Oolite Bulletins

Shiver me hull-plating, there be renegade pirates in the space lanes!

Whilst pirates are the bane of any trader’s life, some of these brigands are more dangerous than others. Some renegades are known to equip their ships with all available equipment; fit Military Lasers to all views and ECM hardened missiles are standard equipment. A few are even known to use Q-mines. Fortunately for innocent traders, these Iron Ass pirates are fairly easy to identify, favouring classic Serpent Class ships, customising their laser systems to fire beams with unusual colours and occasionally hurling insults over the comms-link. Large bounties are offered by GalCop to any Commander brave enough to destroy one of these renegades or take the brigand alive.

A simple OXP hack adding 13 versions of pirate Classic Elite Ships in Iron Ass Configurations with new pilot entries, bounties and hails. Renegades can appear anywhere, although they are most common in Anarchy systems and very rare in safe systems.

UPDATE : THE POLISHED VERSION 2 IS NOW AVAILABLE:-

Improvements:-

- Renegades gain multiple multi-coloured front lasers!
- Some Renegades gain multiple multi-coloured plasma turrets!
- Bigger Bounties!
- More detailed placement script!
- Slight improvement to the AI!
- Few more hails added!
- Better prisoner description when handing a captured renegade to GalCop!

UPDATE:-

V3 is the final version. Just a few tweeks:- making renegedes very rare outside lawless systems and even there, the you should encounter them 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 trips. Adds a few more hails. Gives renegades approprate pirate-type cargo.

Until it appears on Oosat, you can download it by clicking on this link here (V3) or the link on my signature.

Sounds like fun

Excellent! I can't wait to get home, get loaded up and out there blasting the scum!

Yum, yum.

Is this mostly for those who are playing or have finished Assassins or can the rest of us play it without getting too many spoilers on how to fight bad guys in that OXP?

Its a seperate project to Assassins so yes.

This one is a first draft and I've been doing a bit of polishing. The next version features the following updates (probabley post tommorow):-

Updates from V 1.0
----------------------

1) Gave the OXP a little more polish by adding random seeds and origins to the characters entries. This means when you dock and are paid for capturing a renegage, a description of your prisoner is given EG:- "For capturing a pirate captain, a fat bird from Lave, you are paid a bounty of 350 Credits".

2) Scripted a chance of encountering Renegages on the way to the Sun, the numbers and chances depending on the System's Govenment type. A small chance of encountering a Renegade near the Space Station when launching is also added.

3) Impoved the AI slightly to make the Renegades insult you over the Comms-link more often.

4) Toughened the ships up by giving them extra forward gun mounts (between 2 and 4 Military Lasers ) and boosting their sheilds, speed and pitch / roll a bit. Bounties are also increased a bit to reflect this.

5) Added a couple more hails to the list. Whenever a Renegade decides to insult you it randomly picks one of the hails from the list in description. There are currently 11 on the list, but my imagination ran out of Oolitish pirate-type sayings at this point! It only takes a minute to cut and paste in a new hail to the list. If anybody wants to think some more up, post them on the Renegade Pirates OXP thread in Expansion Packs. Once I have enough together I'll post a new version.

Its not a mission OXP, it just randomly adds these Uber pirates (with Uber bounties) to the Ooniverse, to make Bounty hunting a finical alternative to trading. Best to have a few tones of Cargo space though as then you can double your money by scooping the rotters pod and handing him in!

Nice. I can't wait to see how tough they'll be in my new craft. Just came by a Mosquito, so I thought I'd give it a try on the flight that I've been trying to make for two weeks now. I've seriously tried to leave the same planet for all that time, but there's always that something I have to fiddle with which makes me quit before I dock the place I'm going to. That Oolite for me. Little gaming much learning and fiddling.

Less than 2½ months ago I decided to look one of my all time favourite games up on Wikipedia to see if anything had happened since the sequel (Frontier) disappointed me in the early 90's I really was disappointed even though friends that I shared an appartment with at that time now 10+ years on still talk about it as the time when I was to be found playing Frontier, even when we held parties . Well when I looked up Elite on wiki I knew nothing of Oolite, Wings3D, Python scripts, XML, plists, AI states, texture mapping or polygon counts. Now I know a little about each of those things.

Somehow I managed to make it to deadly, but now it's like there's always that silly idea on a note somewhere, that it would be nice to add in an OXP before flying on.

Well we are delighted you found Oolite, both commies and billboards are refreshingly different to the normal deliver a package/ferry a passenger/find and destroy missions. Great stuff, keep 'em coming.

I just came up against my first renegade pirate. They're certainly hard, but then I was looking for a challenge - it was getting a bit easy in my ironass Supercobra.

The bugger tried to hit me with a Q-bomb! That's the fist time I've seen that happen.

wow, this sounds great! I'm really looking forward to seeing an non-player craft use a q-mine, i haven't seen that yet in the game so far.

TGHC wrote:

Well we are delighted you found Oolite, both commies and billboards are refreshingly different to the normal deliver a package/ferry a passenger/find and destroy missions. Great stuff, keep 'em coming.

Well thank you.

I hope to see a lot more flavour OXPs (decor) from others too.

There's still room for many more named buggers to get shot and packages to be delivered. But in the ship department it would be nice to see the builders compete on who can make the coolest looking ships with the smallest overhead - I'm having to play without everything installed here to get a decent framerate and I haven't really got room for upgrading my graphics card (my present one only has a small passive heat disperser, and I wouldn't to have another fan running).

That's what makes Renegades attractive too. 29K's which makes people consider that the lone yellow blip entering scanner range is not necessarily just another easy kill for Commander Cool.

More of everything - we have a Ooniverse to fill!

Why does this always happen? I've been working on a very similar OXP. I had some cool touches in the AI, like making witch space jumps when energy is low, ignoring incoming fire when attacking a target, using hardened missiles, and not getting distracted by incoming missiles. Still playtesting...

Sorry. Hope you post it anyway, as you can never have too much variety. Should put up V2 tomorrow. About half way through kitting the fleet out with mutiple front lasers. Used subentries, so each beam is a different colour. A Renegade Morray firing a beam made up of three differnent beams side by side, green, pink and blue looks rarther nice, until the 3 Military lasers start cutting into you! Probabley gonna give the bigger ships like the Python and Boas turrets instead of left right and rear lasers as they rarely seem to use them.

Just had a scrap with a couple of renegade Adders outside a space station. Didn't know Adders could be so tough......one of them "had the death sentence on twelve star systems" (nice touch).

I made mince meat out of them though, and then shot the escape pods. Who needs the bounty hey!