Oolite Bulletins

What do you think of Rock Hermits having beacon's which are subents of the rock, not buoy's outside their front door? Furthermore, they can be enabled / disabled by script. After all, hermits are... well... hermit like. Sometimes they like not to be disturbed.

I have successfully done the work on this.

I think it's a very interesting idea, amigo.

You could expand that to reputation gained with the hermit. The beacon only being deployed/activated if you are known and trusted by the hermit.

Cody wrote:

I think it's a very interesting idea, amigo.

Seconded!

Tricky wrote:

You could expand that to reputation gained with the hermit. The beacon only being deployed/activated if you are known and trusted by the hermit.

Or just be a special item the hermit sells to you after you've done business with him before and gained his trust.

CaptSolo wrote:

What do you think of Rock Hermits having beacon's which are subents of the rock, not buoy's outside their front door? Furthermore, they can be enabled / disabled by script. After all, hermits are... well... hermit like. Sometimes they like not to be disturbed.

I have successfully done the work on this.

Great idea. But I am not too keen on the building reputation though.

CaptSolo wrote:

What do you think of Rock Hermits having beacon's which are subents of the rock, not buoy's outside their front door? Furthermore, they can be enabled / disabled by script. After all, hermits are... well... hermit like. Sometimes they like not to be disturbed.

I have successfully done the work on this.

There's a lot of possibilities here, not least in having Hermits as mission locations. You could even have cargo and passenger contracts which specify particular asteroids as destinations - it would help to break the monopoly of the main system station.

I don't think that Rock Hermits should have beacons at all.

Half the fun is finding (or stumbling upon) them in the first place, isn't it?

If Solo is making a new OXP for hermits with beacons, can you also make a Rock Hermit Locator equipment item for them?

The current RHL OXP adds beacons to the standard non-beaconed hermits I believe.

Commander McLane wrote:

I don't think that Rock Hermits should have beacons at all.

Half the fun is finding (or stumbling upon) them in the first place, isn't it?

In the first place, yes - but if they become persistent (but mobile) locations within a system, there would have to be some way of finding them. At the moment they're just a bit ephemeral: here today, gone tomorrow. A switchable beacon seems a very useful solution: the player could gradually build up a personal network - or at the very least, it would be a useful way of making individual Rock Hermits into something more active than an occasional one-off stopping place. It would all help, I think, into making some systems different from others. A particular system would become special because it held a specific location.

One query: is it possible to make some beacons more vague than others? Maybe a Hermit's beacon could direct a player to a general volume of space, rather than directly to the Hermit's front door?

Disembodied wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

I don't think that Rock Hermits should have beacons at all.

Half the fun is finding (or stumbling upon) them in the first place, isn't it?

In the first place, yes - but if they become persistent (but mobile) locations within a system, there would have to be some way of finding them. At the moment they're just a bit ephemeral: here today, gone tomorrow.

They're already persistent in Oolite 1.77, which is the reason why they are now stored by randomshipnames and get a persistent name over many visits.

I just don't see the logic of "there would have to be some way of finding them". Why? Is it because if something is there, it therefore must advertise its presence? Which fundamental law is demanding that?

As far as I understand Rock Hermits are entities that don't necessarily want to be found. For me, giving them beacons goes straight against Elite lore. They're trade secrets, and because of the good profits that a trader can make with them, I'm quite sure that traders would tend to keep their locations a secret.

The way of finding them is simple: you stumble upon a Rock Hermit in the first place, and then you know that it's there and can return to it. In other words: you as the pilot have to remember its location if you want to re-find it. This is easy for the hermits that are located on the main lanes. It's of course more difficult for the hermits that are going to be located outside the lanes.

This is the only context in which I can envision a Rock Hermit beacon: to remove the burden of keeping manual notes of Rock Hermit locations from the player. It can be expected that your ship computer would take care of the record keeping, thus the player doesn't need to be burdened with scribbling notes on sheets of paper.

Thus I could agree to the following: Rock Hermits get beacons once the player has docked with them. This will enable the player to re-visit a hermit whose location is already known to them.

This would also enable a new gameplay mechanism, which could for instance be implemented via the F4-screen: trading in Rock Hermit locations. You could buy the access to locations of the Rock Hermits in the current system on its main station (or on another Rock Hermit). Depending on how much you pay, one or more Rock Hermit beacons are switched on.

Commander McLane wrote:

For me, giving them beacons goes straight against Elite lore.

I don't recall main stations in Elite having beacons either. However, I quite like the idea of having once found a hermit, it then gets a beacon.

Commander McLane wrote:

Thus I could agree to the following: Rock Hermits get beacons once the player has docked with them. This will enable the player to re-visit a hermit whose location is already known to them.

Oh yes, definitely! I absolutely do not think that Rock Hermits should all have beacons which the player can see at all times. These would be things which the player can build up over time, as they successfully locate and trade with them in the regular way. The player would develop a personal network of trading contacts this way.

Commander McLane wrote:

Rock Hermits get beacons once the player has docked with them. This will enable the player to re-visit a hermit whose location is already known to them.

This makes sense, and doesn't detract from the game or offend lore or canon as far as I know. Excellent idea.

I kind of like Thargoid's Tracker oxp, that allows me to transfer targets to the ASC. Although I'm not too hot about adding moving targets, it feels a bit cheaty to me. That kind of functionality, limited for stationary objects would be nice.