Oolite Bulletins

I created a shipdata.plist file with snippets of code, as suggested by cim, to enable me to create individual ships without escorts. I created an entry for each ship data key that would potentially be created. I went through Griff's and Staer9's shipsets, and added entries for various Pythons, Boa's, Monitor's etc, and this seems to work fine.

Until I remove Griffs (or Staer9's) ships. Then I get this: Can I ignore these messages? Does Oolite merge what it can from my shipdata.plist file? Or is my whole file ignored because of these errors?

Use is_external_dependency = true in shipdata to suppress the dependency notifications.

Thanks spara!

Asking for opinions here: should the view of docked vessels be available at every possible docking location, or only at a subset? Would ConStores and Space Bars allow provide a view of docked ships? Would military docks provide it?

Part of the reason for this question is technical - if I provide the view at all stations, that's potentially a lot of data that has to be compiled and managed. The more stations in a particular system, the more data has to be maintained. I need a reasonable way of reducing the data requirements that doesn't spoil the effect.

My initial feeling is that GalCop stations, Rock hermits (except Slaver bases), Con stores are in. Rescue stations, GalNavy stations/ships, liners are out. Possibly Kiota stations are out as well, and maybe Space bars. But let me know what you think.

phkb wrote:

My initial feeling is that GalCop stations, Rock hermits (except Slaver bases), Con stores are in. Rescue stations, GalNavy stations/ships, liners are out. Possibly Kiota stations are out as well, and maybe Space bars. But let me know what you think.

I'd think anything that was primarily commercial - concerned mostly with the buying and selling of non-controlled goods - would have this sort of information on display; anything that was military/police/combat oriented, or criminal, probably not. I'd rule out Hoopy casinos, too: their patrons' identities are nobody's business but their own. Dockable ships of any type probably wouldn't display this information either.

You could go further, and say that you only get this sort of data in a dedicated commerce hub - so main stations and convenience stores would have it, but rock hermits wouldn't: "You want to know what ships are docked here? Stick yer head out yer airlock and look!" Nobody else would, either, for reasons of security, client confidentiality, or simply (as in the case of Rescue Stations), "That's not what we're here for."

Another general question: what group should a list of docked vessels be under on the Interfaces screen? I'm thinking "Ship Systems", but really it's a station system interface. It's not really a log, or news. Suggestions, anyone?

phkb wrote:

Another general question: what group should a list of docked vessels be under on the Interfaces screen?

The interface title should be "Shipping news" & category "News".

Wildeblood wrote:

The interface title should be "Shipping news" & category "News".

"Shipping News" sounds good to me.

Is it possible to make more information available than just the ships' names? For example, would it be possible to show the ships' current status, based on how long they've been in the station - e.g. "Docking", for new arrivals; followed by "Unloading"; then "Docked" (non-specific, covering refuelling, repairs, finding and purchasing cargo, shore leave etc., so could cover anything up to, say, 48 hours); "Loading"; and "Departing"? (I'm aware that this may be "feature creep" ... )

Disembodied wrote:

Is it possible to make more information available than just the ships' names? For example, would it be possible to show the ships' current status, based on how long they've been in the station - e.g. "Docking", for new arrivals; followed by "Unloading"; then "Docked" (non-specific, covering refuelling, repairs, finding and purchasing cargo, shore leave etc., so could cover anything up to, say, 48 hours); "Loading"; and "Departing"? (I'm aware that this may be "feature creep" ... )

That would be very cool and immersive feature creep.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Disembodied wrote:

Is it possible to make more information available than just the ships' names? For example, would it be possible to show the ships' current status, based on how long they've been in the station - e.g. "Docking", for new arrivals; followed by "Unloading"; then "Docked" (non-specific, covering refuelling, repairs, finding and purchasing cargo, shore leave etc., so could cover anything up to, say, 48 hours); "Loading"; and "Departing"? (I'm aware that this may be "feature creep" ... )

That would be very cool and immersive feature creep.

Make it vocal so that you can here the simulated traffic, ships landing and launching, bay doors opening and closing, cargo being loaded and unloaded etc. Now that would be extra cool .

Disembodied wrote:

I'm aware that this may be "feature creep" ...

Ya think?




Cool idea, though.

Just as a brief update on where I'm at with this OXP: I've got the data populating, and available to view from various stations in the "Shipping news" list. The stations will launch ships when their departure time is up. Ships that dock with stations are added to the shipping news lists. When the player launches any ships that are due to launch in the 10 minute window the player takes to launch will be visible around the station after launch. The list is updated whenever the player purchases equipment.

Data is saved between sessions. And while I haven't tested it yet, the way the data is structured and cleared, if an NPC ship docks with a station, and the player jumps out to another system then jumps back to the first system and docks with the original station, within a 48 hour period, they should still see that first NPC ship in the dock.

I've implements the various statuses... fortunately not too hard to implement based on what I'd already done. Lucky, eh?

I'm now working on game balancing - making sure I don't flood the system with ships, or conversely have no ships launching from stations. If all goes well I'm hopeful of having a playable OXP in the next month.

phkb wrote:

Just as a brief update on where I'm at with this OXP: I've got the data populating, and available to view from various stations in the "Shipping news" list. The stations will launch ships when their departure time is up. Ships that dock with stations are added to the shipping news lists. When the player launches any ships that are due to launch in the 10 minute window the player takes to launch will be visible around the station after launch. The list is updated whenever the player purchases equipment.

Data is saved between sessions. And while I haven't tested it yet, the way the data is structured and cleared, if an NPC ship docks with a station, and the player jumps out to another system then jumps back to the first system and docks with the original station, within a 48 hour period, they should still see that first NPC ship in the dock.

I've implements the various statuses... fortunately not too hard to implement based on what I'd already done. Lucky, eh?

I'm now working on game balancing - making sure I don't flood the system with ships, or conversely have no ships launching from stations. If all goes well I'm hopeful of having a playable OXP in the next month.

Sounds amazing, phkb!

Let me explain a situation that is occurring in this OXP.

During startup I populate the initial list of docked ships in all stations that have NPC traffic (actually it's a little more complicated that that, but just to keep this simple...). That works fine for the most part. It will undoubtedly need to be tweaked over time, but for the moment I have a nice long list of docked ships.

Then I go an buy something expensive, like, oh, I don't know, something that would take 2-10 hours to install. My logic would remove all the ships that would have launched in that time. It just removes them, rather than create actual ships, as the assumption is the ships would have jumped out. Then you buy something else that takes 2-10 hours to install. Again, ships are removed. You go from having 30 pages of ships, to 0.

I can repopulate the list when the differential is greater than, say, an hour. But would that ruin the immersion, suddenly having a pile of new ships added to the list that didn't exist before, and weren't necessarily in the system at the time? If I was trying to create a full-on system simulation, I'd be monitoring all ships regardless of position, and moving them around during a protracted time jump, possibly even docking them. But I'd like to keep this as simple as possible.

So what do you think? Just build up the list whenever the player buys something expensive? Is there another option (other than full-on simulation)?

In a typical system it'll take at most an hour for a group which hyperspaces in to reach a station around the planet - much less for the ones along the spacelane, of course. If the clock skip is longer than that I think it's entirely justifiable to dock some ships which weren't in the system previously. (Shuttles from the surface to an orbital station can go from launch to docking much quicker than that, too)

The more complex issue - if the player is using random ship names and so can tell - is that after a 3 day clock skip for equipment that trade convoy which they passed half way down the spacelane on the way in will still only be starting to approach the station. You could dock everything in the system and re-do population on a long clock skip, but that wouldn't be easy in practice.