Oolite Bulletins

- Asteroid spliters should sometimes contain radioactives, <5kb platin, <10kg gold, or <20g gems. (minor change to scoopUp). Maybe there should a some special equipment, which turns spliters into gravel and get these more valuable things.

- addShips should also add the escorts automatically.

- Killing a behemoth should drop some firearms cargo.

- Traders should eject cargo when they flee.

- Cargo should self-destruct after some time floating in space, so you can either go for the trader or get the cargo (let's just say 2mins). Would allow smarter AI, because it can use the cargo as distraction during a battle.

- Some pseudo market (not a full market as suggested in other threads). Each time you sell cargo that item gets cheaper, each time you buy it it gets more expensive. After each witchspace jump, you re-evaluate all prices and make them move a little towards the normal price. This involves no complex simulation, just blows up the savegame, since you need to save a pricelist for each planet.

- Different AI scripting. I don't know how to improve it, but in the long run the current system is not viable. You cannot do complex stuff or computation (e.g., base the numer of spawned ships on the player's score). Also, you will always end up reimplementing all objC functions as scriptable functions, for example it would be nice to have an 'worsenLegalStatus' method, which is similar to "setLegalStatus: legalStatus_number + XY".

Well, and maybe some more...

Traders do eject cargo when they flee.

I’ve considered suggesting integrating Lua scripting. The language integration looks easy (there’s an Objective-C bridge) but I’m not sure how easy setting up the necessary hooks for scripting would be.

popsch wrote:

-Different AI scripting. I don't know how to improve it, but in the long run the current system is not viable. You cannot do complex stuff or computation (e.g., base the numer of spawned ships on the player's score). Also, you will always end up reimplementing all objC functions as scriptable functions, for example it would be nice to have an 'worsenLegalStatus' method, which is similar to "setLegalStatus: legalStatus_number + XY".

If you ask Giles, good chance he just implements such stuff in a future upgrade.

Ahruman wrote:

I’ve considered suggesting integrating Lua scripting. The language integration looks easy (there’s an Objective-C bridge) but I’m not sure how easy setting up the necessary hooks for scripting would be.

I would rather suggest Python. It's quite popular now and there seems to be a bridge, too: http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/

Personally I'd like to see scripting in Ruby

The trouble with Python or Ruby is that it would drag in significantly huge dependencies into the game. Perl is supported out of the box on OS X and Linux (and it would drag a huge dependency for Windows, unfortunately Windows does not have any cross platform scripting by default, and the scripting it has built in is mind-numbingly awful).

Ahruman's suggestion of Lua is probably the best, looking at the website it is designed to be a small, lightweight language that is aimed at people who want to extend programs, and it could be shipped with the game without bloating it too much.

Going back to the original theme of breaking down asteroid splinters into component matter would require a bulky extraction unit - possibly a large expensive accessory - 50kCr + 25tons mass?

This could then only be sensibly accomodated in one of the larger ships, which seems logical to me...

then again, a mininglaser just breaks down an asteroid into ore-rich mineralsplinters, not pure metals.
The minerals are sold cheap to stations, where it is bought by bulk refineries (possibly even housed in the station!) to be refined into pure metals and alloys.

A rockhermit may probably have a smallscale smelter or gem extractor machinery.

Besides, I don't think smelters function well under variable g-forces, such as experienced by ships.

edit: I think the mininglaser functions by superheating the asteroid, gasses will escape violently and only the denser (metal) fragments will remain intact.

I know I'm making some kind of parasiting, but would it be possible to display his own ship when in the buy/sell ship docking section ?

Would be useful for texture testing too.

Dunno if it could be shown there, but I do think it could be shown on the Commander Summary screen.

Giles?

Selezen wrote:

Dunno if it could be shown there, but I do think it could be shown on the Commander Summary screen.

Giles?

I'll consider it for v1.63.

In fact, I discover today that in v1.62, I can see my ship if I load my commander file in full screen (but not in windowed).

Cool. I like to see my ship time to time.