Oolite Bulletins

SUNSKIMMERS.OXP (1kb)

v0.1

Adds ships (pirates, sunskim-traders and police) on the witchpoint-sun route mixed according to system economy and government type.

v 0.11

Corrected error with ships spawned in interstellar space. Thanks to Chaos Syndrome for pointing out this error.

Download v.0.11 of Sunskimmers.oxp HERE

Nice One!

Have you put it up on Oosat?

Argh! Beat me to it. I was going to add some deserted rock hermits to the OXP too. And the link between increased rates of piracy and deserted rock hermits is? ....

johnsmith wrote:

Argh! Beat me to it. I was going to add some deserted rock hermits to the OXP too. And the link between increased rates of piracy and deserted rock hermits is? ....

Don't hold back, just take it into account and modify yours to suit. I like the idea of deserted rock hermits, it all adds to the unpredictability, which is one of Oolites major strengths.

Great!

New ships are all very well, but this kind of .oxp adds real extra depth to Olite.

Good work.

Maybe time I stopped being lazy & trawled the depths...

Thanks for the feedback.

Any additions or tune-ups are welcome.

And I look forward to deserted Rock Hermits. Will they be dockable (perhaps sometimes even lootable) or all boarded up?

Other possible additions to asteroids:

Non-spherical asteroids (some rotating). Groups of small asteroids travelling at great speed. Huuuge asteroids.

Dr.-SPACE-Nil wrote:

And I look forward to deserted Rock Hermits. Will they be dockable (perhaps sometimes even lootable) or all boarded up?

Me thinks of Alien and shudders!!!!!!!

I just came across a dope-smuggling Moray medial boat with a clean record while on the way to the sun. He attacked me. Is this normal pirate behaviour?

And while we're on the subject of pirate behaviour, is it possible to script missile launches? I rember being really scared of Fer-de-Lances on the Spectrum because they would always launch their missiles when they were right next to you so you had to ECM before they even launched their missiles.

Playing with the asteroid idea, is it OK to have them spinning? Not that many objects in Oolite do. Why would they spin? Was there instability in their orbits which made the rock hermits leave? Or did they just want to head for the bright lights of the big city? Right now they look like normal hermits, with the lights out and with no door on the entry tunnel. They're also weaker than traditional hermits as the hermits took their shield regeneration equipment when they left.

johnsmith wrote:

I just came across a dope-smuggling Moray medial boat with a clean record while on the way to the sun. He attacked me. Is this normal pirate behaviour?

Medical boats carry narcotics for purely medicinal purposes (yeah right), so their status is always clean, if one attacked you it would have been in "self defence", somehow something triggered their action, their normal behaviour is passive unless provoked, unless it was a female pilot with PMT, which of course makes them totally unpredictable!!

/me dons asbestos suit and dives into foxhole.

TGHC wrote:

Medical boats carry narcotics for purely medicinal purposes (yeah right), so their status is always clean, if one attacked you it would have been in "self defence", somehow something triggered their action, their normal behaviour is passive unless provoked

Mind you, that Megaweed taken for 'medicinal purposes' does tend to make you a little paranoid on the downer.....

Captain Hesperus
"I hear Galcop incinerated a six thousand tonne haul of Megaweed yesterday. No wonder they were so cheerful when they booked me for having an expired maintenance certificate, the wind shifted and blew the smoke through their offices....."

Dr.-SPACE-Nil wrote:

Thanks for the feedback.

Any additions or tune-ups are welcome.

And I look forward to deserted Rock Hermits. Will they be dockable (perhaps sometimes even lootable) or all boarded up?

Other possible additions to asteroids:

Non-spherical asteroids (some rotating). Groups of small asteroids travelling at great speed. Huuuge asteroids.

Yes! And is it possible to implement Asteroid Storm mission?

ArkanoiD wrote:

Yes! And is it possible to implement Asteroid Storm mission?

Wouldn't it be a case of getting Oolite to generate a number (possibly infinite) of asteroids and have them generated with a random velocity.

Then you stop your ship in the middle and rotate around to shoot them!
Ah, the memories flood back....

Captain Hesperus
"I was told that I had memory retention issues. Can't remember who told me, though."

The Moray attacking is not due to this oxp as it just picks random ships by roles without affecting the AI.

Some of the missions in the Sidewinder Commander OXP (*) could be Asteroid Storm type missions if someone figures out a way to make such an oxp. I did do a little work on a tiny and extremely slow mining pod with a low powered laser, which was vaguely intended for an astromine penal colony.

(*) Sidewinder Commander. The commander is hired by the navy as a Sidewinder pilot. They store his ship while he works his way up in the navy ranks by completing missions from millitary bases and carriers in ever cooler naval ships. Mostly very short intensely battle oriented missions like carrier defense or interstellar raid. The pay is lousy but there's lots of action and zero expenses. Instead of paying for gear you are given equipment according to the mission and of course matching your expendability (rank) with the expendability of your gear to the navy. I.e. you will only get a beam laser equipped sidewinder with nothing else to begin with and have to balance your play between letting others with better equipment take more of the heat in large battles, while still trying to grap some glory in order to advance in rank and get better equipped.

I see a lot of problems in implementing such a project. Not least of them the scope of this paired with my reluctance to embark on oxp work which can't be over with in a weekend. Well perhaps it sparked an idea in someone else.

@Doc - Sunskimmers certainly makes the life of us pilots who prefer fuelling our witchspace injectors via a great ball of fusion powered gas much more interesting. I just wanted to check on some odd behaviour I was on the wrong end of last night to see if its part of sunskimmers or oolite in general.

Flying towards sun of a (democracy) system - asp MkII on scanner flying away from sun - I target him and he's clean. when we're about 10k's apart he goes red but doesn't make any other move - I mull over taking him on when two vipers appear also coming from the sun. Me and the asp pass and I think nothing else of it - then the little 8ugger flips over and starts shooting up my tail - so of course I feel obliged to return fire - I'm holding my own when the 2 galcop vipers get involved and blow the poop out of me!

"But he fired first" - said Commander Jameson via a medium and an ouija board....

Good to hear that the change is noticable. I made this one after crossing a galaxy in less than half an hour using skimming, so I at least would have to do more than point at the sun and press 'j' to avoid traffic.

As you might have noticed, this OXP is only about one kilobyte i size and it only consists of a very simple script and no other files. It doesn't do anything besides calling for traders, pirates and police from the pools of those types of ships and placing them on that formerly unused (by NPCs) route. How they behave once in place is guided by whatever AI the ship came with in the basic game or the OXP that supplied the game engine with it, when a ship of that type was called for (ie. trader, pirate or police).

What I'm trying to say is that odd behaviour from ships encountered on the route from the witchpoint buoy to the sun, should be a type of behaviour, that you would have exactly the same chance of experiencing on the route to the planet.

I am still a bit puzzled though, since this is the second report of odd behaviour from ships encountered on the way to the sun.