Oolite Bulletins

While reading the thread: "My Competition Entry Is Ready On Oosat2" - I noticed that some of you were claiming to be shooting bits off the CMKIII and that got me thinking about shields/engines/hit locations and 'uber' ships.

My thinking goes something like this:

Oolite I'm guessing can already tell if you're being shot up from in front or behind and depletes the correct shield accordingly.

From the thread it would seem to indicate that Oolite is more clever than that and can even tell whether a specific part of the ship is hit (certain facet I'd guess not knowing about these things but have done some work on lines intercepting a plane in my real world job)

It would seem that one of the few limitations of oolite is that there still isn't a way to make 'real' money from any activity other than trading. I think Doc has pointed out in some threads is that becoming a pirate isn't very believable because you must dock at a 'real' station to save the game. I think Doc also suggested in another thread (apologies if it wasn't Doc to whomever it was!) that mining isn't profitable but if you could install a processor in your hold that converted minerals into gold/platinum/gemstones - now that would be profitable. And of course Little Bear has introduced Renegade pirates that makes Bounty Hunting a genuinely attractive option (not for me - I have the hand eye coordination of a one legged arthritic tortoise on valium )

So now my aside is over back to the point (thanks for hanging on in there) I'd like to introduce two new concepts (I think) to Oolite. 1) Taggers and 2) Engine Kills.

1) Taggers - a new type of missile - four of these tiny babies takes up the normal slot of one missile. When fired they home in on the targetted ship, penetrate the shields and attach themselves to the outer hull of the ship. From there they begin to transmit a full update of the ship they are attached to. This includes F/R shield status, energy bank ratings and a full cargo manifest. They also have an additional role to be explained shortly.

As a different type of missile they have only a 50% chance of being destroyed by ECM as their unique anti-shield shielding makes them more robust to this form of countermeasure system. Once attached they cannot be destroyed by the ship they are attached to - but could be by laser fire from other ships striking where the tagger is attached.

2) Destroying a ships engines by careful aiming! Picture the scene - you've shot the poop out of a sneaky sidewinder - he's spewing plasma all over the vaccum of space, his engine thrusters are flickering but is he slowing down? Is he hell! Reverse that - you've got no rear shields - you're down to your last energy bar but you hit the witchspace injectors and leave a brace of Mambas behind while you recoup and lick your wounds...

So what I'm proposing is that oolite could be modded (if possible and by people more clever than I) so that you can destroy a ships engines without destroying the ship - leaving it powerless and non-manouverable, i.e. rear laser shots that go directly into the engine exhausts do not go (much) through the shields, do not directly affect the energy banks but do massively affect some hidden value called 'engine status' (or the like).

This could also make the tactic of running away and tail gunning with a big mil laser just that bit more risky (wouldn't it?)

Anyway I'd like to tie 1 and 2 together like this: If a tagged ship has its engine destroyed the Tagger begins to transmit the location of the ship to the authorities - a ship (like the tugs from the tugs oxp?) is dispatched and if the legal status of the dead ship is confirmed 'offender' or above) then the ship is impounded and sold off - you get a percentage of the sell off (10%?) minus the cost of a new engine plus any other damage you inflicted to the body work with stray shots.

You may have to hang around like a lion around a big kill to fend of nasty opportunistic hyenas! Perhaps an ETA on the HUD for the tug plus Galcop escort.

This also brings me to 'uber' ships - perhaps if oolite can tell where ships are being hit then is it possible to also tell oolite where shield coverage is? Or could it be modded so that in some places there is NO shield coverage? ie. 'The new superUber4000 is almost completely indesctructable - pity the manufacturers didn't consider the effect that the polytetramonomagna alloy would have on the shielding around the protruding nose mounted sensor mast - reducing shield capacity in this area to virtually nil' - gww.snoopes.gal

Well anyway this is a huge rambling post and probably none of this can be done or (worse) you all think I'm barking mad. But it was good to get it off my chest!

PS - Thanks for all the replies to my Teorge thread! Fantastic support - I feel an oxp coming on over Christmas.

Cool ideas!
The uber ship with a weak spot you could set up fairly easily, What you'd do is make the weak component the actual 'ship' as far as oolite is concerned and then surround it with tougher subentity components the player has to blast through to get to the weak component. If the weak component has a max_energy of say 50 in the shipdata.plist then one or two shots with a laser will destroy it (and since oolite is seeing this one component as the actual ship then destroying it will kill the entire ship & subentities), um. i'm not sure i've explained this very well, if you'd like i have a simple .oxp featuring some ships with an idea similar to this i could email you and you could pick it apart.

I can't really help on the other points, you might be able to get ships into a zombie shutdown state by writing an AI's for them and making use of the "energy_low" message. I'm not sure if there's an AI command you could give the tugs to scan for shutdown ships - what would be handy would be a way to change a ships role through AI commands, for instance when a ship under fire gets an energy_low message from it's AI, your script kicks in and sets the ships speed to 0, tells it to ignore all other events and then change it's role to something like 'brokenship'. You could then have your Tugs AI do a "scanforshipwithrole: brokenship" and if found perform the towing action etc.

Just a quickie - are these kind of thoughts about expanding the functionality of Oolite - better here or in the "Suggestion Box" Forum.

Don't want to be miss-posting.

@Griff - glad you like the ideas - and yes please - would like to see your simple oxp to have a play around with it. How's best to give you my e-mail addess without it being picked up by spam bots?

Will I need Mesh3D or Wings3D to see the ships or doesn't it work like that? As you see I'm still a very green noob!

TIA

Hi,
I'll use this boards private mail function to send you the stuff, it's only about 200kb and as you say it wouldn't be wise to post up your email address. I'll write out a document explaining how i set out the model and include it with the .oxp, by the way is 'rich text format' a standard format for swapping text documents between various word processors? i know wordpad on windows will open them ok, but i don't know if mac's can read them.

the models will be in oolites .dat format, and i'll also include them in wings format and in .obj format too. if you want to edit the models or replace them with your own designs (which you are very welcome to do) you will need to download wings or some other compatible 3d mesh editor. a paint program of some type would be useful too as then your could change the 'textures' on the ships or draw new ones of your own.

@griff - I'm a PC user so RTF is fine by me.

I'm going to download Wings and/or Mesh3D over the weekend so this will give me something to play with - much appreciated.

DaddyH

@DaddyHoggy: Just keep the ideas coming. Even if they can't be implemented atm, they might inspire someone to do some updates of the exe, which would allow for doing something in the vein of what you write about.

It could be so nice, to be able to make a living from wrecks.

The ore processor I suggested doesn't seem to be possible either (actually you just refined the idea a lot by suggesting that some ore could yield precious stones and metals instead of just alloys), unless there are some ways to test for scooped cargo type and changing a piece of cargo into another available, which are not documented in the Wiki.

i totally understand what ur saying, but one thought......theres a certain limit of damage where the NPC ejects...leaving the ship dead in the water (no engines!)....i do however understand the damage PLACEMENT