Oolite Bulletins

Hey everybody,

Finished playing Iron Raven!
Will write a review in the coming week...

Greetz,
Onno.

I am a bit late with the review, my harddisk crashed and my PC has only been operational since yesterday

Greetz,
Onno.

onno256 wrote:

my harddisk crashed

Arrrgh! Well, but you had at least backups,I hope...

Thanx for the concern, I did indeed have some backups, and I use Ubuntu One, Oolite is up and running again!

Greetz,
Onno.

I just started playing Iron Raven after finally jumping to G8. First observation: After the first briefing, which does not mention the term Iron Raven, the mission screen has an entry that starts with "IRON RAVEN:". It feels wrong to me, almost like debug output that breaks the immersion ever so slightly. I would not add the prefix in this case.

Hmm, that's probably a fair point. I prefix all the F5 screen entries with the mission name so it's clear what they relate to. In fact, the meaning of 'Iron Raven' is only explained in passing until much later.

By the way, I decided to package up some of my plot notes into a bit of a mission narrative. There are a few little side-quests that I'd like to go back and implement sometime, so I needed to keep a record of where they fit in. Onno, this might be helpful if you've forgotten any of the detail! For anyone else, there are obviously spoilers (though nothing you wouldn't get from looking inside the OXP itself), but if you want an better idea of what the mission's about, you can have a read.

Iron Raven Narrative

Downloaded it! Took me quite some time to burn through Iron Raven, there's a lot going on, plus my computer decided to go kablooie a while back (but it's up and running again)...
On the plus side, if anyone ever has a problem with the bootsector of their Ubuntu Linux, just PM me, I know how to fix it!

Ramirez, You're right, a narrative will help.
On a different note; I didn't mind the prefix of Iron Raven in the mission screen myself. I usually have a lot going on ingame, so it was nice to know what was what....

Greetz,
Onno.

I just took a loan on my ship to get an extra million of credits, then went sun-hopping to the system where I need it (just at the beginning of the mission), and when I arrived I found out that the million was gone and my credit balance was back to where it was before. No idea where I lost it on the way. Is that supposed to happen?

Edit: I just sold my fully kitted out Cobra Mk3 at that same station in exchange for a measly Mongoose Fighter to get my balance over one million. Left the station, docked again, talked to the guy, and he wouldn't have anything else to tell me. So I couldn't spend the money. Doesn't seem quite right either.

Hmm, something's not happening quite as expected. It sounds like money's being taken out but a mission screen isn't appearing properly. I'll investigate and see what's up.

OK I've had a look into it and there seemed to be a missing 'else' statement which was stopping things happening as normal.

However, having then done a bit more testing I found some areas of the shipment quest were also bit underdeveloped - there are at least 6 different ways of completing this bit and not all of them had well-defined closure routes, which could result in the mission appearing to be broken. I already had some of these drafted but I've taken the opportunity to go in and finish them up.

Also I've revisited the loan mechanism as again this was a bit underdeveloped, and have made it more robust. On reflection I think a million is a bit excessive, given most ships are worth 100-500k, and it's a lot to pay back. So, I've reduced the loan to 500k, and I've added a proper mechanism to pay it back early at the GSE. If you default on the loan, I can't do anything too clever in terms of repossessing your ship, but it will withdraw of the amount from your account, which pretty much forces you to trade in your ship to get some cash back.

I've also applied various little minor fixes that I've come across - incorrect ad boards appearing outside stations, typos in the mission text, etc, so we're now up to v1.1.

Iron Raven v1.1

Thanks for the super-quick reaction, Ramirez!

Cosmetic small bug.
shipdata.plist at line 82 contain "IR-gse-ad.dat". Must be "IR-GSE-ad.dat". Linux are case sensitive, so it is bug

I'm working through some bugfixes and v1.77 updates and I've had to redesign the the way the defence cannons work. This involves doing away with the solar panel subentities and instead making once combined model, which luckily is no problem now that there aren't any vertex limits to worry about.

However I'm having trouble creating the dat file. In Wings3d I've combined three objects of the model into one, with three sets of UV details and a texture for each (Metal512 is used twice). I make an obj and mtl file which look OK but when I run it through obj2dat there aren't any UV details and it doesn't open in drydock. Do I have to redo the UV mapping after combining the three objects? It'd be a bit of a pain to have to redo everything.

I'm sure I've done this before with other models but I can't see what I've done differently. I've uploaded the wings file here if anyone can help.

On the upside, replaying some of the set-pieces with the funky new laser and exhaust effects is great fun!

OK, I fixed the texture problem by exporting the model to 3ds and re-importing before making the obj file. I've then made a load of fixes and improvements to various elements of the mission - thanks cim for spotting the bugs!

Also I've made use of the F4 screen for the interrogation parts, and have implemented a simple mission screen review function, also accessible from the F4 screen. Again, thanks to cim for help with the script tricks for this bit.

Iron Raven v1.3

Hi guys, have been playing this, great OXP, however I appear to have got stuck...

Have done the rounds of all the locations mentioned, and stuck at the 'come back in 5 days' at the korschov site.. despite the 5 days date having passed by a fair margin, whenever I visit,I just get the usual '4 questions' screen... can anyone help?


In the meantime I've completed the NWE/Defence demo sub-mission, however it all appears stuck on the Korschov mission..

The other interesting point is that the mission log screen (from F4 interface) doesn't appear to work - ie its just blank with no events at all whether I scroll forwards or backwards?

Any thoughts?

I'm using v1.3, with oolite 1.77.