Oolite Bulletins

Hi Screet & DaddyHoggy,

Screet wrote:

Another incompatibility...not cataclysms fault, as far as I can see:

Realistic Shipyards / OSE does change the composition of ships available. With the warship replica this creates some trouble, as it's not available because RS/OSE did override the ships!

Had a look at that, actually that's not possible to happen - the thargoid replica in cataclysm and the buyable salvaged thargoid warship in RS/OSE have different ship key names and therefore won't clash.

There are actually a few buyable ships that are not being rewritten by RS and also won't be by OSE, the reason being that those are ships that are unlocked by a specific mission and/or given as a de facto reward via an insanely low price - it would make no sense to unlock those without a mission or even repricing etc. them, so I'm not doing it.

Have a look yourself, in this respect RS (and also OSE) and Cataclysm don't clash.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Isn't it this that started the brief (ie locked down by admin) sniping thread over "deliberately breaking other oxps"?

No it isn't, that was about something else, another incompatibility between Cataclysm and RS/OSE that disables something from the latter via the former.

But that topic is finished and should stay finished! We all should attempt to solve issues like that in a constructive spirit even if we are of incompatible opinions imho and I include myself and my own semioptimal response back then into that statement.

If anything truely incompatible between RS/OSE and anything else, if oxp or core-game is found and reported to me I will alter that so that it can play together as a matter of of course.



L

Lestradae wrote:

Had a look at that, actually that's not possible to happen - the thargoid replica in cataclysm and the buyable salvaged thargoid warship in RS/OSE have different ship key names and therefore won't clash.

It's not the ship names, it's the availability! With cataclysm, there's that one-time-chance to switch to one. However, with OSE installed, it was not on the list of available ships. When I disabled OSE and flew that final part again, the warship replica was available.

I've noticed something similar once when I went to buy a Caduceus: With OSE in, I got an entirely different list of ships at that planet and the Caduceus was gone. Without OSE, it was available. Thus I did that switch without OSE, losing some of my beloved equipment

What we would need is, that if OSE is in and the replica available (that's only once!), that OSE does not replace that one (or even leaves the original list of available ships for that single moment).

Screet

Screet wrote:

What we would need is, that if OSE is in and the replica available (that's only once!), that OSE does not replace that one (or even leaves the original list of available ships for that single moment).

Mhm, I see!

The problem with this will be that with as many ships as RS and especially OSE offers the game-internal choice of which ships are shown in the shipyard cuts off the list at some point. That can be observed by the fact that there are not 20 pages of ships to be sold with OSE in, but still only 2-3.

This leads to ships with a low probability of appearing not appearing at all. Perhaps one of the devs can explain how exactly the game chooses which and how many ships to sell.

The replica warship will as a consequence, you're quite correct, not even appear with certainty if given probability "1.0" (100%) in the shipyard.plist.

In OSE final, every ship in the shipyard will have to have an uniform "0.5" probability so that every ship type has a chance of appearing at all - anything below or above that would either never appear or appear all the time instead of everything else.

Perhaps I will really have to ask the devs to solve this problem. Workarounds for the replica warship availability - beyond taking out either RS/OSE and, let's not forget, limit the installed ship opxs to 10 or so max is the only solution for the mentioned problem otherwise.

Stuff to think about

L

Hi,

playing the trunk version I have now for a few times received the hive mission without a mission screen. I'm not sure how that happened...

Another thing is that it's the second time that I receive a new hive mission within less than 5 jumps after solving the previous one. Do I have too much luck with the random generator now?

Screet

Screet wrote:

Hi,

there's a little bug with the required galactic jumps from 3 to 5: The player only gets 5K for ONE galactic hyperdrive, but is required to use two.

Actually that's no bug. As you pointed out yourself in another post, you have enough money now. That's what the Navy thinks as well, so they don't pay all your expenses.

Show a little patriotism with your pocket as well!

Commander McLane wrote:

Actually that's no bug. As you pointed out yourself in another post, you have enough money now. That's what the Navy thinks as well, so they don't pay all your expenses.

Show a little patriotism with your pocket as well!

Thinking again about it...it makes sense. The player should buy enough victory bonds, then he can take the time to visit a navy station and buy galactic hyperdrives for 50% off

Screet

Hi Screet!

As you seem to have played through Cataclysm in the meantime, I would be interested in your feedback as far as real bugs in it and things I should look into are concerned. If you've come up with anything, please feel free to post here, or send me a PM. (And everybody else as well.)

Eric has already alerted me to the abs-coordinate bug that recently surfaced, so I will look into the positioning of stations and replace "abs" with another coordinate system, in order to assure a similar appearance on different machines.

I noticed some other glitches myself, which have already been fixed on my machine. But still I'm thankful for more feedback.

Commander McLane wrote:

As you seem to have played through Cataclysm in the meantime, I would be interested in your feedback as far as real bugs in it and things I should look into are concerned. If you've come up with anything, please feel free to post here, or send me a PM. (And everybody else as well.)

It's those things which I mentioned earlier in this thread. I did wait...but nothing else came up in my mind, as it's already some time since I played it through.

I believe the problem with missing mission screens for yet another hub (only happens occasionally) has to do with some other oxp conflicting, as that's what UPS usually detects at those incidents.

