Oolite Bulletins

Thanks Eric for clearing that up. Now I know that the functions are meant to work in theory, I can at least go ahead and plan some improvements to the OXP.

Ramirez wrote:

Thanks Eric for clearing that up. Now I know that the functions are meant to work in theory, I can at least go ahead and plan some improvements to the OXP.

Fixes are committed as r4798/r4799 (trunk/ 1.76 maintenance resp.). So with the next nighty you should be able to test it.

Finally got a chance to test this and yes, range and weapon energy are both OK in the trunk build. So, now it's just a case of playtesting to find the right balance for the challenges. I'll probably need some volunteers to help with this as challenges are meant to be viable for a wide range of commanders with different ships and Elite ratings. No doubt I'll need to modify the odds calculator as well.

Question is then how this might affect the balance of the rest of the OXP, particularly the missions and tournament. I might keep things simple by disabling the turrets by removing the subentities as necessary.

For the last couple of days I have been playing around with one of my ships it now has a layered set of turrets.
Big ones with 6000 range and high energies but slow reload times,
medium with 4500 range, mid energies and faster reload times and
finally small turrets with 3000 range and low energies and a high rate of fire. Set them with different colours so the effects were visible seems to work fine in Trunk 4801.

I was thinking of world war II battle ships with 12" guns, 4.5" guns and multi-barrelled 30mm close support - I am trying to work out what the ranges, energies and reload times for a layered defence for my carrier should be, it will still have a single forward laser of course.

Ironfist

[Moderator: Removed post headers inserted obviously due to copy/paste malfunction. ]
Hey Ramirez

How are things in your end of the Ooniverse and of course other commanders....?

Was playing of course and found something very interesting don't know whether it might be a possible bug or perhaps a slight tweak of the offered challengers when you have three pages, of different challengers.

First I have needed to overhaul my ship and I'm broke so I am in (G1) Onusorle the royal houses won a bunch of duels. I'm not sure of the logic that when you press f8 um is it possible in a future version to only have challengers that will not back out when the odds are in my favour. I've literally spent up to 10,minutes finding a decent combatant. Now if this is random generated that's cool but I would like the three options to be selectable at least.

And is it true that the odds are randomly generated for variety??

Another puzzlement about AI, I was engaging several combatants and most of the time were like head to head, for some apparent reasion the opposing combatant hardly fires at you I had the most financial opportune wager with getting nearly 30,000 credits an engagements. Which is cool cause I really need the money especially with what happened to me when I left a Salvage Gang with a decent 150, 000 Cr. Only to find that after launch and major repairs I still had 150K and slightly more only to find that when I took out an asteroid in my path when it updated my balance I only had 80Cr. Well if the Salvage Gang can offer a multi-pass ID then who knows they might have transfered some credits to their pockets too. So I'm curious if this is a glitch or part of the intrigue of the unknown... Please advise on this when posiuble.

Also the ai is only challenging when you get one of the higher ones the little ships hardly shoot at me almost a guaranteed win thought this would be important to mention just incase.

Ai tweaking necessary?

As noted above I am revising this area.

Odds are currently calculated based on the player ship's max speed, thrust, energy and missile capacity in comparison to the challenger. Odds are capped at 10:1 in player's favour; meanwhile anything less than 0.2:1 means that the player is a clear favourite and so the challenger will refuse to play - this is meant to prevent easy wins.

Ironfist wrote:

For the last couple of days I have been playing around with one of my ships it now has a layered set of turrets.
Big ones with 6000 range and high energies but slow reload times,
medium with 4500 range, mid energies and faster reload times and
finally small turrets with 3000 range and low energies and a high rate of fire. Set them with different colours so the effects were visible seems to work fine in Trunk 4801.

You probably noticed already, but while fixing this with the turrets, I added a maximum to the values that can be set. 6000 as max range, being equal to the range of a primary plasma weapon. And energy is capped at 100, being 4 times the default value. Fire rate was already capped at a minimum interval.
It's not added in the wiki yet, but setting higher values will write a warning in the log, so nobody will miss it.

Eric,

I wonder whether this discussion would be better in its own thread.
Anyway I would like a situation where the turrets had some sort of limiting of energy versus time say something like 50 energy units per second so that if you want a 100 energy unit turret its reload rate would be 2.0 secs and if you can have a 5 energy unit turret it could reload much quicker. This would be a representation of the power supply that would be required to give that sort of energy, may be we could provide some sort of guidance to the overall volume that would be required for differing maximum values some that big turrets can produce 50 energy units a sec but are physically big heavy and slowish to rotate.
Just my thoughts of course.

Ironfist

Okay Ramirez

Thank you for your consideration, I really enjoy your oxp and am looking forward to future versions, its about the best way I've found to make some quick cash.

Ended up once doing duel after duel till I had a million credits so I could by my Vampire MK I gold edition.

The reference to the salvage gang was just to share pretty much a most unique experience and to determine if someone else experienced this its hard to figure out where to post sometimes, I have dedicated as best I can to searching for a similar topic before creating anew.

