[UPDATED RELEASE]-Police IFF Scanner 1.3.1 (18/12/11)

[Smivs]

Well that's the point, isn't it: it's an idea. Someone has an idea, they say "Here's an idea, what do you think?" Grown-ups can discuss ideas, decide whether they're good ideas, whether they're worth following up or not. It seems to me that around the "Friendliest board this side of Riedquat" only certain people are allowed to have ideas.

Anyone can have ideas, just as anyone can question whether the idea is valid or not. One person's 'good idea' might be everyone's notion of a good idea, or it could be seen as a bad idea by most. Anything that doesn't make sense (and I'm not talking about this or any idea specifically) is likely to be questioned, and that's a good thing. How else are standards maintained?

[Thargoid]

Maybe only include entities whose displayName == name

Then anyone who has bounty scanner installed will never see any effect from your OXP.

Wouldn't Bounty Scanner just append the Bounty to the "No Transponder" name? Looking quickly at the code it appears to grab displayName, temporarily change it whilst targeted to displayName + the bounty and then changes it back to the originial displayName?

Academic anyway, I don't intend to code it into anything I'm planning on releasing - upto Wildeblood if he wants to have a shot at it.

My meaning was the other way around. If you have bounty scanner then the displayName will never be equal to the name (as the bounty scanner appends its figure to the name) and so the No Transponder will never happen in the first place.

In practice it would depend somewhat on the order of things - you are correct that if the IFF upgrade triggers first then the bounty will be appended onto the "No Transponder" message. My thinking was if the bounty scanner script kicks in first...

[Switeck]

Why would a fugitive lose its transponder in the first place? And how would he automagically regain it when becoming offender again?

Having a named ship may be a perk that only clean and offender npcs (and player) are allowed to have. The ship might still have a name while fugitive, others just aren't allowed to see it. Their loss.

[Gimi]

There are two parts to this in my Ooniverse, transponder and ships signature.
If I remember the Elite manual correctly, legal status is attached to the signature of the ship. This would give ship type and legal status. but possibly not bounty and name of the ship. Depends on the "db" in the scanner.

A transponder would give more, e.g. ship name and anything else such as the commanders name in personalities.

With the right equipment, bounty scanner" you have a database that updates continuously and gives you bounty based on signature and so on.

[Zireael]

Why would a fugitive lose its transponder in the first place? And how would he automagically regain it when becoming offender again?

Having a named ship may be a perk that only clean and offender npcs (and player) are allowed to have. The ship might still have a name while fugitive, others just aren't allowed to see it. Their loss.

I think a fugitive would deliberately disable his/her transponder in order to be identified later - to make the traders and Vipers unaware of what ship he is (I mean both type and name) and how high his bounty is...

[Commander McLane]

Why would a fugitive lose its transponder in the first place? And how would he automagically regain it when becoming offender again?

Having a named ship may be a perk that only clean and offender npcs (and player) are allowed to have. The ship might still have a name while fugitive, others just aren't allowed to see it. Their loss.

I think a fugitive would deliberately disable his/her transponder in order to be identified later - to make the traders and Vipers unaware of what ship he is (I mean both type and name) and how high his bounty is...

I can see why he would do that, but I have two technical problems with it: first, as far as I have understood Elite/Oolite, a transponder is a key part of the ship and can't be disabled that easily. Admittedly, this can be circumvented very easily, because my made-up backstory of Elite/Oolite doesn't need to fit with anybody else's made-up backstory.

But second, and more importantly: as fugitive status doesn't stick very long to a pilot/ship. One or two jumps, and you're back to offender. So why would a pilot go through the hassle of manipulating their transponder in the first place? And then they would jump to another system (in my personal backstory jumps are instantly for the pilot), and come out at the other side with a magically restored transponder (but only if this is the jump that turned them back to offender; if they were still fugitive, the transponder wouldn't be restored)? I just have a hard time imagining that a pilot would spend exactly the couple of seconds between entering a wormhole and emerging on the other side fiddling with his transponder, in order to restore its signal exactly in the moment when he's entering the new system. Wouldn't he have something better to do in these seconds? Wouldn't he be strapped in his seat, instead of kneeling in front of a panel deep inside the belly of his ship, a screwdriver in his hand? And how would he even get from his cabin to the place wherever the transponder sits and back, and perform the necessary manipulation, all in at most six or seven seconds (that's how long a jump takes for me, so it must be the same for everybody)?

Imagine you follow a fugitive pirate through his wormhole. When you target him before the jump, your don't get any information about him. As soon as you target him after the jump, only seconds after you last targeted him, all information is suddenly there. As a player, I would find that odd.

