Tinkerer's Workshop - OXP tweaking for fun and profit!
Posted: Mon Feb 17, 2014 4:57 am
Lots of us tweak the OXPs in our personal collections, to fine-tune the way they look or work in our game, and at times those tweaks get posted here on the board, for others to use or adapt.. The only problem is, such tweaks tend to be scattered all over the place, and after a while become buried under all the other posts.
I'm hoping that this thread will become a repository for all the various tweaks that are out there, and perhaps even inspire the posting of some that haven't been made public before.. and who knows, if they're popular enough, the OXP authors concerned may even decide to incorporate them into their next update..
If you have made any custom tweaks to the OXPs in your game, please consider posting them here for others to benefit from..
Firstly, some important notes for those new to OXP tweaking.
If you are using Windows, it is very important that you do not use Notepad for editing Oolite files. Notepad adds invisible characters to files that will cause Oolite to be unable to read the file. You can safely use Wordpad if you wish, but we recommend that you install and use the free text editor Notepad++ (http://www.notepad-plus-plus.org/) which has the added bonus of displaying line numbers, making it much easier to locate particular sections of code.
If you tweak OXPs, remember that if the author updates the OXP, after installing the update, your tweaks will be lost, and you will have to re-apply them. I recommend that you keep a "My OXP Tweaks" folder with sub-folders for each OXP that you tweak, where you can save code snippets and extensive notes detailing things like file-names, line-numbers and anything else you might want to remember about what you did. This will save you lots of time and frustration down the track.
A related tip from Cody:
To do this, you have two options. You can manually force Oolite to rebuild the cache by holding down the <Shift> key when you start the game. You need to keep the key held down until you see the spinning Cobra MkIII. The other method is to edit the
Finally, if you post your own tweaks for others to use, please note that whilst Windows does not care about correct capitalisation in filenames, other Operating Systems do.. if your tweak references any other files, please be sure to exactly match the capitalisation scheme of the filenames used. Failure to do so will result in errors on those systems, even though yours may work fine.
I'm hoping that this thread will become a repository for all the various tweaks that are out there, and perhaps even inspire the posting of some that haven't been made public before.. and who knows, if they're popular enough, the OXP authors concerned may even decide to incorporate them into their next update..
If you have made any custom tweaks to the OXPs in your game, please consider posting them here for others to benefit from..
Firstly, some important notes for those new to OXP tweaking.
If you are using Windows, it is very important that you do not use Notepad for editing Oolite files. Notepad adds invisible characters to files that will cause Oolite to be unable to read the file. You can safely use Wordpad if you wish, but we recommend that you install and use the free text editor Notepad++ (http://www.notepad-plus-plus.org/) which has the added bonus of displaying line numbers, making it much easier to locate particular sections of code.
If you tweak OXPs, remember that if the author updates the OXP, after installing the update, your tweaks will be lost, and you will have to re-apply them. I recommend that you keep a "My OXP Tweaks" folder with sub-folders for each OXP that you tweak, where you can save code snippets and extensive notes detailing things like file-names, line-numbers and anything else you might want to remember about what you did. This will save you lots of time and frustration down the track.
A related tip from Cody:
So as to make for faster game loading,Oolite caches copies of the important files from all OXPs, rather than having to load them all every time you start the game up. Oolite automatically detects when OXPs are added or removed, but it does not notice if you make changes to individual files within an already installed OXP. It often happens that someone makes a change to a file, but nothing seems to have changed when they restart the game. If this happens to you, the reason (unless you made some other mistake) is that you forgot to tell Oolite to rebuild its' cache.Cody wrote:As a caveat to anyone who tweaks an OXP: be sure to mark/rename it (slightly) so you know you have tinkered. One can lose track of which OXPs have been tweaked.
To do this, you have two options. You can manually force Oolite to rebuild the cache by holding down the <Shift> key when you start the game. You need to keep the key held down until you see the spinning Cobra MkIII. The other method is to edit the
GNUstepDefaults
file (found in the GNUstep/Defaults folder) and set the always-flush-cache
key to YES. Note that if you do this, every time Oolite starts up it will take a little longer to load, just how long depending on how many, and which, OXPs you have installed.Finally, if you post your own tweaks for others to use, please note that whilst Windows does not care about correct capitalisation in filenames, other Operating Systems do.. if your tweak references any other files, please be sure to exactly match the capitalisation scheme of the filenames used. Failure to do so will result in errors on those systems, even though yours may work fine.