Oolite Bulletins

The ships have already been done, but I think the OXP is hidden in the crumbled remains of one of the OoSats.

Compass beacon icons are now drawn in the same way as missile icons. As with missile icons, this will break some existing beacon icons (but their behaviour was previously formally undefined). The polygon-sprite-dump-svg hidden setting now works for beacon icons too.

Since this will break compatibility anyway, I’m considering changing to looking up designs by “beacon” string instead of primary role. Thoughts?

Ahruman wrote:

Compass beacon icons are now drawn in the same way as missile icons. As with missile icons, this will break some existing beacon icons (but their behaviour was previously formally undefined). The polygon-sprite-dump-svg hidden setting now works for beacon icons too.

Since this will break compatibility anyway, I’m considering changing to looking up designs by “beacon” string instead of primary role. Thoughts?

This is a work in progress, so backwards compatibility is never assured. I vote for whatever makes the end product better.
Then again, I don't have to update any OXP's, so I'm being rather selfish here.

Ahruman wrote:

Since this will break compatibility anyway, I’m considering changing to looking up designs by “beacon” string instead of primary role. Thoughts?

Seems to make sense. Given that in case there is no design for a given beacon string, the first letter of that string will continue to be used.

I think I have never used more than one letter in my beacon keys. Perhaps one-letter-strings could automatically result in this letter being used, making them unusable as a name for a custom beacon definition?

Commander McLane wrote:

I think I have never used more than one letter in my beacon keys. Perhaps one-letter-strings could automatically result in this letter being used, making them unusable as a name for a custom beacon definition?

Now that’s downright sensible.

Ahruman wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

I think I have never used more than one letter in my beacon keys. Perhaps one-letter-strings could automatically result in this letter being used, making them unusable as a name for a custom beacon definition?

Now that’s downright sensible.

Yeah, sometimes I seem to have a sensible moment.

Right, let’s see. *shuffles notes*

• Cube-mapped planets now have their poles in the right place. (I set out to fix this and found that it already worked. Don’t know when that happened.) Latlong textures are now wrong in a slightly different way than before, but I’m not very interested in fixing them; between the distortion, the misalignment, and the pinching, latlong textures have never looked very good. Use cube maps. (Bug #17243)
• Fixed the Mac sound bug where it would occasionally stick a knife into your ear and wiggle it around until your brain started running out of your nose. (Bug #17214)
• New ship script event shipTakingDamage(amount, fromEntity, damageType). Amount will be zero if damage is absorbed by shields. DamageType is the same as for shipDied(). The event is triggered after the damage is subtracted from the ship’s energy but before checking if it’s a kill, so energy may be <= 0 (and you can resurrect a ship by giving it energy in this situation). It should be called for any damage type except “removed”. (Feature request #5077)
• As far as scripts are concerned, the player can now only die once. (Previously, shipDied() would be called twice, once without parameters and once with.)
• When the player is killed by a q-bomb, the damageType parameter to shipDied() is now “cascade weapon” (not “energy damage”) and the player triggers a new cascade.
• Sounds that are listed in customsounds.plist are now preloaded to avoid loading delays. (The code was there before, but was never invoked.) Sounds that are played through JavaScript by specifying a file name cannot be preloaded; if you’re doing this, and your sound isn’t particularly rare, I suggest going through a customsounds.plist entry.
• New Entity method dumpState(). Same type of dump as pressing 0 while paused, or the super-secret shift-H key (I’d completely forgotten about that one).
• The JavaScript global and console objects are now replaced when resetting the game, and can no longer be used to smuggle information across sessions.
• Reduced memory usage of various special effects and JavaScript objects.
• Windows builds now support the JavaScript trace and profile commands (see upthread; only native functions at this time), and also the ability to turn Objective-C exceptions into JavaScript exceptions instead of crashing horribly.
• Updated to FireFox 4b10 version of SpiderMonkey, and dropped support for SpiderMonkey 1.7. Boring for you, fiddly for me, but I got to check in -121970 lines of code in one go. Nice big drop in the LoC graph.
• Bugs #17202, #17214,#17215, #17243, #17391,#17454, #17819, #17888, feature requests #5058,#5077,#5095 and task #3373 closed. Feature request #5031 deferred until after MNSR.

You had a quiet week then, admiral.

Well, not just me. Those other fellahs helped around the place and whatnot, dontchewknow.

Ahruman wrote:

Right, let’s see. *shuffles notes*

• Fixed the Mac sound bug where it would occasionally stick a knife into your ear and wiggle it around until your brain started running out of your nose. (Bug #17214)

I love you!

During this last week, instead of hanging around on the boards, I've started actually playing the game again, and I decided to do it with sound on (which I usually have turned off). And I really can't tell you just how often my brain started running out of my eardrums! At times it happened once a minute! There was one instant when I was seriously afraid that my laptop's speakers could have been actually damaged, because after one particularly vicious sound attack all sounds were muffled. I had to restart the computer to be able to listen to music again.

Even if there were nothing else at all, Oolite Mac 1.75 is going to be a major breakthrough just for fixing this particular bug!

I love you!

Awwwwww

TGHC wrote:

I love you!

Awwwwww

well, we are the friendliest Board etc, don't you know!

Ahruman wrote:

[*] Fixed the Mac sound bug where it would occasionally stick a knife into your ear and wiggle it around until your brain started running out of your nose.

Oh hooray! I remember playing Oolite with in-ears once, and well, you can imagine what happened.
Great job!