Oolite Bulletins

Ok, this post may or may not belong in this forum. I'm posting it here rather than in 'Discussion' because I mostly want to reach minds that are so deep in the system that they no longer recognize what things look like to someone not having that conditioning.

I may also suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding here. You decide.

Here's the/a scene: "So there's a battle on the horizon. I make a last cup of tea and hit the go fast button to get the scene into scanner range. Once the blips the blips show up on the horizon I stop the ship to figure out what's going on."

Now, forced to fly with the keyboard, i hold down Ctrl and aim the reticule at the first stranger out there. Nothing happens. I get no target information. I try missile-lock, hit the telescope, bang on the prev/next target buttons. And nothing. Nothing of relevance at least. The missile has locked onto a fuel station that I passed minutes ago. I can not tell who's ahead. I do not dare to fire and hit or kill someone by skill alone.

Now I move closer. Banging missile lock and unlock and prev/next target while flying straight at someone centered in the reticule I still can not get a positive ID for the ship and I have no idea if they are a system-vessel or a pirate.

By the time I have locked a nasty I'm already under attack and afterburnering my way through the cloud of ships and then switching to rear view to do some blasting.

This is and has been my experience many a time in this game. During the first week of playing I kept telling myself that I'd figure out how to do better with the tools at hand. During the second week I've realized that I could not. Now I'd like to spell out how I would want the game to play for me:

As I'm approaching the fog of ships ahead i release 'target-lock' which was still tracking the system's main station - and sweep the reticule over whats 20 clicks ahead. Immediately I see ship details and after a quick survey I decide on a target. I hit 'target-lock', queue up a missile fire it and hit the after burners to have it trail me. then I start blasting from the front and back until the confused target is dead and i'm positioned for another run.

Here prev/next target would select other targets based on their distance from the reticule's center. under no circumstance would they ever select planets or installations during red-alert. The telescope's navigation function would kick in and spin me to the next nearest target by distance should I want to.


If its already playing like that for you, then do suggest the error of my ways to me. But if your play experience is anything like mine, please hold the justifications and realize that its just terrible.

Thanks for pondering.. and hi!

Lots of things here.

First, you say " The missile has locked onto a fuel station that I passed minutes ago". This prompts me to remind that if you want to lock a new target, you have to reset the target system by pressing 'i' again. Also, the ship must be perfectly centred in the reticule (and of course in scanner range). This gets more difficult as the target is farther away and smaller.

Both the selection of previous/next target and friend-or-foe identification require specific equipment. If I recall correctly, they are "Integrated targeting system" and "Targeting system memory expansion".

There's no way in the base game to lock planets (or moons), but you can lock everything else including stations. From what I read from the Wiki, the  "Telescope" extension you mentioned might be responsible for the non-standard targeting and locking behaviour.

Ok, the sloppy language on my part got you. I apologize! I've actually played this game for more hours than I care to admit and I have the sources for the add-ons you mentions and I know and use them. Anyway...

Am I clear about the concept that what is -- is a long way away from easy to use, that its convoluted and not made any simpler by addons even though telescope and sniper-lock do. Sometimes when we get to close to the design we wind up rationalizing things like pylon based machinery because we've shied away from dealing with issues elsewhere. Getting simple information about what's ahead of you _feels about as suitable for this game as the needless docking difficulty did 6 or 20ish years ago. That's my point.

If you want to believe that i don't know about unlocking missile targets, look at this evolution of my keybinds. I've spent a lot of time reloading in order to figure out how to make aiming a no-brainer so that i can have a solid lock on the target i want before i pass them. in reality, i can't even reliably retarget during a dogfight and am forced to shoot things down by skill alone

gt52 wrote:

I may also suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding here.

Hi gt52..

I think the "fundamental misunderstanding" here is that, if a particular OXP is not behaving as you'd expect/desire, the person to take that up with, would be the OXP author. Usually, OXP authors have the threads for their OXPs set to auto-notify them of any new posts, so that they can respond promptly.

In your particular case, a post about your experience in Norby's Telescopes thread, is going to be the most effective way of getting things resolved.

(On a purely personal note, I find the Telescope system to be the most convoluted, confusing, and screen-cluttering 'system' I've ever encountered. I'm not in the least bit surprised that it's giving you grief. I uninstalled it within minutes of trying it out. Norby has made some great mods, but Telescope ain't one of 'em. Purely my own opinion, of course.)


And while we're on the subject of Norby's OXPs, your recent dependency hassles with the "Addons for Beginners" and/or "Ambiences Recommended" meta-packages, are also Norby's doing (and are his responsibility to fix). When Norby first began compiling his "recommended for beginners" meta-packages, he was advised against doing so, in part because of the potential for exactly the kind of problems you've experienced. There was also the problem that newcomers to Oolite would be likely to think that his meta-packages are some kind of officially tested and sanctioned collection, when they are, in fact, merely the personal preferences of one particular individual (as can be seen by the fact that they tend to strongly favour his own OXPs). Interestingly enough, you yourself would appear to have been labouring under this very misconception.

