Moderators: another_commander, winston
At least you didn't say it's just a game.Dragonfire wrote:It's a GAME, people. May the next person who brings up how "realistic" Oolite's physics are be tied to a rabid Thargoid.
Yes, quite interesting statements, because it tells us a bit more about the problem extremes can cause. I'd agree that nothing is wrong with strong entities per se, only when, how often and where they are appearing can be a problem for missions.CommonSenseOTB wrote:I rather agree with KW and McLane's comments. This has got me thinking about something else. Perhaps being able to read the stats of the player and the ship have more application in simply setting a difficulty level for the game generally. Oxp ship makers could put in conditions for their ships so that they only appear when the player is of high enough skill and perhaps also check maxEnergy and maxSpeed. It would be a never ending job to do it from the outside as ship oxp's are constantly evolving and new ones being introduced. This would put some responsibility into the hands of the creators of tough or uber ships.
Oolite Life is now revealed hereSelezen wrote:Apparently I was having a DaddyHoggy moment.
On the one hand, preventing a mission from starting is a simple solution, but presumably that means there's only one point of ship evaluation. There's potentially nothing stopping a player from upgrading once the mission starts. In that regard, mission writers won't get away from the need to periodically evaluate the player ship (and perhaps write in appropriate mission exits accordingly).DaddyHoggy wrote:As I said earlier - the easiest way for the Mission designer is (if allowed via js) to spot check certain attributes of the player's ship and if "uber" the mission doesn't start. The player makes their choice, so does the mission designer.
You and Gary Gygax (the creator of Dungeon's & Dragons) can sit down and roll a 20-sided dice. You rolled a 1. I'm sorry. Your laser cooling booster appears not to be working at the moment and , what's this, you just noticed a group of 10 more pirate ships approaching. The fuel injectors also seem to be in some difficulty. Oh My! You have the initiative and 1 free attack at -3 to hit due to Trumbles. What do you do?Disembodied wrote:I don't think it's practical (or even fair) to expect mission designers to create challenges that can adapt to the huge range of possible OXP mixes out there. Even classing player ships by some calculation of übericity is going to be difficult, because sometimes it's not what the player is flying that's important – it's what else is going on in the player's universe. Various mission scenarios could be interfered with by e.g. a mix of OXPs that provide a lot of easy refuelling opportunities, say, or that plant a heavy Navy presence in a particular area. People will also bring out "wangle" OXPs, too, like the Fuel Collector, GalDrivePod or HyperCargo, which are hard to anticipate. This is not to single out or criticise these and other similar OXPs, or to say that people shouldn't continue to push Oolite's envelope, but – by circumventing certain built-in restrictions in the game – they can make it difficult to write missions which depend on those restrictions to provide a challenge.
I'd favour a lo-fi approach: mission authors could give a brief overview of the sort of ship-and-universe mix they think their missions are aimed at. A bit like the old RPG scenarios: "this scenario is intended for a party of 4-6 players, levels 6-9, with at least one Cleric". If someone insists on doing the mission with the equivalent of a party of 18 demigods, each one with an army of immortal Holy Warriors tucked into in their Socks of Surprise +10, then they probably won't have much fun playing it.
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This problem was discussed here. And the mechanism is used in OresratiChallenge.Svengali wrote:The idea is to help avoiding clashes between OXPs which are happening mostly silently. If we start thinking about locking codeparts then we are in trouble, so let's keep these things as open as possible - for the commoonity.-)
