Oolite Bulletins

First off, thanks to all the devs and modders on creating and maintaining such a great game. I have to say that this is one of the better communities I've come across on net, gaming-related or otherwise.

With all of the great content that has been provided by modders however, a minor irritation has cropped up: messages. A number of OXPs output new messages to the screen apart from the standard ones that are in the vanilla game. Unfortunately, most of them seem to come in the middle of combat. Having played the game for a couple of months and worked my way up to a fully kitted out Vortex (mainly through the Random Hits OXP ), things like the shield equaliser/capacitor system, the auto-targetting system and the MAC system of the Vortex itself are constantly spitting things out at me while I'm trying to stay alive in a dogfight, sometimes involving upwards of fifteen ships (mainly when pirates work up the nerve to attack the spacebar I'm at when looking for my next mark). It's not a case of the old stuck messages bug, but occasionally enough messages are generated in a short enough space of time to actually interfere with laser targetting. Suffice to say, most of those messages go past unread, and when it's all over and I've docked for repairs/handing over captured pirates/selling scooped containers, there isn't really a way for me to sit down and have a look at just what happened. With the Vortex, where the ship is able to repair itself and some of its features (like the MAC itself) are not listed on the manifest screen, I am sometimes unaware of damage that has occurred until I get a message on the way out of the station saying "MAC regeneration restarted" or something along those lines.

Ideally, a message log would be implemented within the game, similar to the existing communications log (but with a much expanded history), and the number of messages displayed onscreen would be limited to a set number or a set number of lines. However, as ahruman has quite rightly stated, there is a feature freeze in place due to the beta status. As a short term fix, would it be possible for an OXP to be written to simply dump all messages out to a text file in real-time? Possibly with timestamps? Essentially, it would be totally silent in game, but would create a text file (probably in the saves folder) where all onscreen messages would be saved. Then you could sit back and read just what happened in that last dogfight over a beer while waiting for you ship to be repaired.

As a side benefit, I'm sure this would result in much hilarity if people posted some of their logs here, as well as describe the actions of candidates for Oolite Darwin Awards in a rather dry manner...

I've looked for a solution for this on the boards, but haven't been able to find one. If there is one, my apologies, my Google-fu is weaker than I thought it was. I did see Captain Beatnik's HUD which has two visible logs, but a) they seemed to simply be duplicates of each other and b) were probably limited in how much of a history they could show. Having said that, I'm basing that purely on the screenshots he posted as I didn't try it out myself. If I'm wrong, then apologies to Captain Beatnik.

I can't help, but I wanted to say that I think it's a good idea and I remember it has been asked before, so if I have time and nobody beats me to it, I'll try my own Google-fu.

And of course, what I need to do here is pronounce: "Welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat"(tm)

The problem is that there are two similar functions: console messages and comms messages. Console messages are displayed for a few seconds then are gone. Comms messages are stored in the comms log and can be recalled later by pressing "`". Less important messages should be displayed as console messages. More important messages should be displayed as comms messages. Unfortunately, many OXP authors habitually use only one or the other.

As Wildeblood writes, there are two types of messages. The console messages are the unimportant ones and are not logged. The commsMessages are logged and can be read back in the comms log. Whenever an oxp thinks that its message is important to be read back, it should send it as comms message.

Only for the comms messages it would be possible to write them to the normal log file. e.g. by added the following lines to a worldScript:
So added in a separate oxp, you would have a logging oxp.
That would log all dammaged/destoyed equipment and broadcasted messages. (console messages are by their nature not broadcasted)

And since 1.74 it is possible to define the on-screen area for the messages and their character size. It is defined in the hud and some huds make already use of it.

Thanks for the explanation. Funnily enough, it's the console messages I'm interested in. I take it that it's not possible to dump console messages to a text file?

@DaddyHoggy, thanks for the welcome!

No advice for a fix for retaining the messages in a log, but at least this thread explains how to make the messages smaller / offset so they don't get in the way of your sights. Hopefully helpful

Welcome LonerAoshi. The messages in the latest version of ShieldEqualizers+capacitors can be toggled "OFF" in the startUp function of the script, as can sounds of most of my oxps. Might help prevent obscuring your vision in combat.

CommonSenseOTB wrote:

Welcome LonerAoshi. The messages in the latest version of ShieldEqualizers+capacitors can be toggled "OFF" in the startUp function of the script, as can sounds of most of my oxps. Might help prevent obscuring your vision in combat.

Thanks for the info. I don't actually have a problem with various OXPs giving out constant messages like that, and it's rare that there will be so many messages that they interfere with targetting, it's just that I would like a way to review exactly what happened during the fight afterwards. Unfortunately, it seems that logging console messages is not technically possible.