IIRC the main points were these:
- the thargoid prototype sometimes failed to destroy it's targets, so I had to do it for the mission to proceed
- the thargoid prototype cannot be bought when RS/OSE is installed, apparantly because that does add too many ships to the shipyard, leaving the protoype out somehow. I didn't retry with the latest OSE version, maybe there's a difference, but I guess it's from oolite itself, limiting the amount of available ships

Of course there's still the subentity/turret issue with some structures, but that's for coders to worry about.

A suggestion from me would be to solve the MASC thing some other way...I did play with the MASC removed, but after cataclysm, I set the variable to allow it back to true. Maybe the navy could come up with a permittance to use or buy that device during or after those missions?

Thank you very much for this oxp, it was a lot of fun!

Screet

Screet wrote:

A suggestion from me would be to solve the MASC thing some other way

I think that giving the thargoid attackers the military scanner filter should work - that counters the MASC, and thargons etc. can be locked & launched at the player.

Hi, Screet!

Thanks for playing (and liking!) Cataclysm.

Screet wrote:

- the thargoid prototype sometimes failed to destroy it's targets, so I had to do it for the mission to proceed

Yes, I had that too during playtesting. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Unfortunately the whole attacking business is entirely handled by the code, not by script. After the AI-command "performAttack" the ship's behaviour cannot further be influenced. It is unsatisfying, nobody could agree more than me, but this is one of the moments where Cataclysm reaches the scripting limitations of Oolite, and perhaps overstretches them a bit. I can only hope that the sometimes strange AI-behaviour itself (like running away when in state ATTACK_TARGET_TWELVE or somesuch) will be sorted out at some point. Up to this point I'm afraid we have to live with the warship not reacting, and perhaps replay from the latest save point (although that is quite a distance away, as I'm aware). The question for me was: knowing that this glitch exists, should I live with it, or trash the whole testing sequence. And I ultimately didn't want to do that.

Should I write a small explanation in a spoiler section in the readMe?

Screet wrote:

- the thargoid prototype cannot be bought when RS/OSE is installed, apparantly because that does add too many ships to the shipyard, leaving the protoype out somehow.

There is nothing I--or Cataclysm--can do about that, I'm afraid. The Cataclysm script re-sets the system's techlevel to ZERO in order to make the replica the only ship available in the shipyard at the time, which works most of the time for me. Sometimes there were very few other ships available alongside it. If another OXP interferes by setting or re-setting the system's techlevel to something else than ZERO, there is nothing I or the player can do, except de-installing the conflicting OXP. (I can only guess that this is what happens with RS/OSE; downloading how many--136 or what?!?--MB just to check its planetinfo.plist is completely out of the question, considering my internet connection.) And I will not go down that road of naming my OXP ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZCataclysm in order to force Oolite to discard all other OXP-induced changes in that system. I think we have too many of these already.

Screet wrote:

Of course there's still the subentity/turret issue with some structures, but that's for coders to worry about.

Yes, indeed. But it seems there is at least some progress on that. So let's keep our fingers crossed.

Commander McLane wrote:

And I will not go down that road of naming my OXP ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZCataclysm in order to force Oolite to discard all other OXP-induced changes in that system. I think we have too many of these already.

For mac users: only just install cataclysm in the private area. users -> "your-name" -> library -> Application Support -> Oolite -> AddOns

(Probably you have to create the Oollite folder there first.) These oxp's are loaded after the ones in the program folder. I store part of the oxp's there because they are used when launching oolite from within x-code.
I think it is not mentioned in the docs but using your private library makes it possible when more users share your computer to personalise Oolite for all users.

I'm still over 4000 kills away from being able to start this mission.... but I'm curious about something. The oxp is listed as being broken on the wiki page, citing an uspecified problem with the most recent version of Oolite. However, it also states that the commies and Galactic navy oxp's add their own problems.

So, my question is: is this oxp actually broken? Or do I just need to remove the galactic navy oxp from my add-ons folder before starting the mission (since I don't use the commies oxp)?

Hi Falcon777,

the OXP is also broken in itself, because I've never gotten around to updating it to make it work with the most recent versions of Oolite. I think there aren't even that many fixes needed to make it work somehow (some scripting commands are no longer understood by Oolite and need to be replaced with other commands), but I'd need to put much more work into it in order to make it work well and beautifully.

Conflicts (or rather inconsistencies) with other OXPs are another and different matter. The story of Cataclysm takes place in a Ooniverse which is very clearly very close to the "vanilla" Ooniverse. It simply doesn't make sense in a Ooniverse that is so fundamentally different like the one that is created by Galactic Navy OXP. And the more other OXPs were changing (personally, I rather think of it as "screwing with" instead of "changing") the fundamentals of Oolite's backstory (or what I perceive as those fundamentals), the more I was losing interest in maintaining Cataclysm. GalNav OXP is a major offender in that regard, and seeing how popular it is I can only assume that the game world in which Cataclysm OXP takes place is much less popular among players. So I'm not very motivated to put much work into it.

Commander McLane wrote:

The story of Cataclysm takes place in a Ooniverse which is very clearly very close to the "vanilla" Ooniverse. It simply doesn't make sense in a Ooniverse that is so fundamentally different like the one that is created by Galactic Navy OXP...and seeing how popular [Galactic Navy OXP] is I can only assume that the game world in which Cataclysm OXP takes place is much less popular among players.

I'm not sure about that. There are still plenty of us who prefer our Ooniverse to be less mucked-about with and more as it was intended to be.

Smivs wrote:

There are still plenty of us who prefer our Ooniverse to be less mucked-about with and more as it was intended to be.

Yep... no Galactic Navy in my Ooniverse!