Oolite Bulletins

Hi all,

I'm new here, but not in the world of Elite. Starting in 1986, I've made the Elite status three times. On C64 in the original game, then on Amiga 500 in Frontier and Amiga 1200 in Close Encounters. And that, in my eyes, give me the right to - for the first time in Elite - try to mod two things here. Yes, it is a kind of cheating, but now I have very, very little time for playing (stressful job, kids etc etc...) and I've earned it three times

I want to make Fer-de-Lance cargo hold with 100 tonnes, and I want to make Naval Energy Unit to be, say, 10 times faster.

How do I make it?

I've tried to change those values in Ship Description with text editor, but to no avail. Whatever value I put on Player's ship, it stays the same. So it has to be something else.

How do you edit parameters of ships and equipment? (PC, Win7 - running in XP Compatibility mode for Oolite)

Thank you all!

Old Hand Jameson wrote:

PC, Win7 - running in XP Compatibility mode for Oolite

Might one ask why? Oh... and welcome aboard.

After your changes, did you restart Oolite with the shift key held down until the spinning Cobra appears? If not, you need to.

Cody wrote:

Might one ask why? Oh... and welcome aboard.

Because I figured it's more stable that way, read somewhere that it's XP optimised. And thank you!

Cody wrote:

After your changes, did you restart Oolite with the shift key held down until the spinning Cobra appears? If not, you need to.

No, I haven't. What does it do, force the software to read from those files?

I run Oolite in Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit as is - it works fine, better than XP in fact. The shift key thingy clears the cache.

Oooohhh.... you are saying that the changes will be implemented, once the cache is cleared?

I was fiddling with those last night, had a couple of resets in that time, and the game was all time taking the values from the original cache?

Old Hand Jameson wrote:

Oooohhh.... you are saying that the changes will be implemented, once the cache is cleared?

<nods, grinning> It's gotta be done every time you make an internal change (adding a new OXP will flush the cache anyway).

Cody dude, thank you very much! My shift ends at midnight, and I can hardly wait to come home and try my enhanced ship!

Thank you!

Old Hand Jameson wrote:

... read somewhere that it's XP optimised.

I'm curious as to where you read that. Which version of Oolite are you running, btw - 1.77?

Hi Old Hand Jameson, and welcome.
Re the hold, yes just change the relevant line in the shipdata.plist for the player version. I expect you've worked it out. I'm not sure if you can do anything about the Energy unit though, unless you are prepared to delve into the core game code. The recharge rate is not open to scripting as far as I know.

Smivs wrote:

The recharge rate is not open to scripting as far as I know.

I presumed he meant tweaking his ship's energy_recharge_rate in shipdata.plist - yes?

Ah, with you.
I thought we were talking a tweak of the actual Naval Energy Unit itself.

This works fine. I've changed some data in shipdata.plist, and "the shift thingy" did it's job. I can change cargo hold size, toughnes of the ship etc etc, but the recharge rate is not there.

I've done hex editing before, but here it's hard - there's no comparable data on laser power (the actual strength, so I can search for that hexadecimal numbers, clustered lines with data on various shield strengths etc). Same goes with the recharge rate and a lot of other data... they are all hardcoded in the oolite.exe. Has anyone been fiddling with that?

Regarding the "runs better on XP Compatibility", I'm not quite sure where I've read it, and it's wrong. Last night I've tried it normaly, and it runs perfect. Win7 32. And I run the 1.76,1.

Old Hand Jameson wrote:

This works fine. I've changed some data in shipdata.plist, and "the shift thingy" did it's job. I can change cargo hold size, toughnes of the ship etc etc, but the recharge rate is not there.

Hi, Have a look at line 1567 of the file Oolite/oolite.app/Resources/config/shipdata.plist

You will see the line in the section
"ferdelance-player" = Change the 4.5 to something above 6 to really see a difference.

It might be that there is a cap on base energy_recharge_rate.
The maximum base rate seems to be '5', with the extra energy unit multiplying this by 1.8 (9) and the naval energy unit by 2.6 (13). Therefor 13 might be the maximum possible rate.

I have my Test ship set at 7.8 and that works away fine. That's with all the bells and whistles.
I also had a look at the wiki and that states that stations are set at 100!