Page 1 of 2

Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 12:06 am
by Cholmondely
How should I classify the upcoming new Lore (Classic Elite) oxp?

Is it a systems .oxp?
"Alters multiple star systems in a number of ways eg. combinations of changing main station and local police ships, adding new stations, ships, activities, missions"
It alters Lave & Tionisla, adds Lave Academy, Moray Medical Boats, Liners, Dredgers & Generation Ships. And New Cargoes for activities.

Is it an ambience .oxp?
Changes the Oolite ooniverse to the Classic Elite lore-based ooniverse?

Or an activities .oxp?
Explore/enjoy/deplore the world of Classic Elite lore?

Or a scenario .oxp
- which does not use the scenario format?

Or a miscellaneous .oxp?
Does not fit a category

Reference: Lore Collection (Classic Elite)

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 3:58 am
by phkb
Actually, because you're including "New Cargoes" and "Jane's Galactic Shipset", it really should go to the Mechanics OXP category. That would be my recommendation.

Re the wiki page:
1. Why include a Griff Moray? The core game has a standard Moray and a Medical Moray. Or perhaps a slightly different question, why only include the Griff Moray, and not all the other core Griff ships?
2. Griff has a standalone Ophidian. Is there a reason it wasn't included?

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:20 am
by Cholmondely
phkb wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 3:58 am
Actually, because you're including "New Cargoes" and "Jane's Galactic Shipset", it really should go to the Mechanics OXP category. That would be my recommendation.

Re the wiki page:
1. Why include a Griff Moray? The core game has a standard Moray and a Medical Moray. Or perhaps a slightly different question, why only include the Griff Moray, and not all the other core Griff ships?
2. Griff has a standalone Ophidian. Is there a reason it wasn't included?
Very simple.

I did not realise that the core game has a medical moray. When I looked it up on the wiki, it seemed that there were several packages and only Griff's included Moray's without other extraneous ships. Ditto with the Ophidian. The wiki page did not seem to mention the standalone!

Thanks! I've a good feel for many parts of this game - but not the ships. That's why I'm so relieved each time I see Montana05 has been busy!

Ho hum! Version 1.1 beckons already!

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 10:23 am
by Cody
As regards ships, are you sticking strictly to TDW lore? Or is original Elite lore good enough?
If the latter, I think perhaps the mystery ship known as the Cougar should be included.

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 12:20 pm
by montana05
Cholmondely wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:20 am
I did not realise that the core game has a medical moray. When I looked it up on the wiki, it seemed that there were several packages and only Griff's included Moray's without other extraneous ships. Ditto with the Ophidian. The wiki page did not seem to mention the standalone!

Thanks! I've a good feel for many parts of this game - but not the ships. That's why I'm so relieved each time I see Montana05 has been busy!

Ho hum! Version 1.1 beckons already!
While I do feel honored, the picture on your wiki page shows my Medical Moray S2, not the core game ship. If you do need Griff's Ophidian I have the OXP and could upload for you, probably also create a wiki page for it.

I will be busy for about 1 week more but if you need help just PM me, simple modifications I could do in the morning while drinking my coffee. :wink:

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 12:33 pm
by Cody
Griff's Ophidian is available from the manager, as are the Gnat, Griffin, and Hognose. All have Elite canon.

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:39 pm
by montana05
Cody wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 12:33 pm
Griff's Ophidian is available from the manager, as are the Gnat, Griffin, and Hognose. All have Elite canon.
My bad, probably from where I got it. :oops: However, a wiki page separate from Griff's Industries would be useful, specially since this model is larger than the others.

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 4:42 pm
by Ramen
So uh, I just wanted to inform you that you need to sanitize your inputs for the quotations you're using around the "i" in "press "i"". It's breaking the manifest plist.

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 6:16 pm
by Cholmondely
Ramen wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 4:42 pm
So uh, I just wanted to inform you that you need to sanitize your inputs for the quotations you're using around the "i" in "press "i"". It's breaking the manifest plist.
Thank you, mighty one! What do you recommend? I sensed something was wrong, but had no idea what. I just presumed it was the mighty and magnificent Macintosh being even more mighty and magnificent, detecting sinister solitaire semicolons where there were none, and throwing a galloping fit of the heeby-jeebies. I've put in a temporary fix, but if you can recommend something better...

Thanks for adding the first two of Drew's saga to the Ship's Library. I tried doing the same with a couple of the other novels which I thought were important, but flubbed the dub. My Oolite would not even recognise their existence. Now that my skills have improved, I hope to have another stab at it at some stage. But I was using your work as a crib...

