Oolite Bulletins

...plus it made it a little too obvious that it was a mathematical trick rather than a hand-crafted universe.

Someone mentioned chaff a few posts up. I never got flares doing anything in Missiles and Bombs but I've had a rethink: it would be simple enough to destroy a missile using a scriptactionontarget, but this would make things too easy. You could use d100 numbers to add an element of chance, but then you'd just be replicating the current ECM system in a very convoluted way.

An alternative that better matches the chaff/flare idea could be to alter the standard missile AI so that it looks for ships with role 'chaff' and if found, breaks off the current attack to intercept it. You could slip some d100 numbers in there to add a chance factor of locking on, or just leave it up to the physics of the situation to see what happens. So long as the missile's targetting is disrupted, that should be sufficient.

Another idea I've had is making more use of ECM. Missile AIs recognise ECM as a trigger to blow themselves up, therefore you can adapt this to make a bomb (or a cluster of bombs) that can be detonated remotely by firing the ECM. Of course, other ships could also trigger it and so you'd need to be careful deploying such weapons in the middle of a firefight. You could get around this though by having a standard delayed-action release type thing (as in the current flare launcher or the Green Spark frag bomb) where the devices are only armed once they are a certain distance away from the launching ship.

Looks like I've got some AI work to do!

I've tried out the ideas above and somewhat surprisingly, they've worked first time:

Chaff/Flares

I've added some lines to the missile AI that looks for any chaff in the immediate area both at the time of launch and while it's intercepting the original target. I've managed to evade a trio of missiles fired by a Viper Mk2 by launching a chaff cloud out of the back of my ship. I'll try to get some pictures.

Remote Detonation Bomb

Using ECM as a trigger worked exactly as expected. I've modified the flare launcher again so that a number of bomblets are dispersed over a wide area, then once they are in place they are armed (a comms message pops up to confirm this) and can be detonated at the touch of a button. The same basic approach can be used to lay minefield, with the difference that the bombs are set off by proximity fuses rather than remote control.

I'll work these two ideas up and see about putting them in Missiles and Bombs OXP.

Ramirez wrote:

Remote Detonation Bomb

Using ECM as a trigger worked exactly as expected. I've modified the flare launcher again so that a number of bomblets are dispersed over a wide area, then once they are in place they are armed (a comms message pops up to confirm this) and can be detonated at the touch of a button. The same basic approach can be used to lay minefield, with the difference that the bombs are set off by proximity fuses rather than remote control.

I'll work these two ideas up and see about putting them in Missiles and Bombs OXP.

love this idea,,,, great for "innocent traders" who might have "mistakenly" fired a laser volley at an armoured transport and decided to chase him for a depressingly long time,,,,[/s]

Absolutely brilliant, I'll have to play assassins again with the remote bombs and see how they work, but Iexpect Little Bear may modify the script if it makes it too easy.

TGHC wrote:

Absolutely brilliant, I'll have to play assassins again with the remote bombs and see how they work, but Iexpect Little Bear may modify the script if it makes it too easy.

I doubt L_B will revise Assassins, such is the march of progress. At least if you ace it with the remote bombs, you'll be able to say
"Hah, you youngsters! I hammered that OXP without namby-pamby proximity bombs long before you were even flying shuttles. Kids these days don't know they're born. I remember when this was all starfields......."

Captain Hesperus

Captain Hesperus wrote:

TGHC wrote:

Absolutely brilliant, I'll have to play assassins again with the remote bombs and see how they work, but Iexpect Little Bear may modify the script if it makes it too easy.

I doubt L_B will revise Assassins, such is the march of progress. At least if you ace it with the remote bombs, you'll be able to say
"Hah, you youngsters! I hammered that OXP without namby-pamby proximity bombs long before you were even flying shuttles. Kids these days don't know they're born. I remember when this was all starfields......."

Captain Hesperus

Strange that the most frequently popping up topic is our age, isn't it?

Commander McLane wrote:

Strange that the most frequently popping up topic is our age, isn't it?

Really? To be honest, I can't remember.......
<_<

>_>

But then, I'm starting to have more frequent lapses of.....you know, whatssit......thingy........what were we talking about?



Captain Hesperus
"Uhhhh, something?"

