Oolite Bulletins

Hello all.

Loving the game, and from reading this forum I'm really impressed by Giles' (and you other chaps!) enthusiasm to jump on ideas - especially from non programming oiks like myself. In all, superb!

The only drawback of course to this is that it encourages folks like myself to keep making suggestions without the working knowledge to implement them or dismiss them outright!

Anyway a suggestion - feel free to point out how (im)plausible this may be!...

Semi-random missions

For example - on arriving at a station have a, say 1 in 10 chance of a mission being offered, which can be accepted or not.

Example: on arriving at a high political level planet, you get the message: "The [planet name] Trade Federation is offering a bounty to: Kill (capture?) a pirate on [another planet name]. They are offering [suitable value] credits as a reward."

On accepting the mission, said pirate is generated on the planet mentioned, and linked to a bounty as set in the mission briefing.

Possible mission ideas (feel free to mock/amend)

Killing/capturing a specific pirate ship/rogue cop.

Killing/robbing a rich trader (could also be a Galcop trap...!)

Clearing a trade lane on a planet (of high political level) of ALL pirates. Bounty for clearing them all.

Escorting a trader (bounty on safe arrival) (maybe over a large distance/several jumps?)

You get the idea... I'm sure there's loads of better examples.

An aspect to consider may be the type of mission that is generated/offered may be affected by certain status:

- Legal rating - Certain missions are available only to lean traders/bouty hunters, and other (more lucrative - and therefore risky!) missions available to offenders and fugitives.

- Kills - as with other missions - some available right away, but some only to folks that may have 'seen it all'...

- Credits - maybe you have to pay upfront a deposit to do a mission (for equipment/info on a bounty etc)

- Equipment - no point capturing escape pods without a scoop!

- Cargo, etc etc

By being suitably vague, and generating positions/values/bounties etc randomly (but within suitable parameters) you have a potentially infinite amount of missions.

Is this in any way feasible, or have I been at too much caffeine again?

It's not currently feasible to generate missions randomly - but the infrastructure for something like this is beginning to come together.

I'm always in a two-state of mind about such suggestions:

1) More missions= A Good Thing (TM) So, 'autogenerated' ones is kewl.

But...

2) If you've ever played one of the better missions (like 'Deposed') you know autogenerated missions will pale, or even become boring, compared to the hand-crafted ones...

But... Choice is good, so I can see autogenerated ones can be a nice addition.

Yes fair points - I can see how these sort of missions would pale to a hand crafted one. If they were to pop up each and every time you docked you'd soon tire of them.

Then again I suppose given the optional nature of these (100% optional if only as an OXP!) - and the fact they'd only pop up given the right set of conditions, it would maybe add something else (an occasional distraction!) to the life of a trader/pirate/bounty hunter.

Like I said, I don't have a clue as to whether these things are possible or not, but the odd suggestion here and there often leads to something good - even if it's in a different guise!

BTW, I'm waaaaaay off getting anywhere near the deposed missions, but looking forward to 'em.

Now my brain isn't working quite right today (damn cold), but isn't essentially all that would be required to support the scripting of random missions a random number generator in the scripting system?

I'm thinking randomly generate a mission definition and keep the details if the player accepts. Once the mission is complete (or expires) delete the mission details. The only restriction to this would be that you wouldn't be able to be offered more than one randomly generated mission at a time.

Actually a few more thoughts...

You could undertake multiple random missions of different types - if the variables storing mission details were prefixed with their type, like "ASSASINATE_", "FETCH_", "KILL_". Those three types should be do-able with the scripting system now if there's a random number generator available to the scripts... It may even be able to do single-jump escort missions with the existing scripting mission.

stevesims wrote:

Now my brain isn't working quite right today (damn cold), but isn't essentially all that would be required to support the scripting of random missions a random number generator in the scripting system?

I think it could be done using current scripting. And there is a random number generator - For example, if you wanted to test for something that occurs 20% of the time, you could use the following as a condition: