Oolite Bulletins

Commander McLane wrote:

EDIT: Am I just dense, or do the [wiki] and [wiki=] tags not accept colons (':'), making them pretty useless for the JS-reference pages and for category pages as well?

I ran into the same problem when trying to link to a user:user page, so I think we can disregard the denseness explanation on that one.

Commander McLane wrote:

However, as far as I know NPCs cannot misjump, and scriptedMisjump is a player-only property. Therefore the wormhole generated by the exiting NPC will always lead into its target system. Your tests seem to indicate that even setting the scriptedMisjump-property will not cause the player to 'fall out of the wormhole'. If this holds up, you're stuck for now.

My own tests confirm the observation. I can make an NPC jump to any system in range via JS, but I cannot make it misjump. And if following through the wormhole, I always end up in the target system. The scriptedMisjump property doesn't do anything. I guess I could still manually misjump, though, so probably the scriptedMisjump property could and should be amended to work even when using an NPC's wormhole.

EDIT: No, I was wrong on the last assumption. When following an NPC wormhole I cannot manually misjump. Even if I enter the wormhole with full pitch, I end up in the target system. Seems the idea of jumping after an NPC won't work in this case.

Hmmm. I've been thinking about it and I don't know wether I would want to use such a thing, but maybe these ideas could make it more interesting:

1) If whatever causes the wormholes to be created (be it either a special ship or a pylon mounted engine) - maybe it would be good if the series of wormholes is not created instantly, but if the eq/ship has to "gather energy" after each jump before jumping again. Maybe attacks could even slow it down further (so the delay ain't that big when nothing is going on but noticeable when there's fun around). That way, normal pirates as well as specially scripted ones (they should be there - they surely consider a commander able to buy such a thing and his ship a good target) can have some time to attack the player AND the eq/ship creating the wormholes. This would force the player to fight without fleeing

2) If you make it only available with a mission *after* the player has done specific missions (or reached a point where he surely has), you would at least not break those missions. Furthermore, some might want to play it at least once because it's got a mission on it's own Reconsidering 1) I could imagine that such a mission would include to hunt a NPC who's using this device and stop him from reaching the destination as well as to jump somewhere special and having to fight off additional ships on the way there (between the jumps). Maybe the player has to do some special operation with other ships which use the same EQ and then, during the mission, one tries to flee with the device to hand it over to the enemy...

Screet

CheeseRedux wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

EDIT: Am I just dense, or do the [wiki] and [wiki=] tags not accept colons (':'), making them pretty useless for the JS-reference pages and for category pages as well?

I ran into the same problem when trying to link to a user:user page, so I think we can disregard the denseness explanation on that one.

Yep, the custom tags feature in phpBB3 is pretty lame. For linking to JS reference pages without anchors, there’s a hidden [jsref] tag.

Ahruman wrote:

For linking to JS reference pages without anchors, there’s a hidden [jsref] tag.

Noted.

I was hoping to create a common framework that could be externally called by other OXPs via mission variables/arrays to both place warp gates and give them controlled hyperspace routes.

All is not lost...the warp gate could be placed at the end of a long chain of systems, so its only possible exit is the next-to-the-last system.
Or even make the random results PART of a mission/campaign -- it only dumps you out at the system you need to go to *sometimes*, so you must keep going back to the gate and retrying it till you get to the "secret base".
If you end up where the mission/campaign wants you to go, instead of ending up at the witchpoint beacon...a script.js moves the player's ship much like Save Anywhere OXP or Gates OXP does -- and also populates the mission-related NPC ships/asteroids/stations/whatever. Since it would be an inhabited system, these mission items would be best placed far from the normal shipping lanes.
Discovery/starting the mission could be a "rumor mill" report either as a standard mission briefing or via Snoopers news of a severely off-course trader spotting "something strange in the distance".

Commander McLane wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

However, as far as I know NPCs cannot misjump, and scriptedMisjump is a player-only property. Therefore the wormhole generated by the exiting NPC will always lead into its target system. Your tests seem to indicate that even setting the scriptedMisjump-property will not cause the player to 'fall out of the wormhole'. If this holds up, you're stuck for now.

My own tests confirm the observation. I can make an NPC jump to any system in range via JS, but I cannot make it misjump. And if following through the wormhole, I always end up in the target system. The scriptedMisjump property doesn't do anything. I guess I could still manually misjump, though, so probably the scriptedMisjump property could and should be amended to work even when using an NPC's wormhole.

EDIT: No, I was wrong on the last assumption. When following an NPC wormhole I cannot manually misjump. Even if I enter the wormhole with full pitch, I end up in the target system. Seems the idea of jumping after an NPC won't work in this case.