[Thargoid]

You could argue there the career pirate, who can't be bothered with all the time needed to restore his bounty level (when he could be out killing innocent traders) would fit the category of someone who might do this.

Also perhaps some heinous (sp?) and traitorous crime that made someone a permanent Galcop enemy could also fit in here. And the transponder fiddling could be automagic, electronic based perhaps.

There are all sorts of narrativium particles that could strike here I would say.

[CommonSenseOTB]

I heard that narrativium particles can liquify you from the inside out!

You know, I always thought(assumed) that the identification of ships was solely done by reading the em signature of the hull and the reason was the difficulty/impossibility of alterring that signature by criminals. Also would explain why you have to target a ship to get it's info or if it was a transponder it would broadcast the info and it would be like an air traffic contoller's radar with all the info displayed all the time.

On the names thing, If you have individual names for npc ships and you destroyed one, would that name not be seen again to reflect that individual ship has been destroyed? Shouldn't and couldn,t it?

[Thargoid]

Ideally yes, when destroyed the ship name should never appear again. However scripting that would be a real PITA, so the next best thing is done (usually) and either have the ships in question so rare (such as the Vortex) or the random name generator so populous (such as the Emeralds in the upcoming Liners.oxp) that they don't reappear within short-term memory that way.

And I generally find with narrativium particles the reverse is true - they get attracted by liquid, usually of the alcoholic nature At least that's my personal experience...

[CommonSenseOTB]

Ah yes, I forgot about the alcohol. Probably has a place in the grand unified theory of literature, eh?

[Commander McLane]

On the names thing, If you have individual names for npc ships and you destroyed one, would that name not be seen again to reflect that individual ship has been destroyed? Shouldn't and couldn,t it?

Given that we have eight galaxies with 256 systems each, it isn't too difficult to imagine that there can be two ships with the same name. So I wouldn't find it odd to come across a name twice.

(Also—a purely practical reason—any OXP-provided list of names would eventually be exhausted. What should Oolite do then? Never spawn an Anaconda (or whatever the NPC was) again? )

[Capt. Murphy]

Software Refinary's Hardwar used to that (run out of NPC's names). They had a very elegant solution - it crashed!.

[Wildeblood]

Version 1.2: 25/6/11 - Fixed a 'silent' bug in timer mechanism. Added code to stop Timer on ship death.

R U sure?

22:34:39.729 [script.javaScript.timeLimit]: ***** ERROR: Script "Police_Scanner_Upgrade" ran for 120.707 seconds and has been terminated.
22:34:39.729 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: 0 (Police_Scanner_Upgrade.js:57) <anonymous function>
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22:34:40.736 [script.javaScript.timeLimit]: ***** ERROR: Script "Police_Scanner_Upgrade" ran for 121.714 seconds and has been terminated.
22:34:40.736 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: 0 (Police_Scanner_Upgrade.js:57) <anonymous function>
22:34:40.736 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: this: [Script "Police_Scanner_Upgrade" version 1.2]
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22:34:41.740 [script.javaScript.timeLimit]: ***** ERROR: Script "Police_Scanner_Upgrade" ran for 122.719 seconds and has been terminated.
22:34:41.740 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: 0 (Police_Scanner_Upgrade.js:57) <anonymous function>
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22:34:42.722 [script.javaScript.timeLimit]: ***** ERROR: Script "Police_Scanner_Upgrade" ran for 123.7 seconds and has been terminated.
22:34:42.722 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: 0 (Police_Scanner_Upgrade.js:57) <anonymous function>
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22:34:43.716 [script.javaScript.timeLimit]: ***** ERROR: Script "Police_Scanner_Upgrade" ran for 124.694 seconds and has been terminated.
22:34:43.716 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: 0 (Police_Scanner_Upgrade.js:57) <anonymous function>
22:34:43.716 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: this: [Script "Police_Scanner_Upgrade" version 1.2]
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22:34:44.725 [script.javaScript.timeLimit]: ***** ERROR: Script "Police_Scanner_Upgrade" ran for 125.704 seconds and has been terminated.
22:34:44.725 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: 0 (Police_Scanner_Upgrade.js:57) <anonymous function>
22:34:44.725 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: this: [Script "Police_Scanner_Upgrade" version 1.2]
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22:34:44.726 [script.javaScript.stackTrace]: psu_findshipswithbounty: function psu_findshipswithbounty

[Capt. Murphy]

That's something different.....looks like it's stuck in a loop an oolite is killing it off as it should.

edit: Had you just died perchance?

[Wildeblood]

That's something different.....looks like it's stuck in a loop an oolite is killing it off as it should.

So you're saying it's my fault?

No, I was in interstellar space, trying to get photos of Erewhon Station, actually.