Norby chose to ignore the advice he was given, and went ahead with releasing his meta-packages anyway. He created this mess, it's now up to him to deal with the fallout. As Smivs said to you elsewhere:

Smivs wrote:

And of course it is the Authors who are responsible for what they post there - it is not the responsibility of 'the Game', the Dev team, the EM or anybody/anything else to monitor quality, compatibility issues, or even the worth of what is there. Nor should it be. You either have freedom (even to post rubbish!) or censorship. This community tends to favour freedom.

Diziet Sma wrote:

(On a purely personal note, I find the Telescope system to be the most convoluted, confusing, and screen-cluttering 'system' I've ever encountered. I'm not in the least bit surprised that it's giving you grief. I uninstalled it within minutes of trying it out. Norby has made some great mods, but Telescope ain't one of 'em. Purely my own opinion, of course.)

IMHO the telescope mod suffers a bit from the oxz format in that the user is less likely to 'look under the hood' than in the oxp only days. The telescope.js file has a bunch of annotated options at the start that are easy to configure/disable. Some of them are quite significant and almost all of them are turned on by default!

Like Dizzy however, I think I'd personally find it a bit much too domininant without reconfiguring it to my tastes, whereupon it becomes a much more gentle beast

Redspear wrote:

The telescope.js file has a bunch of annotated options at the start that are easy to configure/disable. Some of them are quite significant and almost all of them are turned on by default!

Like Dizzy however, I think I'd personally find it a bit much too domininant without reconfiguring it to my tastes, whereupon it becomes a much more gentle beast

I wasn't aware of that.. as you say, OXZs aren't exactly conducive to tinkering. Sounds like this is a prime candidate for the in-game OXZ configuring mod that I've seen mentioned of late.

gt52 wrote:

aim the reticule at the first stranger out there. Nothing happens. I get no target information.

I think you found a ship with Military Scanner Jammer which prevent to put target lock on them. This item is not buyable and not appear in normal games, but there is an addon for experienced commanders: [wiki]ShipVersion[/wiki] which award it to the top NPCs.

[wiki]Telescope[/wiki] is a complex tool, also aimed for advanced commanders so worth to read through the long wiki page before use. You can deactivate many features by the mode key ('b') when you primed it (which settings saved into your savegame) or you can edit the config variables in telescope.js as Redspear mentioned or simply choose another targeter. Thank you for the valuable observations and sorry but I do not plan any updates on this package in the near future, my todo list is a bit long for this.

Diziet Sma wrote:

your recent dependency hassles with the "Addons for Beginners" and/or "Ambiences Recommended" meta-packages, are also Norby's doing (and are his responsibility to fix).

Yes, when I saw the first report I sent a PM to cim who put back his accidentally disappeared packages to his server meantime. What maybe I can do over this is to close out any packages which not hosted in the wiki, but imho it would be too strong condition.

Diziet Sma wrote:

When Norby first began compiling his "recommended for beginners" meta-packages, he was advised against doing so, in part because of the potential for exactly the kind of problems you've experienced. There was also the problem that newcomers to Oolite would be likely to think that his meta-packages are some kind of officially tested and sanctioned collection, when they are, in fact, merely the personal preferences of one particular individual (as can be seen by the fact that they tend to strongly favour his own OXPs). Interestingly enough, you yourself would appear to have been labouring under this very misconception.

Norby chose to ignore the advice he was given, and went ahead with releasing his meta-packages anyway. He created this mess, it's now up to him to deal with the fallout.

Long quote due to I want emphasize that I accept the truth within. Just I would like to say a few more words.

Yes, I created and maintain some metapackages regardless of I know these cause headaches for me and my life would be easier if I remove them. Just I also saw enough need for these and I see that nobody else take the job to continually explain and defend the alternative concept, where you can install more packages in one step and you must remove a few only what you do not want from these.

Yes, it is not officially tested, just revised by the communtiy in the Addons for Beginners topic. I am here to deal with the notices, just please be specific. I need to know exactly which package should or should not be in which collection, this is what we can discuss there. (Flames usually disappear at this point, confirming that we already done at least moderately fair job in selection.) The result will never be the best for everyone but probably not contain big mistakes. Imho a newbie would install much more too advanced packages too early without this guide.

Finally Smivs, thanks for your words about freedom.

Norby wrote:

... I know these cause headaches for me and my life would be easier if I remove them.

<nods> Those headaches will probably get worse as time passes - authors drift away, things get broken, tanks go missing. <grins>

That word 'metapackage' brings back sour memories for some of us - though that was an extreme example.

I'm not sure if this suggestion is right, but a number of OXZs are just scripts and config files, so it seems to me they could be hosted in a git repository and maintained by the community (via pull requests) and perhaps distributed in a "inactive" state (for instance to temporarily remove an OXZ I often just append a character to the extension) together with the installation binary.