Tionisla Reporter

[Cody]

Just been to Erehwon (midway between Usle and Biorle) to check - the planet and station are there (dead ahead). All you gotta do is evade the Thargoids.
This may be trickier to do with the newer Thargoid behaviour in interstellar space, of course. If you have injectors, it's no problem!

[Mazur]

Looking at my Latest.log from my last attempt, just before the first mention of a Thargoid ship, I see this:

Code: Select all

15:31:13.339 [LogEvents]: Player will enter witchspace due to wormhole
15:31:13.515 [LogEvents]: Player exited from the vicinity of [Planet position: (0, 0, 533880) radius: 44490 m]
15:31:14.564 [LogEvents]: Player will exit witchspace
15:31:14.618 [script.javaScript.exception.unexpectedType]: ***** JavaScript exception (BroadcastCommsMFD 1.0.18): TypeError: myRoute is null
15:31:14.941 [LogEvents]: Player alert condition changed from 2 to 1
15:31:15.066 [LogEvents]: Hyperjumping 27215 spawned at 0 km
15:31:15.066 [LogEvents]: Thargoid Warship 25820 spawned at 22 km
15:31:15.066 [LogEvents]: Behemoth Type 4 10412 spawned at 23 km
15:31:15.066 [LogEvents]: Navy Asp Mark II 15000 from Behemoth Type 2 11098 spawned at 26 km
15:31:15.066 [LogEvents]: Navy Asp Mark II 3506 from Behemoth Type 4 10412 spawned at 25 km
15:31:15.067 [LogEvents]: Navy Viper 953 from Behemoth Type 4 10412 spawned at 20 km
15:31:15.067 [LogEvents]: Behemoth Type 2 11098 spawned at 26 km
15:31:15.067 [LogEvents]: Navy Viper 30202 from Behemoth Type 2 11098 spawned at 25 km
15:31:15.067 [LogEvents]: Thargoid Warship 14311 spawned at 18 km
15:31:15.067 [LogEvents]: Thargoid Warship 19357 spawned at 23 km
15:31:17.220 [LogEvents]: Player exited from witchspace

Does that help? I mean, there is mention of a planet, which I obviously missed in view, and of a BroadcastCommsMFD error, which I can do nothing with. Next try (as soon as I finish posting this) I'll look in all directions, I'm sufficiently hard now to survive a few hits. Especially if there are cops again. Pity ASC doesn't work, though, and therefore WaypointHere doesn't, or I could find my way back if there are no cops and I have to run a while again to pick off Thargoids from the poopdeck.

[Cody]

I know zilch about GalNavy, as I've never used it. You should emerge into interstellar space in roughly the same position as with a normal witchpoint emergence - i.e. with the planet (a rather ugly one, in this case) more or less straight ahead. The station is easy enough to find, and is of non-standard design.

[Mazur]

I know zilch about GalNavy, as I've never used it. You should emerge into interstellar space in roughly the same position as with a normal witchpoint emergence - i.e. with the planet (a rather ugly one, in this case) more or less straight ahead. The station is easy enough to find, and is of non-standard design.

Well, when i exit into intersteller space, there's only some or more Thargoids, and often some GalCops as well, but no planet, and hence, no station.
And here's my problem: while I used to be a Unix Systems Administrator, that was 14 years ago last, and I now use computers mostly to amuse myself. Recently I started playing Oolite, because it looked like a kind of fun I like, and so it proved to be. However, probably because I like bells and whistles and options, I installed a lot of Expansion packs, some of which now appear not to be working together but produce bugs, which apparently noone has discovered before. I report those bugs, because I think people might want to know, and hopefully fix them, but since I only started playing a month ago and know blessedly little of Javascript anyway, I can't trace and/or fix those bugs on my own. On top of that, I wish to play Oolite, not hunt down obscure bugs, because the latter comes too close to the job that almost drove me into permanent disability, if it hasn't done that. Sure, I can help, following clear requests to find out more information, but I'm not going to remove the Expansion packs one by one to find out when things start working again, because that would take all the enjoyment out of playing Oolite for me.
I will provide a full list of OXPs installed in the game where I encountered those bugs.
HTH, HAND.

[phkb]

nd of a BroadcastCommsMFD error, which I can do nothing with

Yeah, that one's mine. Looks like my route planner doesn't work in interstellar space. Shouldn't impact on anything else, though.

[spara]

...I installed a lot of Expansion packs, some of which now appear not to be working together but produce bugs, which apparently noone has discovered before. I report those bugs, because I think people might want to know, and hopefully fix them, but since I only started playing a month ago and know blessedly little of Javascript anyway, I can't trace and/or fix those bugs on my own...

