/terms mean different things to different people. Also you are trying to devise a system where you are effectively equating differences which won't work. A market-skewing OXZ helps the player, but so does an uber-ship, yet they are very different things.
I don't plan to get involved in this debate as I can't really see it going anywhere useful, but I am not being negative about it, just realistic. One thing that might work is a sort of traffic-light or colour coding system.
Green is neutral and has litttle or no effect on gameplay - re-textures and ambience OXZs like Delightful Docking).
Amber and Red OXZs have medium and strong affects against the player - Battle Damage would be Amber, for example.
Blue and Violet have medium and strong bias in the player's favour - YAH might be Blue, LRS would be Violet to give examples.

+1 to color coding.

Agreed. Color coding would probably reduce ambiguity. But isn't there already color coding based on what's been installed and what can be updated? (I haven't used 1.79/1.80 yet, I'm basing this on screenshots of the OXZ installations)

Yes, the status of OXZs is denoted by colour. I was thinking more of the Tag system.

Smivs wrote:

One thing that might work is a sort of traffic-light or colour coding system.
Green is neutral and has litttle or no effect on gameplay - re-textures and ambience OXZs like Delightful Docking).
Amber and Red OXZs have medium and strong affects against the player - Battle Damage would be Amber, for example.
Blue and Violet have medium and strong bias in the player's favour - YAH might be Blue, LRS would be Violet to give examples.

This is probably the most workable system suggested so far..

Smivs wrote:

It is already becoming clear that different words/terms mean different things to different people.

This is why I suggested prefixing the tags with a scheme name. It doesn't matter then if "alice-safe" and "bob-safe" have different boundaries, or even if "alice-safe" means the OXP is considered safe by Alice for beginners to install and "bob-safe" means that the OXP contains safe-cracking as a theme. (Bob is incredibly disappointed by the low number of safe-cracking OXPs, by the way)

Especially at this stage - when Oolite ignores the tags and no-one's yet written a 3rd-party app which uses them either - you might as well just experiment with a bunch of different (overlapping, contradictory!) tag schemes by writing down on a web page which OXPs you'd tag with each one. No need, yet, to get them into the actual manifest.plist.