Oolite Bulletins

Fritz wrote:

Hm. Taking cover in the tunnel while being attacked by around 8 ships is good for protection, but not so good for the hermit... but that's ok.

Did it blow?

Yes. But it took some time.

Fritz wrote:

Yes. But it took some time.

Exploding from friendly fire kind of sucks. I'll probably up the max_energy a bit.

I don't know if this is necessary. I tried to destroy it myself, and it was very difficult, especially because I couldn't use my lasers to fend off all the ships attacking me. Provably nothing I would try when playing "normally"...

Fritz wrote:

I don't know if this is necessary. I tried to destroy it myself, and it was very difficult, especially because I couldn't use my lasers to fend off all the ships attacking me. Provably nothing I would try when playing "normally"...

True. And seeking cover from the dock could be seen as one way of destroying the station. If someone wants to do it.

And why bother to keep track of its destruction when it's indestructible?

Fritz wrote:

And why bother to keep track of its destruction when it's indestructible?

Indeed. Pirate hermits should be tough, but possible to destroy, if someone fancies.

Cody, I was a bit hasty with my answer regarding script_info. Busy spicing chaotic hermits. It's the barred equipment block that's causing it. You need to edit it to look like this: To be perfect, from both: "oolite_template_rock-hermit-pirate" and "griff_normalmapped_hermit-pirate". But as I said, I'll fix it to the next version.

I didn't manage to find the destroyed hermit again. It is missing from its old position, so something has happened, but it doesn't seem to be somewhere else.

How do you do the repositioning? Will it be in the same area? Will it be somewhere completely else? Is there a delay in game time until it appears again?

Fritz wrote:

I didn't manage to find the destroyed hermit again. It is missing from its old position, so something has happened, but it doesn't seem to be somewhere else.

How do you do the repositioning? Will it be in the same area? Will it be somewhere completely else? Is there a delay in game time until it appears again?

First of all, you need to re-enter the system for the populator to spawn the original back. In the populator phase, after the hermit has been spawned by the core, the whole hermitage (the hermit and rocks around it) is moved to a new place using a named region: "PLANET_ORBIT_HIGH", which means a position between 3 and 7 radii from the main planet's surface.

It's probably a bitch to find again, but then again, you might not want to blow the one you have found, if you want to take some advantage of it .

If you want to reset the hermits back to their original places, you can delete the key mission_spicy_hermits and the string following it from your save file.

Hm. My hermit was near the sun, on LANE_PS. But I expected it to be somewhere else, and I looked around the planet and the W-P route. But 7 radii is a huge area of space, especially if you have only the sun, the planet and a very unprecise space compass for orientation!

I think, choosing about the same location would be unrealistic, so it's ok how you have done it. I'll look for it again!

@Friendly fire: Is there an option in AI script programing to let the AI check, what is in there aiming cross? if not, maybe the AI could be made to stop firing and to change its position, when hitting the hermit trice in a row. Maybe even in direction of the docking bay, to take position over it, but only if it's easy to write.
Or: Is there en eventhandler when the station is hit, that also gives the attacker? (I'm using my android tablet right now and the browser keeps chrashing, so I'm having trouble to look it up myself.) This way the done damage could be given back to the station, to nearly turn damage by friendly fire off.

@features for chaotic hermits: The only thng I came up with quickly is, that I never have been attacked by standard offeners in the Savezone of the main station. Can this be easily transfered to hermits, too? Even if it's a chaotic hermit, I wouldn't allow brawls at my frontdoor.

ocz wrote:

... that I never have been attacked by standard offeners in the Savezone of the main station.

Some ships can, and will, attack within the station aegis - no such thing as a safe-zone in Oolite.

I didn't find the hermit even after an intense search around the planet, so I gave it a beacon (with an upper-case H, in case Cody is worried!). I checked the saved game before the destruction, and the beacon worked and led me to the known pirate hermit.

In the game saved after the destruction, the beacon took me to a rock hermit almost behind the sun, seen from the planet. I didn't expect that anything in Oolite would be much outside the WPS triangle! It had a new name, but the relocated one probably would get a new name too, because of the changed position. So I checked the first saved game again, to see if this hermit did exist before the destruction of the known one, but the compass didn't show it, only the one I knew already.

What I didn't know is how the compass behaves if there is more than one target of a certain type. Does it pick one of them randomly, or can you toggle through all of them? So I reloaded the second saved game, flew to the hermit, and destroyed it to see if the compass would show another hermit, which should have been the relocated one. It didn't - there was no other pirate hermit in the system.

Conclusion: The destroyed hermit was relocated, but not around the planet, but somewhere around the sun!

Fritz wrote:

Does it pick one of them randomly, or can you toggle through all of them?

The latter.