Bear in mind that the OXPs are to be considered as unofficial content to the game with various authors of which some are long gone from the forum. Some OXPs are really old and somewhat functional and there is no central quality control. The quality of a single mod is as good as the current maintainer makes it. Time is limited, there are a zillion on mods around and there aren't that many OXP maintainers.

In short, your reports are very much welcomed. Many OXP maintainers don't really play the game anymore and bug reports from players are much valued.

And to the point. I have confirmed and identified the problem. The oxp set's the planet and the station in planetinfo.plist like this:

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"interstellar: 0 48 144"=...

With the current version of Oolite, that means that the interstellar space between Usle and Biorle is set. And direction matters. The mission strongly suggests to jump from Biorle to Usle and because of the direction, that produces an "empty" insterstellar space.

The OXP would require a little bit of updating overall as it throws a few deprecation errors, but just to fix the problem above,

Code: Select all

"interstellar: 0 144 48"=...

need to be defined too.

[Cody]

I have confirmed and identified the problem. The oxp set's the planet and the station in planetinfo.plist like this:

Code: Select all

"interstellar: 0 48 144"=...

With the current version of Oolite, that means that the interstellar space between Usle and Biorle is set. And direction matters. The mission strongly suggests to jump from Biorle to Usle and because of the direction, that produces an "empty" insterstellar space.

Ahh, that explains it... when I was testing this for Eric, it was fine from either direction. This time I only tested from Usle to Biorle.

[Mazur]

Bear in mind that the OXPs are to be considered as unofficial content to the game with various authors of which some are long gone from the forum. Some OXPs are really old and somewhat functional and there is no central quality control. The quality of a single mod is as good as the current maintainer makes it. Time is limited, there are a zillion on mods around and there aren't that many OXP maintainers.

Lioning that in mind (I like the cat family more than the bear family), I do appreciate the time and effort invested by the global Internet community in keeping me entertained. On the other hand, as an ASS, I am pushed into literal interpretation of verbal communication, and get frustrated when I seem to be misunderstood or ignored. I've had a lot of that in my life and have become less patient with it, hence I may have been reacting a little terse just now. I'm also quite disappointed in having lost the ability to absorb new stuff easily, like javascript, and my inability to fix these problems I encounter myself.

In short, your reports are very much welcomed. Many OXP maintainers don't really play the game anymore and bug reports from players are much valued.

And to the point. I have confirmed and identified the problem. The oxp set's the planet and the station in planetinfo.plist like this:

Code: Select all

"interstellar: 0 48 144"=...

With the current version of Oolite, that means that the interstellar space between Usle and Biorle is set. And direction matters. The mission strongly suggests to jump from Biorle to Usle and because of the direction, that produces an "empty" insterstellar space.

The OXP would require a little bit of updating overall as it throws a few deprecation errors, but just to fix the problem above,

Code: Select all

"interstellar: 0 144 48"=...

need to be defined too.

You're a marvel! I'll just tackle it the other way round for now, something I was planning to try anyway, but kept forgetting to do as there were no ships going that way and thus making it an ordinary cargo run, as I'm close to buying my second ship at the 200k ₢ mark.

[Diziet Sma]

Sure, I can help, following clear requests to find out more information, but I'm not going to remove the Expansion packs one by one to find out when things start working again, because that would take all the enjoyment out of playing Oolite for me.

Agreed.. doing it all one OXP at a time is seriously un-fun.. which is why we recommend using the Binary Method when tracking down problematic OXPs..

Remove half the OXPs. If problem goes away, change to the other half of the set and try again.

Continue removing half the remaining OXPs each time, eliminating the half that are trouble-free. Repeat until you have identified the culprit.

Even if you have hundreds of OXPs, this method will let you identify the source of the trouble in less than 10 iterations.

[Mazur]

Sure, I can help, following clear requests to find out more information, but I'm not going to remove the Expansion packs one by one to find out when things start working again, because that would take all the enjoyment out of playing Oolite for me.

Agreed.. doing it all one OXP at a time is seriously un-fun.. which is why we recommend using the Binary Method when tracking down problematic OXPs..

Remove half the OXPs. If problem goes away, change to the other half of the set and try again.

Continue removing half the remaining OXPs each time, eliminating the half that are trouble-free. Repeat until you have identified the culprit.

Even if you have hundreds of OXPs, this method will let you identify the source of the trouble in less than 10 iterations.

Naturally. But even then, more experience and insight into the various OXPs beyond "What it says on the tin" helps immensly to speed things up.
There are OXPs which require other OXPs so they should not be in different "halves", and quite a few OXPs depend on Snoopers. Those relations are not pre-evident, and so result in false start-ups for a clueless noob like me. And even using the most optimal binary method, it takes 8 restarts with removing and adding OXPs to find the culprit from a game with about half the OXPs installed.

