Oolite Bulletins

Is it possible to cut down on those situations, where there's a huge furball between you and the pirates when a viper comes in and gets in the way accidentally? And making you an offender with one stray shot?

I was thinking that it would be good if the game wouldn't make you an offender until the second or third hit, perhaps within a short time, say 10 or 20 seconds?

Is that possible?

For 1.79 I do intend to make friendly fire checks a little more flexible, and give them discretion over whether to give you a bounty. Don't count on it working every time, though - it's up to the individual pilot whether to give you the benefit of the doubt or not.

Suggestion (JazHaz's) seconded! Glad that something along these lines is being planned. Good work cim!

It's working out quite well: provided you are a commander in good standing (which doesn't just mean "has a clean legal status"), your first stray hit on a Viper will sometimes get you a warning, not a bounty and an attack. Similarly with other accidental hits, though a pirate's idea of "good standing" will differ from a bounty hunter's.

cim wrote:

It's working out quite well: provided you are a commander in good standing (which doesn't just mean "has a clean legal status"), your first stray hit on a Viper will sometimes get you a warning, not a bounty and an attack. Similarly with other accidental hits, though a pirate's idea of "good standing" will differ from a bounty hunter's.

Would you be happy to give some indication of how this works, please? For it sounds as if I might need to alter the bounty hunters in my Fer-de-Lance 3G OXP. Thanks.

cim wrote:

provided you are a commander in good standing (which doesn't just mean "has a clean legal status")

Eh? What else is involved?

Diziet Sma wrote:

cim wrote:

provided you are a commander in good standing (which doesn't just mean "has a clean legal status")

Eh? What else is involved?

Perhaps an offender has just helped a Viper and received a 'thank-you' message (something I do occasionly). A 'period of grace' is in the pipeline/implemented (I think).

Friendly-fire happens - I've taken it from Vipers before now.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Eh? What else is involved?

Well, there's Clean as in "upstanding member of the community" and Clean as in "hasn't recently been caught red-handed by the police". When making a split-second decision between "an accident" and "make it look like an accident", that distinction might matter...

Conversely if you've been helping them in the fight so far, you might get away with more.

UK_Eliter wrote:

Would you be happy to give some indication of how this works, please? For it sounds as if I might need to alter the bounty hunters in my Fer-de-Lance 3G OXP. Thanks.

It's part of the new Javascript-based AI controller. If you stick with their current plist AIs they should behave exactly as before with respect to friendly fire, so no changes are strictly necessary. Or, you could rewrite their AI to be Javascript-based, and then there would be certain specifications you could put in as to when they might forgive the player friendly fire.

(If they're just given a standard roles="hunter" then the populator will generally give them the JS-based bounty hunter AI, though)

@cim: right, thanks.

Don't forget that the new JS for AI isn't with 1.77, its to be introduced in 1.78 or 1.79 (can't remember which).