OK, I've adapted a model I did ages ago to stand in for the remote-controlled bomb, so here's some rough time-lapse photography. Once the bomb has been released from the launch casing, it will wait a few more seconds for you to get clear before arming itself - I've given it a 5km effective range which is why I'm standing well back. You may just be able to make out a red light on top - this flashes on once the bomb is armed:



I've just gone with one bomb for the purposes of the test, but it's trivial to launch a cluster simply by altering the launcher device.

For the flares, I've set them to explode harmlessly once the bundle has separated out - this should help avoid slowing down the game and also means that they'll only be effective for a short time. It looks like I can create a duplicate set of standard missile AIs that will take the place of the originals contained in the Oolite application package itself, rather than having to modify any of that data.
Here are some pics of me running away from a missile launched by a police viper. In the last shot, between the tailfins you can just see the explosion where the missile has taken out one of the flares:

Are you going to make the flares a single-use device?

A nice idea (from FFE) was the chaff dispenser that used a tonne of chaff per shot; it could be adapted to Oolite using metal alloys.

Great stuff!

Good work, Ramirez!

Chaf would be dead handy when playing assassins.

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

Are you going to make the flares a single-use device?

A nice idea (from FFE) was the chaff dispenser that used a tonne of chaff per shot; it could be adapted to Oolite using metal alloys.

At the moment the idea is to have it as a relatively cheap single-use device. One bundle of is enough to take out a large number of missiles, and so if used carefully you can exhaust your enemy's missile supply quite quickly.

However - I've missed the more obvious solution which could be to use metal alloys ejected through the usual cargo jettison mechanism. If you dump a piece of cargo does it get given a role associated with the commodity or does it just come up with a role of cargopod but with a specific cargo_type? Whatever the case, I think if I were to go down this route, I'd need to add in some chance factors or reduce the scan range otherwise it would be too easy to disable missiles just by dumping cheap pieces of cargo. Also, the use of a dedicated launcher helps to spread the chaff well away from your ship and looks more spectacular.

TGHC wrote:

Chaf would be dead handy when playing assassins.

It is indeed - I tried out a test version on one of the missions and sped through a mass of battlebots releasing clouds of chaff to confuse them. Then I used a Violet Flax to disable the mark before pumping him laser fire. It still wasn't easy though, mainly because my slightly creaky 700MHz G4 couldn't cope with the object count very well!

Some really interesting weapons.

Nice job Ramirez

Ramirez wrote:

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

Are you going to make the flares a single-use device?

A nice idea (from FFE) was the chaff dispenser that used a tonne of chaff per shot; it could be adapted to Oolite using metal alloys.

However - I've missed the more obvious solution which could be to use metal alloys ejected through the usual cargo jettison mechanism. If you dump a piece of cargo does it get given a role associated with the commodity or does it just come up with a role of cargopod but with a specific cargo_type? Whatever the case, I think if I were to go down this route, I'd need to add in some chance factors or reduce the scan range otherwise it would be too easy to disable missiles just by dumping cheap pieces of cargo. Also, the use of a dedicated launcher helps to spread the chaff well away from your ship and looks more spectacular.

That waswhat I meant: don't use the commodity, rather make a piece of equipment that grinds and spreads the metal - a chaff dispenser. With one touch on the dispenser button (not jettison), it should check to see if there's metals available on the cargo hold, remove a ton, and pulverize it in a thick cloud.

Ah right, I get you - I never played on FFE so didn't know how it worked in there.

Looking through the documented script options, I don't think there's a method to check for specific cargo in the inventory is there? Also, I was under the impression that awardcargo doesn't worth with negative numbers. That said, I'm going by what's in the Wiki so I may be wrong.

If that's not an option, an alternative way of getting a limited multi-use device could be to use something like a chaffcount variable that decreases each time you release a bundle. When you buy the equipment via the F3 screen you pay for 10 bundles, and only when they're used up will the launcher be removed from the weapon pylon (I think I can keep re-equipping the player with the device for all other instances). So far I've only really used variables in a mission context thus far, using things like 'set: mission_trident_down xxxx' but I see people are also using non-mission related variables these days, like the [local_legal_reward] in Cmr McLane's Anarchies OXP. I'd imagine that both methods would work, but if I were to use a variable like [chaffcount] that should mean I can use it in comms or console messages and update the player on how many more bundles of chaff they have left. Any special tips on using variables in this way?