Wormhole behaviour is somewhat different in trunk. Last time I looked you could indeed misjump when entering other people wormholes, and for 1.75 we should hopefully get NPCs to follow the scriptedMisjump property, in which case the analyser would still display the intended destination, but any ship entering the witchcloud will end up in interstellar space...

PS: talking about interstellar space: in trunk any station/carrier boarded in interstellar space can be optionally set to stay put rather than jump to the nearest system, so interstellar space might get more interesting in the future...

So now we need an option to populate interstellar space between two specific systems at will, removing all Thargoids etc, and the ability to place a space station or even a planet there. And, viola, there you have a good environment for placing Raxxla and other fabled planets into Oolite. Good starting point for secret missions in an OXP, don't you think.

Gimi wrote:

So now we need an option to populate interstellar space between two specific systems at will, removing all Thargoids etc, and the ability to place a space station or even a planet there. And, viola, there you have a good environment for placing Raxxla and other fabled planets into Oolite. Good starting point for secret missions in an OXP, don't you think.

Yep, that oxp is already written: "achenar.oxp." Has a planet and station in interstellar space and a mission to take some pictures there, but because interstellar stations only works well with trunk, it's release has to wait untill 1.75 is released

Eric Walch wrote:

Gimi wrote:

So now we need an option to populate interstellar space between two specific systems at will, removing all Thargoids etc, and the ability to place a space station or even a planet there. And, viola, there you have a good environment for placing Raxxla and other fabled planets into Oolite. Good starting point for secret missions in an OXP, don't you think.

Yep, that oxp is already written: "achenar.oxp." Has a planet and station in interstellar space and a mission to take some pictures there, but because interstellar stations only works well with trunk, it's release has to wait untill 1.75 is released

Ohhhh... I Want. I have trunk installed. Can I play. Pretty please. "With a cherry on the top".

Joking aside; looking forward to it's release. What galaxy is it set in by the way. (Out of curiosity).
Have you considered expanding it with a series of missions, and then calling it "The Dark Wheel".

Edit: Corrected awful English to passable English.

Gimi wrote:

So now we need an option to populate interstellar space between two specific systems at will, removing all Thargoids etc, and the ability to place a space station or even a planet there.

All these options have always existed, although off the top of my head I know no released OXP which places a planet in interstellar space (Eric seems to have hot news, though ).

There is still the glitch that no sun exists, and the lighting is gloomy greenish. So you will never confuse interstellar space with normal space.

Commander McLane wrote:

There is still the glitch that no sun exists, and the lighting is gloomy greenish. So you will never confuse interstellar space with normal space.

So, what we actually need is the ability to place a sun in interstellar space.

Gimi finds himself glaring at the sun outside and waiting in anticipation for news from Ahruman ......

Gimi wrote:

Joking aside; looking forward to it's release. What galaxy is it set in by the way. (Out of curiosity).
Have you considered expanding it with a series of missions, and then calling it "The Dark Wheel".

Edit: Corrected awful English to passable English.

It is in galaxy 1 and mend as a starter reconnaissance mission with only 4 mission screens. It is mainly mend as an example of the new possibilities in future 1.75.

The mission is fully working except that the content of the mission screens still has to be filled in. I don't want to do that myself because of my own "awful English". DH already volunteered for that job but I still have to send him a brief overview of the intended content. (Its on my TODO list for over a month now)

And McLane is also right about the absence of a sun. I already had a thought about it, that the planet description on the mission screen must say anything about that. And I don't mean the description on the F7 page as that only will show the planets in normal space and not this one Placing planets and stations was already possible in 1.65, the only problem was a realistic launch from such a station.

While BB was down, I had a look at the Idea of making simultanous jumps to the far systems. And I was able to jump from one end of the galaxy to the other end.

I have done that by adding a cheat jump planner equipment to my LongRangeScanner equipment. I am not going to release this version, before all the guys agree on a release. Because it is not my Idea.

I havent used a drone, but another Idea. Apart from the cheat jump part, I added a Jump Planner screen to LongRangeScanner.



The equipment works fine and I was able to earn about 6 million credits in a day on long range contracts. If any body wants to have look at that equipment please post a PM to me.

The only problem is, this equipment does not work on interstellar space Because ship.exitSystem is not working for a ship there. I looked at Interstellar help OXP and it achieves the jump by AI.

Okti

Okti wrote:

The equipment works fine and I was able to earn about 6 million credits in a day on long range contracts.

That's a lot of credits!