Thank you for your insight everyone and I think its very clever how you've calculated the odds. I'm also curious about a commodities possibility, I mean those hunting lodges need food and luxuries or alloys for repairs ???

It's okay if you don't put something in as far as that goes, but there seems to be no supply ships coming to the lodge for any sort of resupplying operation and the way the royal house would work especially the finances to pay out sometimes 100,000 Cr to win a duel depending on the challenger, so suffice it to say they're pretty much loaded for a realism point of view there always exists the possibility for needing crucial consumables like food and such. Machinery if they need to repair of perform maintenance of their oxygen recycler or something to that effect.

Sincerely and Respectfully
CMDR MEGALODON.

MEGALODON wrote:

The reference to the salvage gang was just to share pretty much a most unique experience and to determine if someone else experienced this its hard to figure out where to post sometimes

Posting the same thing in four different locations (even after the first or second post was already answered) is not a good remedy, however. It's considered bad style.

Just putting a test OXP together so people can try out the settings for the turrets. I was wondering how to quickly disable lasers as it would look rather ugly to have both turrets and lasers firing during the challenges. I'm stopping short of using turrets for the whole OXP (mainly because that would mean re-testing everything!) and so don't want to have to alter the shipdata too much.

So, I thought maybe I could used a ship script to keep the opponent's laser temperature maxed out - however I'm not sure if there's actually a JS key for this? My guesses at what this.ship.laserTemperature would be haven't worked. Given this data can be used by shaders I assumed it was also accessible to javascript?

Ramirez wrote:

Just putting a test OXP together so people can try out the settings for the turrets. I was wondering how to quickly disable lasers as it would look rather ugly to have both turrets and lasers firing during the challenges.

Use mining lasers. Next best thing.

Bit tied up with a few things so haven't been able to do much Ooliting recently. However, here's the test OXP:

The Feudal States v1.14 TEST

So the deal is that I've taken just the three ships from Aronar and have given them turrets instead of lasers. Every time you ask for a challenge you'll get one of these ships. The fire rate and weapon energy of the turrets can be changed by modifying the relevant bits in the shipdata.plist.

What I'd like is for people to have a bit of a play around and post some of their findings. I can then use this info to make the challenges much more risky and interesting. Remember to fire your flare to yield to an opponent if you don't want to get blown up!

There are some more details included in the readme. Happy hunting!

Thanks Ramirez

One problem is that I can launch from the station and target my opponent without getting too close and fire until my lasers overheat. From that point most of my work is done! Would it be possible to make it so that to open fire before start bell is an automatic disqualification/loss?

Sometimes the opponent does not yield and their ship is destroyed. I've tried scooping up the escape capsule but I still lost the joust. I've tried to destroy the escape capsule but it seemed to be immune laser fire? Do I have to wait until it reaches the planet to win? Or is winning not possible under those circumstances?

Mostly the problem seems to be more to do with the AI controlling the NPC. Quite often it will go into a loop around and around me so I just sit in the middle with the engines at all stop and take pot shots at him until he yields. It would help if he had a top and bottom waist turret to discourage me.

The prizes are huge! Could we reduce them so that I have to do a lot more jousts to earn 100k credits?

Greyth wrote:

One problem is that I can launch from the station and target my opponent without getting too close and fire until my lasers overheat. From that point most of my work is done! Would it be possible to make it so that to open fire before start bell is an automatic disqualification/loss?

That's a good idea. At the moment the opponent waits near the buoy and starts attacking once you're within 5km, but for the snipers at there that's more than enought time to take a shot from long range. Now I know how sound works I can add a little fanfare or something to start the challenge.

Sometimes the opponent does not yield and their ship is destroyed. I've tried scooping up the escape capsule but I still lost the joust. I've tried to destroy the escape capsule but it seemed to be immune laser fire? Do I have to wait until it reaches the planet to win? Or is winning not possible under those circumstances?

An opponent should yield once they hit low energy (25% of maximum); as well as releasing a flare a comms message should come up on screen. I think if things are busy, comms messages can sometimes be lost so maybe I should change this to a more reliable console message. Another complication is that if you continue to attack a ship after it's yielded you forfeit the challenge. So if you keep firing your laser and don't realise the opponent has yielded that may end up in failure. Equally, if you yield your opponent should break off the attack and let you return to the hunting lodge in safety. The escape pod doesn't do anything, other than add to the fiction that the challenges aren't meant to be lethal, and it is pretty much indestructable.

Do you find it's random whether or not you get the yield message - is the problem repeatable?

Mostly the problem seems to be more to do with the AI controlling the NPC. Quite often it will go into a loop around and around me so I just sit in the middle with the engines at all stop and take pot shots at him until he yields. It would help if he had a top and bottom waist turret to discourage me.

Hmm, maybe just a little chaser turret with low power will be enough to force you to keep on the move. I can try that.

The prizes are huge! Could we reduce them so that I have to do a lot more jousts to earn 100k credits?

I'll aim to modify the prizes once I've improved the gameplay. I still want to give players a good level of risk/reward, especially if they're in an underpowered ship.