Oolite Bulletins

I've started an oxp inspired by Doc's AD's campaign (i.e. its something everybody can contribute to). But I wanted to check some things before I put too much initial effort in to it only to find it's a non starter.

In some of the other threads you may have seen me quote from 'gww.Snoopes.gal' - that Ooniversal source of all that is not Galcop propaganda.

So I want to build up a 'mission' type screen that actually gives you some Snoopes-style, Oolite inspired news when you dock at a station (Having now played LongWayRound and seen how the mission scripts work I think this is do-able). I actually want the oxp to either give you nothing (0.33 chance) - i.e. "Be grateful - they say no news is good news - gww.Snopes.gal"

Some news about the planet you're docked at (also a 0.33 chance) i.e. "Tianve police today were forced to break up a game of Zero-G cricket today that took place in the converted hold of an Anaconda freighter. The captain of the vessel apologised indicating that his passengers had assured him the hold was being used for a televised game of Zero-G mud wrestling - gww.Snoopes.gal"

or a rumour (also 0.33 ok 0.34 chance) i.e. "Galcop to introduce additional insurance premiums for pilots of LHD starships after study indicates that these pilots have more accidents while manually docking at Space Stations - gww.Snoopes.gal"

It's gonna be big (effort wise) but should be quite small file size wise as its all gonna be text.

I figure one oxp per galaxy starting with galaxy 1 (naturally) - 3 news items per planet initially (ouch 765!) plus 100 rumours ( I want these to be picked randomly from a D100 role (*100 and converted to the nearest integer) [Is this possible to do I don't know much about how the scripting deals with maths - the closest I've ever seen like this in 'the real world' is when I used to play with tcl/tk].

Anybody who contributed to the oxp would be credited as a 'roving Snoopes reporter' on the screen and those of you who are already out in the other galaxies could start contributing early to the oxps for other galaxies.

Soooooo, if I did this as a mission i.e. the mission is effectively "Subscribe to gww.Snoopes.gal" what I wanted to check is that missions can run concurrently, so being on this 'mission' wouldn't precluded you from doing any others, such a LongWayRound, BlackBaron, Constrictor, et al.

I also thought this would be a good way for creators of oxps already in existence or were thinking of introducing one to 'plug' their product via the gww.Snoopes.gal newsfeed.

I'm quite pleased with the concept and hope/think it would add to the feel of the game - any thoughts, suggestions and potential problems would be much appreciated as input at this early stage.

I've already started writing some news and rumours (you've seen some of them here and in other threads) in the hope that its given a thumbs up by the important people out there (i.e. you lot )

Thanks,

DaddyH (the 'Edison Carter' of gww.Snoopes.gal)

You are going to run into problems with missions. Most missions check for whether a player is docked. They you check whether they have the right number of kills, are in the right galaxy, the right planet etc. If the news screen comes up, then I don't think the mission screen will. There are a bunch of us who use news screens in missions, in galaxy 7 the main news service is galaxy 7 news, and in galaxy 4 it's iNews.

(I was thinking of doing a mission where you have to stop a news crew from getting to a story, but I probably won't have time for a while.)

Cool idea!

I'm reminded of the newspaper screens that were in FFE.

It sounds like fun.

I'm almost sure that there is a way to make it work in one form or another.

Its very do-able and very cool , but as JS says, the problem is an OXP clash. Feel free to pinch the Galatic News logo from Assassins if you like!

Assassins has 12 News Broadcasts (and it was good fun dreaming up some of the Oolitish news!) and another 25 briefings (making 37 in total). I had to set it in G7 (to be sure I wouldn't get a mission brief clash - no other OXPs putting up briefings there!).

I can confirm that if two OXPs try to put a mission briefing at the same, then Oolite often canot cope. Somtimes the first brief comes up, you "press space commander" and the second brief immedatley comes up. However sometimes the first brief stops the second one being displayed. There seems no ryme or reason to this.

