Oolite Bulletins

Two more ideas, one based on another recent thread:

1. If a trader is under fire and in danger of blowing up, they should send a message along the lines of "OK, here is my cargo!" and start dumping cargo so the pirate will let them survive. I think most of the code required for this would already be present - this would happen a little before the escape capsule would be used, and dumping cargo is already available.

2. When a ship blows up, you might pick up a stray piece of equipment as well as cargo. There could be a very small chance some chunk of the wreckage contains a complete or salvagable piece of gear. Condition could be added as an attribute to equipment, and stuff collected from an exploding ship would obviously be pretty beaten up and not very reliable.

I like that idea. It makes the NPCs seem more real and more intelligent. It also make piracy more profitable.

dajt wrote:

1. If a trader is under fire and in danger of blowing up, they should send a message along the lines of "OK, here is my cargo!" and start dumping cargo so the pirate will let them survive..

They already do that, whimpering for mercy while ejecting strings of cargo... Most noticeable the bigger ships. Or do you want them to be more explicitly saying "here's the loot, lemme go, be a sport"?

Or do you mean: in exchange for letting their pod go? In that case it won't happen, 'cause Giles is working on stuff that rewards picking up said capsules..

I didn't know that already happened, because I'm not a pirate ;)

So those of you who indulge in piracy can comment on whether the current messages are sufficient or not...

Well I haven't noticed and cargo being dumped but I've seen those I've attacked wimpering for mercy. Offenders of course, I'm a clean fighter

I think these are the messages: (accompanied by jettisoning of cargo, in the hopes pirates will leave the ship alone and start scooping instead...)

Our systems are failing, please let us flee!

Don't shoot, please

Please stop! Have mercy!

Leave us alone!

No!

Yup they certainly do eject cargo in the hope that they can flee while you are scooping. Winston mentioned a great trick in a thread sometime ago whereby you fly right up their backside into their exhaust plumes hit them big time with the laser and they release cargo in a long stream. If you are lined up right you can scoop the lot.

As for the equipment (2.), you could make an oxp similar to what I tried to do with wrex.oxp.
That uses a likeShip shiplist, which eject a scriptedCargo container as death_action.


This container should then be scripted similar to the cloacking_device (see Oolite shipdata.plist)

If you script this as a normal cannister, they would also show up as ejected loot (as in 1.), which is not what you are after.

To make things even more realistic, you could model equipment-oid debris to use in stead of a standard cannister.


(ps. In wrex, ship-debris would be spawned, incidentally also occasionally containing suprises)

I think what he meant was something like that if an AI offender attacks an AI trader, that the offender leaves him alone after collecting the dropped loot. Am I close?

No, I was just thinking about the player attacking traders for the first thing. I didn't know it already happened because I don't indulge in piracy and was too silly to check.

As for equipment, I'll check the comment further up about wrex.oxp and see what it does.