Oolite Bulletins

The default Rock Hermit in Oolite is a beautiful model, and Griff deserves all the praise for creating it. But, when it's the *only* Rock Hermit you ever see, it starts to feel strange. In all 8 galaxies, in all 2048 systems, how can there be only 1 Rock Hermit design? The bounds of reason are getting stretched substantially (although to be fair, with our scaling issues, our AI issues, our balance issues, reason probably isn't playing a significant part in procedings, but I digress).

Here's a little something I cooked up, borrowing heavily from another of Griff's excellent models. Extra Rock Hermits!



The observant among you will quickly realise you've seen this model before. And yes, I've shamelessly yanked the Space Bar model out of Random Hits, and created an OXP around it.

With this OXP installed, one of the RH variations it contains will replace an existing RH in about 35% of cases. There will still be plenty of the default ones, but now there will be a mix. The screenshot above is for the "premium" RH, one that the hermit has upgraded considerably. But there are plain ones as well, that just have a docking port. There are ones that just have the main building, or have the back structure as well. Some will have the external landing pad. And this is on top of the 4 different flavours of asteroid as shown above.

For those who are experimenting with the External Docking System mod, you will be able to land on the external pad on those RH's that have installed it.

Anyway, hopefully this will (a) give you a bit more variety in your Rock Hermits, and (b) provide resources for developers to utilise the methods inside in their own OXPs.

Comments, feedback and bug reports welcome.

Download here for the moment: ExtraRockHermits.oxz
Now on the Expansion Manager as well.

And I should add: BIG shoutout to Griff for creating all these models in the first place. Thanks for making our Ooniverses so cool to look at!

Awesome! Thanks phkb (and Griff)

+1 to the comment just above

Really like the tie in with external docking,

Could the external docking beacons be turned off for when commanders have not yet installed the external docking oxp...

cbr wrote: ↑Fri Feb 02, 2024 8:01 pm

Really like the tie in with external docking,

Could the external docking beacons be turned off for when commanders have not yet installed the external docking oxp...

If you don’t have EDS, the beacon flashers are removed. Same goes for the Space Bar Face Lift and Nuit 2.0.

These white flashers, got pretty bumpy close, showed up without eds.
Got bumped and spaced frontal and sideways before realizing i had not installed eds yet.
Or am i missing something

cbr wrote: ↑Fri Feb 02, 2024 9:20 pm

These white flashers, got pretty bumpy close, showed up without eds.
Got bumped and spaced frontal and sideways before realizing i had not installed eds yet.
Or am i missing something

Weird. I’m sure I tested it without EDS. I’ll have another look.

Yep, it's a bug. Fix on the way. Fix is live, download link above will get version 1.1.

These extra-special looking Rock Hermits seem like they'd be a good fit in Industrial systems, perhaps even in disregard of government type...although who'd want to build one in an Anarchy?

I was thinking more in terms of low tech systems (easier to build on top than within?) but... not my oxp and condition scripts are a relatively easy tweak.

Switeck wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 5:48 am

These extra-special looking Rock Hermits seem like they'd be a good fit in Industrial systems, perhaps even in disregard of government type...although who'd want to build one in an Anarchy?

You could go that way. I've gone for a kind of loose TL-based condition, but I was more interested in making sure (as much as I could) that, in the case where multiple RH's are spawned, a single system will get different versions, even if that meant having 1 RH with all the extras, and 1 with nothing else.

As long as there's variation!

Beats the Astro-gulags in Commies! systems...all the same and replacing 90+% of what would otherwise be rock hermits.

Switeck wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 2:55 pm

Beats the Astro-gulags in Commies! systems...all the same and replacing 90+% of what would otherwise be rock hermits.

GearsNSuch was working on a replacement -

GearsNSuch wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 12:00 pm

I've made a touch of progress on the Astromine since then and will probably move on to texturing before too long.

The new commies oxp features his ships models, but he'd not published any of his dockables...

But if he finished texturing them and is happy to publish, that would give us two models - the old and his new

phkb wrote: ↑Fri Feb 02, 2024 11:16 am

Amazing work phkb revamping that ancient model and bringing it up to scratch for modern Oolite, it looks awesome! It's brilliant that you've also got that landing pad working too, something that was just a bit of throw-away detail actually works and has an ingame purpose now!