Oolite Bulletins

Can anybody recommend a editor I can use on the PC that makes things like pairing up '{}' brackets easier (or indeed possible!) for playing with script.plists (or anything else oolite oxp related).

Cheers,

DaddyH

EDIT: There also seems to be two "flavours" of scripting: those who use lots of brackets and speech marks and those who use lots of <string></string> type stuff. Is it down to personnal preference? Do both work equally well or is there a de facto standard?

I use Notepad++. It is an excellent free programmers editor and so does matching of opening/closing punctuation.

I think most people use the style with lots of braces rather than XML.

There is meant to be another choice called OOS but it is broken at the moment. I've checked in a fix but as no-one is making builds, no one has it.

dajt wrote:

There is meant to be another choice called OOS but it is broken at the moment. I've checked in a fix but as no-one is making builds, no one has it.

The code is still being updated (as one can see on BerliOS), but those updates are not released

@dajt - thanks for the heads up on N++, I've downloaded it and will play with my script using it tonight.

So, is there any advantage or disadvantage to using braces over xml (other than sheer typing!?) - must you do one or the other? I notice in a lot of the oxps I've downloaded that while the script uses braces the misiontext is often in xml. Is this purely a historical thing?

I wrote my first OXP (Assassins) using the " { script, as I learnt as a whent along and used Sleezen's Spyhunter script as a model - a good one to learn from as its faily short but does a lot of the things any OXP will want to do like adding ships, putting up briefings and switching mission variables. For shipdata I modeled on Giles's ships. For planet and moon building I cribbed Murgh's Lave and Diso OXPs. AIs I had to learn from scratch though as nobody had done anything similar to what I wanted!

Personally I think the <array> <string> format is easier on the eye and you a less likley to make a mistake as a missing <array> tends to leap out at you, but its easy to miss a ], parycularly if you have a complex segment thats doing lots of things. Add to script, fire up Oolite, Oolite not reading script, go back, Oh yes in paragraph 501 I have 12 { and 12 ( but only 11 ]. Grr!

An editor like Vim can be used to determine if brackets are paired correctly - if you put the cursor by a bracket it will become marked with blue as will it's partner. This of course only works for pairs that are displayed simultaneously in the editing window (probably also work with multiple views though).

Dr.-SPACE-Nil wrote:

An editor like Vim .

Begun the deitor wars have

Rxke wrote:

Dr.-SPACE-Nil wrote:

An editor like Vim .

Begun the deitor wars have

dyslexic fnigers huh

Rxke wrote:

Begun the deitor wars have

I didn't realize that I stepped into a religious minefield there.

It was just the editor I came across when I needed something more than Windows native notepad (when I came across Oolite and the whole OXP scene). I gave up such religions a decade ago when I could no longer convince myself that the Amiga had any future. Since then I've been irritatingly pragmatic about such things. So if I get the pros and cons of Vim and whatever it's mortal foes are I might just switch, if it for some reason makes sense to me.

Dr.Nil wrote:

I gave up such religions a decade ago when I could no longer convince myself that the Amiga had any future

Of course the Amiga has a future - I've got 3 A500s (standard, ½meg upgrade, "fatter Agnus" + 1½meg upgrade + A590 20MB HD) just waiting to be released into the wild should breeding conditions ever prove favourable again (although they're still fighting with my 2 C64s (+1541 5¼" FDs))

Oh, and Doc, your moniker seems to be a bit lacking in "space" recently

glances over shoulder, tiptoes backwards out of minefield

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Oh, and Doc, your moniker seems to be a bit lacking in "space" recently Wink

I didn't expect to post as much as I've ended up doing when I chose the one with "-SPACE-" instead of " ". So Ahruman, one of our friendly moderators changed it for me

deitor? How did that one get through?

Oh yes, now I remember, there was a phone blaring for attention

Rxke wrote:

deitor? How did that one get through?

Oh yes, now I remember, there was a phone blaring for attention

I was thinking it meant dieters or debtors maybe....

Captain Hesperus
"Debts are always good, as long as they are owed to you, otherwise their bad."

I knew a boy once called Deitor - but he was Polish so it's not his fault.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I knew a boy once called Deitor - but he was Polish so it's not his fault.

Pronounced: like Detour

But, sorry, going off at a tangent there!

Captain Hesperus
"Last time I saw something that funny it was stood against a wall awaiting execution by firing squad."