Oolite Bulletins

@ Dr.Nil: Outworld (and off topic) indeed! And perhaps we should just keep it there, in RealLife. Just as a very brief insight into my personal opinion: To me the story as told in the bible (some of the mythological stuff subtracted) in its core seems far more likely then the myth you are putting up, which is the general problem with most of the "instead-of-what-we-read-in-the-Bible"-stories. (No personal offense meant! Just my view.)

Hi
I've been busy trying to add a small collector ship tasked with the job of travelling between the autominers and hoovering up any mineral pods they eject, it seems to be working ok, i've got a few tweaks to make before i upload it, anyway, whilst testing, oolite generated some of charlies fantastic asteroid models amongst the processors and it looked so cool i thought i'd post a screenshot, great work charlie!


the small boulder is the processor and the ship you can see is the mining pod collector trying to work out how to get around the massive asteroid!
The oolite 3d engine really is a great piece of work, it doesn't seem to have any problems with objects of wildly different scale at all.

@Griff:
Thank you - praise indeed!

Some day I'll return to that .oxp & do a better job on it's v. primative sript file.
( But not before I've cleaned up the other .oxp in my 'beta' folder - nasty... )

PS
I don't think I've taken the opportunity to say: - Great work!

@Griff & Charlie: You guys make it so hard to come up with new ways to express praise. If at times you dream team members don't get any, it's probably because the rest of us feel like we keep repeating ourselves whenever we see depictions of your splendilicious magnifiwonderous creations.

@Commander McLane: No offense taken. I can't help smiling at someone finding resurrection and a flat Earth created in six days et. al. more believable than power politics though

Looks cool!

Are these mining ships going to be used with Griff's excellent freighter here? They look like they're of a similar design.

Crazy and somewhat farfetched idea: the mining pods could deliver raw materials to the AutoMiners, and the loading robots from Griff's freighter could ferry finished products to the freighter, which would have a patrol AI that would cause it to make trips to and from the station. And, of course, each step would be open to piracy (ie. shooting robots to get their cargo, attacking the autominer or freighter, etc.), but there would be defense ships and turrets to stop you.

Cool Ideas MadMax,
*Long post warning!*
The plan here was to try and come up with a 'busy port' type .oxp, basically some small ships and stations with 'interlocking AI's' that we could quickly add to a system with a simple addship: command, by interlocking AI's what i mean is like what you suggest, autominers would pop out minerals, scoopers would scoop them, move off to the station to deliver, freighters would arrive depart etc, small tugs & cargo unloader bots would move amongst the ships etc.
at the moment i've got the autominers producing occasional batches of minerals, and the collector ship occasionaly notices and moves over to collect them but there are still a lot of bugs - hopefully these can be fixed by adjusting how often the autominers release cargo, at the moment this is et to be very often as i want to test the collectors ai, but this is confusing the collector ship and i'm often seeing it moving around the asteroid field like the Pied Piper of Hamelin with hundres of cargo pods trailing after it, give me a moment and i'll update the link in case anybody is brave enough to have a pick through and sort out the bugs.

*edit* i've added the newest version here
http://www.box.net/public/um19jjbp1s

@Charlie.

Hope you don't mind, but when I submitted Asteroid Storm.oxp (a joint OXP with Charlie, where he did the models and textures and I did the script and coding, so all Charlies models and texs are included in this OXP), I added code to add all your asteroids to the game generally. So anybody with Asteroid Storm.oxp installed gets to see all your asteroids as part of the normal Oolite game. Seemed a waste just to have your varied and pretty takes on asteroids (BTW some of Charlies asteroids are modeled on real ones in the Real World Earth Solar Syetem! ) only seen in the Mission!!

The OXP code adds your asteroids and makes the really big ones appear on the ID comp. as "Large Asteroid". The really big ones also throw out more boulders than normal, if you mine them. I just added 13 other asteroid entries in shipdata, so there are 15 differnt types (Giles's 2 plus Charlies 13), giving a nice varitiey to Asteroids in the game generally.

If Griff (or anybodyelse) has a "addShips: asteroid" in an OXP, the Charlies asteroids pop up (if you have the Asteroid Storm.oxp in). Charlies asteroids are added to the "call list" for "asteroid".

Taking a break from Oolite and the Boards for a few months, but I'll be back!

@LB to steal a quote from a movie "Cheerio, but be back soon!"
(the movie is Ooliver of course!)

refering to the previous page of this thread:

EjectItem:/ejectCargo:/spawn: ARE available to NPCs.
I used them in deathactions so they should also be working in AI.
(See the Wrex thread.)
(There were problems with cargo not being cargo, fix: change bounty to zero.)

Maybe add performScriptedActionOnTarget: to them?

===
Edit:

Going from what is mentioned in the last few posts, it seems you managed to figure out an effective way of moving mineralpods?