Oh! And Ramen, what are you doing with yourself nowadays? Are you surviving the dreaded plague out there on the west coast?

Edit to add: for the record my latest log complained about brackets, again:

Code: Select all

02:54:06.981 [plist.parse.failed]: Failed to parse /Users/accountname/Library/Caches/org.aegidian.oolite/Oolite-download.plist as a property list.
Unexpected character ( at line 1
02:54:06.983 [oxz.manager.error]: Downloaded manifest was not a valid plist, has been left in /Users/accountname/Library/Caches/org.aegidian.oolite/Oolite-download.plist
02:54:14.371 [exit.context]: Exiting: Exit Game selected on start screen.
Not a word about quotation marks. Needless to say, you were right, my latest.log was wrong. When I tried my less than satisfactory tweak, the new expansions list downloaded quite happily.

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 6:54 pm
by Cholmondely
montana05 wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 2:39 pm
However, a wiki page separate from Griff's Industries would be useful, specially since this model is larger than the others.
Just to say, I find the Griff pages quite useless in understanding how his many multiple multifarious oxp's fit together. Not that I'm that interested in the ships, but even so... they look very nice, they do a great job of selling the product, but do not help with understanding it.

My fault - I should have looked a Hiran's databases instead...

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:01 pm
by Cholmondely
Cody wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 12:33 pm
Griff's Ophidian is available from the manager, as are the Gnat, Griffin, and Hognose. All have Elite canon.
So, thinking about this, I was focusing on the BBC Classic Elite (the one I actually played a little of, back in the day). So if the cougar never appeared there, I would never have thought to include it.

What about a second such OXP, for the non-BBC Elite versions? That could include all the extra ships (I presume that they are listed on the Jason Togneri's Complete Ship List).

Is there anything else that should be included? Stations? Equipment? Other stuff?

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:22 pm
by Cody
Cholmondely wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:01 pm
I was focusing on the BBC Classic Elite (the one I actually played a little of, back in the day). So if the cougar never appeared there, I would never have thought to include it.
It's so long ago, I'm no longer entirely sure which version of BBC Elite I played. I know it was on disc, not tape. I believe the Cougar (as the Cat) was in BBC Elite II, but I'm not even certain of that anymore. I do recall manic all-night sessions - just one more jump - and the GF complaining.

Nurse, nurse... help!

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 9:51 pm
by Ramen
So as for the quotes, you're using one too many backslashes

Code: Select all

\"i\"
will work fine. As for the ship's library stuff I'd honestly recommend taking a look at the stuff cim included by default. It's been like 6 years since I've touched those OXPs, and I'm not going to pretend I remember how it works at this point. As for the covid stuff I just don't go outside.

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:54 pm
by Cholmondely
Ramen wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 9:51 pm
So as for the quotes, you're using one too many backslashes

Code: Select all

\"i\"
will work fine. As for the ship's library stuff I'd honestly recommend taking a look at the stuff cim included by default. It's been like 6 years since I've touched those OXPs, and I'm not going to pretend I remember how it works at this point. As for the covid stuff I just don't go outside.
Thanks for the tip.

Well, with the ship's library stuff, I'll probably sort it out eventually. I'm getting my head around this programming business bit by bit. I suppose one of my major interests has to be the lore, so I do want to get it done. I don't know how many people will have read Drew through your work - but I'm quite sure that it brought Drew to their attention. I want to do something similar for Ganelon's anarchy stories & Malacandra's humanoid communist stories. I feel that both add background and insight. I also want to have another stab at HDBG-B and rejig some of what Norby did. I feel that his choice of pictures for the Rock Hermits could be improved. Eventually I want to come back to what Phkb was showing me about improving LongWayRound. If I can manage a reasonable chunk of all that, I'll be able to argue that I've gotten something worthwhile from this bizarre Covid-inspired occupation with a computer game!

You don't go out at all? How can you stand it? I'm out in the midst of the English countryside - fields all around, great walks - there is a 5,000 year-old footpath not too far away, et cetera, et cetera.

Re: Lore meta-oxp's

Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2021 2:32 am
by Ramen
Cholmondely wrote: Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:54 pm
You don't go out at all? How can you stand it? I'm out in the midst of the English countryside - fields all around, great walks - there is a 5,000 year-old footpath not too far away, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, my life has been more or less consumed by my latest modding project. Let me just say that reverse engineering makes writing OXPs look like paradise. I've spent the past 2 months figuring out what size a variable is. Now I know, but I still have no idea what it does. I'm rather green at it though, admittedly. Basically imagine if someone scrambled norby's code and changed the file format and you had to figure it out from scratch.