I playtested with Thargoid Wars installed, somtimes both the Assassins brief and Thargoid Wars brief came up, somtimes the Assassins Brief stopped the Thargoid Wars brief comming up, somtimes the Thargoid Wars brief stopped the Assassins brief comming up. I could find no worka-round, so in the end had to put a note in the readme, warning the player that he would have to unistall Thargoid Wars whilst playing Assassins!

As collectively the native and OXP missions dispaly well over 100 briefs (in Galaxies 1,2,3,4 & 7), the News OXP would inevitabley conflict without a workaround causing players to miss mission briefings. Ie Your F5 screen would tell you that you had a mission to take an old geezer home (longaway) but you wondn't have seen the briefing offering the mission (as you got a news broadcast instead).

Two Suggestions:-

Set the News OXP to only display briefs in G5 6 and 8 (not ideal).

Or:- Currently all OXPs and native missions only display briefs when the player is docked at the Main Station (ie the one where you can save you game by the main planet). So if you set News.oxp to only display a brief if these conditions were met:-
That way the News would come up when the player was docked at a station other than the main one (rock hermits, Doc's commie stations, carriers, factory ships, etc etc).

That would prevent a conflict and allow the News in all Galaxies to all players.

Really Cool idea!

I have some unused broadcasts on my WP that didn't make it into assassins, if you wanna use em. The Galatic Mud Tennis cup between the fat harmless birds and the fierce furry felines apparently had some moments!

@LB - Thanks for the tip - so, if I use your non-main-station docking code snippet then it looks like I may avoid the worst (all) of the clashes. Perhaps this is quite an Oolite solution too - Galcop has too tight a control over the newsfeeds on the main stations so Snoopes must get its news out via other channels.

It will also encourage users of Oolite to populate their Ooniverse with lots of oxps...

I will glady take your 'spare' news off you and populate snoopes.oxp with it.



Ta,

DaddyH

I started a 10 stage mission pack for G6 that involved the Thargoids realeasing some horrible virus that jammed communications and fried Police and Military control systems turing the police and Military ships to the Thargoids side. It build up slowly, with minor problems being reported, but I only got as far as a paper plan. I then got involved with the 50 stage Assassins project and many of these ideas (such as the trained deadly goats! ) were incorperated into Assassins.

Anyway, I've ended up with a word file of nonsense like this:-

"-----GALAXY NEWS SPORTS UPDATE

The Mud Tennis Galactic Cup ended in controversy today, when the Essozaians beat the Orteedians in straight sets.

The Orteedian manager blamed the team’s poor performance on an outrageous foul. Five minutes after kick-off, the Essozaians striker (a Queceteian fat yellow feline) pounced upon and proceeded to consume the Orteedian mid-fielder (a Qubiisian harmless horned bird). When the referee attempted to book the player, the striker swatted the referee in a playful manor, unfortunately breaking the fat red bird’s neck. A steward’s enquiry into the incident is in progress.

Galaxy News apologies unreservedly to all viewers in the Anlebi system for the complete loss of holo-signal during this exciting game. The fault has been traced to the failure of the local sub-space transmitter, crashing the entire Anlebi communications network.

Galaxy on Line report that the fault was caused by an inexplicable central computer error. Output from neighbouring systems transmitters was boosted accordingly and full coverage has now been restored to Anlebi."

If you wanna PM me your e-mail (don't put it here due to spam-bots), I'll send it over!

Cheers LB - PM to follow with e-mail address.

I've been thinking, is there anyway that the Snoopes feed can be set to one of the unused F-keys (F9 and F4 on the default setup when docked), and have the option for the player to subscribe to snoopes as a 'mission briefing'? In this way, there wouldn't be any clashes between OXPs, since the news feed would be controlled by a function key, not by docking.

Is this a possibility, or would it require massive amounts of re-working?

Captain Hesperus
"I must apologise for his whittering, he's writing this at three o'clock in the morning."

Probably do-able, but would need a change to the Oolite EXE.