Oolite Bulletins

Oh yeah, this is cool!! Downloading now!!

I found 2 minor "bugs":

• It seems that moons are only shown in the compass when jumping into the system, not when launching from a station.
  EDIT: after I restarted the game (with updated versions of already installed oxp's and a bunch of new oxp's), the problem doesn't occur any more. Sorry for the false alarm!
• And I think the shown distance to the main planet differs from the one that is shown when selecting the original "planet"-target.
  EDIT: Hmm, forgot to check if this problem resolved itself, too... will do this soon!
  EDIT 2: Yes, the shown distance is different, but I think I found out, why: It seems the "original" planet-info gives the distance to the surface, while your version gives the distance to the planet's center. I actually like that - with this combined info one can figure out how big a planet is. I've encountered incredibly big planets which looked like they where very close, but in reality they where almost twice as big as the sun they where orbiting

Aside from that, it work's very perfectly!! Well done!!

Thargoid wrote:

Thanks for the report. However planetary compass doesn't display the distance to the moons and planets. That must be coming from another OXP? All compass does it display the name and make it actually appear on the thing.

Yes, you are right - I've also got a (self-modified) version of [wiki]Updating TSC[/wiki] installed. This is what shows the distance.

I have version 1.01 and all four name packs but all I get is an M or a P on the ASC... No names. Adding TSC, I do get names, but the moon names are always the same (Jupiter's) and not the ones in the name packs. I am running trunk 1.77.1.r5676. Game started with cache cleared. No errors in the log.

False alarm, Thargoid. Your OXP works. Too old, lack of sleep, and too hasty with my false report.

I finally got my Additional Planets converted to an oxz and for some reason I'm not getting planet/moon names any more. I have to admit that I have not really used this oxp since 1.77, so I can't really say when they stopped working for me. Planets and moons get their beacons, but something goes wrong with the naming. I also tried with the old system redux oxp and it did not get names either. Any idea? Is it just me? I'm using the latest 1.79 build with the oxzs downloaded from the expansion pack manager.

Relevant OXZs:

Planetary compass + name pack
Additional Planets + texture packs

After a good night sleep, I dug a bit deeper into this and it seems that Oolite 1.79 gives the name "Planet" or "Moon" to the spawned stellar objects. It looks like that triggers the compatibility part of the Planetary Compass that simply names the beacon with the given name "Planet" or "Moon".

And now it seems to work as intended. Go figure. Sorry for the false alarm. I have no idea what has happened, but now it works and all is well again in my Ooniverse . I did update to the latest Oolite, but I don't really believe that's the reason. Oh well.

Btw. Is there a reason for multiple name packs? Couldn't they all just be bundled into the oxp?

spara wrote:

Btw. Is there a reason for multiple name packs? Couldn't they all just be bundled into the oxp?

Put simply, to allow for flexibility and customisability.

Each pack has to some degree a theme to it (I'll leave spotting them as an exercise to the Commander), but with more or less packs you can have a greater or lesser variety of name choices. Also for the future, if someone wanted to create a more specific universe with a defined name set (to go along with a fanfic, or some other established source for example) then it would be simple to do.

They could be bundled into the OXP, but it's then fixed and closed (aside from via update) and much less flexible. So I thought it nicer to make it in the core plus packs format, in the same way as YAH is for example. The package size overhead is minimal, and it works fine I think.

Valid points. I better take a closer look at the differences when I get around.