If not:

You could try a script that does "awardCargo: minerals" every 60seconds or so.
Have a max cargo of one to five, check for cargofull.
CARGOFULL: ejectCargo
(with the eject position defined, ofcourse)

===

Are the rock and the miner two seperate entities?

===
Sorry if this has been answered in earlier posts here, the thread is a bit long and beefy.

@Griff: Sorry, but I'm a bit burnt out atm. I haven't really got the mental surplus for doing more complicated stuff than ads and things like that for now.

I hope to see your excellent stations in game soon even if it is only as replacement for the rock hermits in G8 or something like that to start with.

Anyone: Feel free to pick up on the 49ers ideas - I'll try to give a fair warning if I suddenly jump back into working on this.

Hi A_H, great to see you posting again!
hmm, i'm not sure what i've been doing here to be honest, let's see...
i made about 4 'autominer' models and 4 asteroids, making sure that each asteroid was shaped in a way that all the autominers fitted on to them neatly (ie. i gave all the asteroids a flat top!)
since i don't think we can add subentities by 'role' yet, the shipdata.plist has about 18 entries for most combinations of autominer and asteroid (with the asteroid as a subentity of the auominer) all with the role 'autominer', so oolite can pick and choose from them all and the player sees a variety of different combinations whilst in game.

The autominers have an AI whereby they roll a dice and if they get a 1 they target a 'hopper' spaceship placed near them and fire a special missile. the special missile only lives for about 2 seconds then dies, spawning cargo pods as a death_action ( i couldn't get the autominers to simply ejectItem/ejectCargo, so i had to use the special missile/death_action as a workaround, although the recent postings on "scriptactionontarget" might be the fix to get ejectCargo to work)

since the hopper ship notices an "incoming_missile", it's AI whirrs into life and it flies in close to it's attacker, doing the last few hunders meters at a snails pace in order to keep it close to the autominer for about 20 seconds, (i've done it this way with the hopper moving to the autominer rather than the cargopods because i don't think that items with a scanclass of cargo can be found with a "ScanForNearestShipWithRole" and unless the cargo has a scanclass of cargo it can't be scooped by the player)

the cargo pods have an AI to scan for the hopper and fly towards it, i'm explainging this behaviour as the hoppers tracktor beam drawing in the cargo pods, although often the hopper leaves too soon and the pods trail along behind it, trying to fix this with a scanner_range key for the cargo pods to make them loose the hopper and drift off into space but it's not working yet.

I've got a problem with the cargo in that, unless i use cargo_scripted_item on them, oolite keeps seeing them as escape capsules so when you scoop them you get slaves etc, i tried the bounty=0 on them but it hasn't worked but this is probably an error i've got somewhere in the shipdata.plist

Perhaps a pilot entry (like you did with the BattleBots), of "a miner pod" and then an award_cargo (like you did with Santa). A bounty of 1, should then give the message "You have captured a miner pod".

Must stop looking at the Boards now and get on with work!

you don't need a scanForShipsWithRole: cargo

You can copy what is used in the scavengerAI, edit: scanForRandomLoot.
However, the method may not recognise script spawned cargo as real cargo; hardcoding of game-generated cargo again.
But hopefully the method recognises all entities with Cargotype: something other than NOT_CARGO and scanclass: CLASS_CARGO

So... you have the recieving collector droids targetted by the splintermissiles,
the message INCOMING_MISSILE then gets the thing to do it's stuff.
(So it will be blind to real missiles )
If you set targetToPrimaryAgressor as a response to missile, the missile will be the target?
Then performInterceptOnTarget, range<1000: setAITo: collectLootAI.plist

edit:
Now that I think of it:
CollectLootAI.plist is a perfect readybuilt solution.

edit2:
No need to prevent collision between subunits of the same entity, they do not collide with eachother.
What I usually did was: make the base continue below the 'groundfloor', then it could be placed on any rough surface. (Given that the surface is solid on the other side, otherwise it looks silly.)

Hi A_H
thanks for the insight on the AI's. i'm definately going to try out your suggestions. yeah you're right about the pod collector ship being blind to missiles, in fact if you shoot it with one it wonders over and tries to stare you out, it's quite funny!

LittleBear wrote: ↑Sun Feb 11, 2007 7:47 pm

Think you can have them do this with pwm co-ordinates (have a look at Murgh's AdDroidAI in LaveOXP). The trouble is that pwm co-ordinates are specific to a system. So you could set you bots to go to pwm XXX YYY ZZZ (ie a point inside the docking port - causing them to speed dock!) and this would work fine at Lave, but the same co-ordinates at Diso would send them off into the middle of nowhere!

Griff wrote: ↑Sun Feb 11, 2007 8:06 pm

ah, i didn't realise pwm co-ordinates were different in each system...

What are pwm coordinates?

The wiki's Oolite coordinate systems page describes 2 different systems, something called "absolute" and something without a name (the legacy_addShipAt system?).