Oolite Bulletins

At some point I picked up a cloaking device - didn't realise I was fighting thst mission. I only found it today when cycling through my primable equipment.

However

Unlike in the past, if I am cloaked and fire my lasers, I become uncloaked. Is this a new standard behaviour for the device or do I have something wrong?

Yep, that's the way it works now - you fire, you uncloak!

OK, I can live with that. It would be interesting to know the reasoning that went into this change. Firing while cloaked wasn't that good an idea as energy bank depletion would generally put you at risk - you've annoyed somebody and you're uncloaked and vulnerable 'cos you're low on energy so you'd better run away _very_ quickly.

davcefai wrote:

It would be interesting to know the reasoning that went into this change.

Being able to freely distribute death to everyone and everything behind the safety of a cloak does not make for good gameplay. It was so blatantly unfair to NPCs, that certain OXPs involving strike missions or assassinations were explicitly removing it during said missions and were re-awarding it afterwards.

Edit: You can bring back the old behaviour of the cloak by adding (or editing, if it already exists) this line to your ship's shipdata.plist entry:

As I wrote earlier, I can live with the new behaviour.

What is more "amusing" is this type of scenario: (I've just played it)

There's a Boa and about 5-7 fighter escorts. Destroy it from about 15Km distance and cloak for a couple of seconds. The escorts turn yellow again on the radar and happily ignore you while you scoop the cargo. They don't seem able to work out that you were the son of a bachelor that terminated their boss.

If you want to really confuse them, stay cloaked while you scoop - see what they make of disappearing cargo pods

davcefai wrote:

There's a Boa and about 5-7 fighter escorts. Destroy it from about 15Km distance and cloak for a couple of seconds. The escorts turn yellow again on the radar and happily ignore you while you scoop the cargo. They don't seem able to work out that you were the son of a bachelor that terminated their boss.

Well, that or no-one's paying them anymore, and they don't fancy their chances against a ship carrying semi-mythical military hardware...

The response of NPCs to cloaking players in the current nightly builds is already modified to make this situation less likely - anything attacking you while you cloak can keep fighting you in some circumstances (though they get a significant penalty to their aim).

You're determined to get me aren't you