Oolite Bulletins

. . to use the new roles that Oolite introduced in version 1.79.

Here's some explanation.

I think my Fer-de-Lance-3G pack (available though the in-game manager, and here) is spawning too many ships with the primary role 'assassin', and indeed perhaps of various other primary roles, because two few other expansion packs are using such roles (but, instead, stick to the traditional - i.e. recognised (only) by older versions of Oolite roles - of pirate, trader, hunter, etc).

Here's why I have that diagnosis. My shipdata file does not give any ship a probability of being an assassin - well, an assassin of any of the types 'assassin-light', 'assassin-medium', 'assassin-heavy' - greater than 0.05%; and yet, jump into an anarchy, and various Fer-de-Lances of those types tend to show up.

Admittedly, the populator script in the currently-downloadable version of my expansion pack is apt to add some extra assassins, and hunters. Yet, on my own computer, I've toned that down and yet the same sort of situation obtains. So I do feel that the reason so many of my ships are appearing is that other expansion pack makers are not using the roles.

Still, perhaps the core Oolite code is to blame. Or perhaps I make some other mistake. If not: could people please consider using these sorts of roles for some of their ships?

- assassin-light;
- assassin-medium;
- assassin-heavy;
- hunter-medium;
- hunter-heavy;
- pirate-heavy-fighter;

et cetera (see, again this page) rather than the more generic roles (e.g. 'hunter')?

I'm not sure what the 'normal' ratio of assassins is in a 'clean' game, but if you are causing them to be generated by say carrying dodgy parcels or whatever, and there is a small pool of available ships with these roles, I could see this happening. Remember that most OXPs have probably not yet been updated so these roles will not be commonly used yet.
FWIW my latest offering does use some of them as these are all excellent assassin and hunter ships.
Asp-X Cobra2-X Sidewinder-X

I think you need to balance your roles against the core roles instead of pleading for others to to change their roles/roleweightings. The reason simply being, there's no way to control what extra ships the player has installed and what not.

I made a quick check over your oxp and assassin-heavy roles cumulate to the total weight of 0.18. The core weight is 1. So when selecting a ship from an assassin-heavy pool, your ship gets selected with the probability of 0.18/1.18 = 0.153.

As a side note, the older ships should really be updated, but for a different reason. The old roles "pirate" and "hunter" are primarily meant for lone and weak ships. Add some good old uber ship with old roles to the game and you're up for surprise, when the game thinks it's spawning a weak pirate to the lane.

Smivs wrote:

I'm not sure what the 'normal' ratio of assassins is in a 'clean' game...

When deciding your role weights, you really want to consult [wiki]Oolite Ship Role Weights[/wiki].

spara wrote:

Smivs wrote:

I'm not sure what the 'normal' ratio of assassins is in a 'clean' game...

When deciding your role weights, you really want to consult [wiki]Oolite Ship Role Weights[/wiki].

Thanks for the link - I hadn't come across that page before. BTW It does not fit on my screen - the right side goes off the side of the screen and even with a horizontal scroll bar is very untidy and awkward to use, so the page perhaps needs looking at...

Smivs wrote:

spara wrote:

Smivs wrote:

I'm not sure what the 'normal' ratio of assassins is in a 'clean' game...

When deciding your role weights, you really want to consult [wiki]Oolite Ship Role Weights[/wiki].

Thanks for the link - I hadn't come across that page before. BTW It does not fit on my screen - the right side goes off the side of the screen and even with a horizontal scroll bar is very untidy and awkward to use, so the page perhaps needs looking at...

Yes, that's a problem with html formatting. I could link the spreadsheet I use to the page, if wanted.

the staer shipset has:

cat: assassin-heavy(0.05)
cobra mk2: assassin-medium(0.05)
mussurana: assassin-heavy(0.2)

afaik: these ships won't appear too numerous, tho

Hmmh, side effect with another oxz which is overriding/rebalancing the roles like the legacy shiproles script? I had an old oxp in my addons folder overriding an OXZ once.

Smivs wrote:

spara wrote:

Smivs wrote:

I'm not sure what the 'normal' ratio of assassins is in a 'clean' game...

When deciding your role weights, you really want to consult [wiki]Oolite Ship Role Weights[/wiki].

Thanks for the link - I hadn't come across that page before. BTW It does not fit on my screen - the right side goes off the side of the screen and even with a horizontal scroll bar is very untidy and awkward to use, so the page perhaps needs looking at...

Ok, I did some formatting (quite a lot actually) and squeezing and such and now it somewhat fits horizontally. Is it still readable?

Ah, that's better The far right column still slightly runs over but is readable.
My screen isn't that small though, so I expect that on a small screen it may still be an issue, but it is a big table and I appreciate that there is not much else that could be done.
Thanks.

spara, Smivs, Amah: thanks. Helpful stuff.

This is a very helpful table. And small enough for my 26" screen!

I see that there is only 1 asassin-heavy in the core game, the Asp. I added my "Python Gunship" to this role with a value of 0.1, so as I understand it, it should appear in 1 of 11 cases (p=0.1/1.1).