All time not spent playing.

I just mean: for the newbie, time wasted in bug-hunting can be massively shortened by the knowledgeable grizzled space-farer laying out a course of action to find the damn bug.

[CFK]

So let me get this straight:

- You have to somehow intuit that you need to intentionally misjump (something you usually try to avoid doing). Having read the thread, I realize hints were added in later updates, but it's significant for an understanding of the author's thought process that they weren't there to begin with.

- You have to determine the correct witchspace jump to screw up (I figured that Biorle - Usle was the only one that had any chance of being the right one, but when I looked here and saw I was right, it wasn't an "aha" moment, it was a moment of "well I guess I got lucky that my expectations and assumptions are similar enough to the creator's").

- You have to sit around at Biorle waiting for someone to make the correct jump so you can follow them and screw it up - which by the way takes non-trivial piloting skills and, unless you have the patience of the Buddha, a wormhole scanner, which isn't cheap.

- You then have to dodge a pack of Thargoids - better hope you have injectors, but also better hope you keep enough fuel to get back to realspace.

From every design perspective this mission is godawful. (You can take that personally if you like, but I've only said the facts thus far, so I wash my hands of any of that.) And it's billed as a good mission for new commanders? Seriously, what?

[Cody]

You have to sit around at Biorle waiting for someone to make the correct jump so you can follow them and screw it up.

Unless something has changed (it's been a while), you don't need to do that - simply misjump yourself to midway, and tank up at the station.

[CFK]

Then I suspect something is rotten in the state of Denmark, as no planet or station appears for me. I've moved on to greener pastures now - I might fix this mission myself when I have a spare moment. It's just JavaScript, after all.

[Amaranth]

Just managed it, its not broken, you just have to do the trip the other way round.

Just got back into Oolite after a couple of years and reinstalled, so I assume I am on the current version of everything.

[MarchHare]

Eric, I've been tinkering with your OXP a bit. I'm trying to make persistent the part of the mission where you fly between Biorle and Usle. It turns out that once you accept the mission (let's call this state0), that part persists in the save file. However, once you really start the mission (Start at Biorle station [misjumpInfo="BIORLE", call this state1], dock at Usle [misjumpInfo="USLE", state2], dock at Biorle [misjumpInfo="GIVEN", state3]), these further states are not saved. Thus, whenever I restore a save file, I always have to start at state0, regardless of what the state was when I saved. For instance, I could have been on state3, getting ready to trigger a misjump, saved in case of trouble, misjumped, blown to bits by the thargoids, and restored. Following the restore, Erehwon will never appear unless I visit Usle, then come back to Biorle (to be given the misjump hint).

I did try changing misjumpInfo to missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo in the code. While this seems valid, and the mission proceeds as expected with the jumps, the value is not saved like missionVariables.erehwonReconnaissance and similar. In addition (and probably quite related), missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo doesn't really seem to be visible/accessible using the debug console.

What are your thoughts on this? Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong here? Does anyone else have any clue at all? I'm posting the relevant code below. Really, all I did was prepend missionVariables.erehwon to misjumpInfo, and set it equal to "NULL" in the startup event handler.

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this.startUp = function (){
    
    if (!missionVariables.erehwonReconnaissance) {
    	missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo = "NULL";
        missionVariables.erehwonReconnaissance = "START";
        missionVariables.erehwonFotoShot = "NO";
        missionVariables.erehwonGotStory = "NO";
    } else if (missionVariables.erehwonReconnaissance == "FINISHED") {
        this.cleanUp();
    }
};
.
.
.
        if (system.ID == 144 && missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo == "NULL") {
            missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo = "BIORLE";
        }
        if (system.ID == 48 && missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo == "BIORLE") {
            missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo = "USLE";
        }
        if (system.ID == 144 && missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo == "USLE") {
            mission.runScreen({
                title: "Tionisla Chronicle", 
                messageKey: "erehwonReconnaissance_biorle"
            });
            missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo = "GIVEN";
        }
.
.
.
this.shipWillEnterWitchspace = function (cause) {
    if (!system.isInterstellarSpace) {
        missionVariables.showErehwon = "YES";
        if (missionVariables.erehwonmisjumpInfo == "GIVEN" && (system.ID == 48 || system.ID == 144) && cause === "standard jump") {
            if ((player.ship.targetSystem == 48 || player.ship.targetSystem == 144) && Math.random()< 0.2) {
                player.ship.scriptedMisjump = true;
            }
        }
    } else {
        missionVariables.showErehwon = "NO"; // avoid adding planet on multiple misjumps.
    }

};