Oolite Bulletins

An update in the latest build of Oolite 1.85 means that some of the discussions that took place here and here can now be implemented.

This OXP does a couple of minor tweaks to the way escape pods are processed. First, details of all rescued escape pods will now be listed on the F5F5 manifest screen. Secondly, and more importantly, escape pods won't be unloaded at any station that doesn't have a police presence (ie. the "max_police" setting in shipdata.plist, which can be read via the "dockedPolice" property of a station), and is not a GalCop station (ie. stations with an allegiance property of "galcop").

So, docking at a pirate Rock Hermit with some rescued pilots now won't do anything. They will stay on board your ship, with the correct number of "slaves" recorded on the F8 screen. Attempting to sell those slaves will be stopped.

To further add some realism to Rock Hermits in particular, the default "4" value for "max_police" has been overridden to be "0", and the number of docked defenders has been adjusted as well.

You can download v0.6 of this OXP from here: EscapePodTweaks.oxz, or you can download it through the in-game OXP manager. And note, this is for the latest build of Oolite 1.85 (Build cafd0de).

Version 0.2 is now available (see links above). Important bug fixes if you're using this.

These tweaks sound like a good idea to me. Am I right in thinking there's a possibility they will be imported into the core game?

Also, what's 1.85 packing - as it were - over 1.84? That is: should I upgrade to trunk (even though I think I'm done with the latest round of testing my own OXPs)?

UK_Eliter wrote:

Am I right in thinking there's a possibility they will be imported into the core game?

Unlikely, I'm afraid. Even if there was general agreement the issue this OXP addresses is actually a bug fix, it would be better to fix the core code itself, rather than include an OXP that works around the core code's current behaviour. I had a look at the core code when I was working out what to do, and decided that there are too many things that could break if I played around with the internal behaviour of escape pod processing.

UK_Eliter wrote:

Also, what's 1.85 packing - as it were - over 1.84?

This link to the GitHub repository should give you most of the details (rather than just copying it all here!): CHANGELOG.TXT

phkb wrote: ↑Sun Jul 23, 2017 1:53 am

it would be better to fix the core code itself, rather than include an OXP that works around the core code's current behaviour.

Well that - the former - was what I had in mind, I think. But, for the moment at least, I'll use your OXP. Or I will do at least if I do decide to try out the newer version of Oolite. Thanks for the GitHub link.

Oolite / Github: thank you.

@phkb very nice effort, I am looking forward to playing with this! Are you considering to add it to the extension manager as well?

gsagostinho wrote:

Are you considering to add it to the extension manager as well?

Just waiting on an update to the expansion pack manager to be able to flag this OXP as requiring v1.85.

phkb wrote:

Just waiting on an update to the expansion pack manager to be able to flag this OXP as requiring v1.85.

Do you know when the new flag will be introduced? I also would like to flag my Dangerous HUD as requiring v1.85 (it works very well on v1.84, but there are some things that are only available on v.185).

gsagostinho wrote:

Do you know when the new flag will be introduced?

It should be there now, actually!

Great, thanks for the heads-up!

Escape Pod Tweaks is now available via the download manager, for Oolite v1.85 only (in case that wasn't clear!).

I am afraid it is not downloading through the manager (on my system with Oolite 1.85). My screen hangs on 'Downloading Escape Pod Tweaks: Unknown of Unknown'.

Perhaps you've misconfigured the manifest or something like that. It's easy to make that kind of mistake, I find.

It downloaded and installed okay here, but instead of its name in my installed list, I got its description.

I tried a third time, after waiting for the existing attempt to timeout, and it's installed and - though I haven't tested anything yet - I've received no error messages and the log does contain this:
So all seems well.

Looks like I put the description into the title field. Version 0.4 is now available which should fix this.