Dynamic Ooniverse

[Captain Hesperus]

My post to reills was supposed to be Stevesims - I think they have similar avatars but a fairly pathetic excuse - nonetheless

Reills' avatar is a PCC, stevesims' is an Anaconda. I think your ID Computer needs overhauling.

Captain Hesperus
"If all the people in the Universe actually thought about what they were doing before they did something, then a lot fewer stupid people would get between me and my profits."

[DaddyHoggy]

@Cap'n H - based on my life at the mo' general lack of sleep etc, one pointy thing pretty much looks like another pointy thing...

[reills]

I was a bit confused there. . . Well, okay, that IS sort a permanent state for me.

[Captain Hesperus]

@Cap'n H - based on my life at the mo' general lack of sleep etc, one pointy thing pretty much looks like another pointy thing...

I'm NEVER letting you on any ward I end up working on!

Captain Hesperus
"That's NOT where you put the suction pipe, Nurse!"

[Miangele]

oolite seems to contain a lot of the features from archimedes elite -- namely ships moving in formation and a world happening around you. so while you don't see systems changing hands or government, you at least see other people that aren't you. did you ever encounter ships in the elite sequels that weren't pirates or mission targets? i never saw any, and that dissapointed me. such a dead universe.

has anyone played space rangers 2? as far as dynamic universes go, that's quite excellent. it has a lot of semi-unique and named pilots which are individually ranked, the war with the dominators carries on with or without you, systems fall and are won back even if you aren't involved, the tech level changes as you play, there are semi-unique weapons, a dynamic economy, and nice factions. and planet government i believe can change. very well done. i think that's the sort of thing you guys are talking about.

i guess the x series is also dynamic but the x series loses a lot of the playability elite has because x is like really really confusing.

[Captain Hesperus]

Welcome to the forums, Miangele!
Yes, Elite was very much player-oriented. Oolite is Object Oriented, so you are likely to jump into a system and as you Torus in, it's quite likely you'll see pirates attacking some luckless trader who arrived before you, or you'll see GalCop police clearing out a Pirate Cove (with the right OXP, of course), all without your involvement. Look out for distant laser beams and missile explosions and you'll find yourself thinking, "Damn, I'm missing all the fun!"

[Commander McLane]

Hi and welcome to the board (and of course to the game itself), Miangele!

Personally I have never played any Elite sequel and unfortunately don't know Space Rangers 2. But what I had in mind when I started this thread was something very much along the lines you portrayed.

Indeed, Oolite is object oriented (hence the name: Object Oriented Elite) and there is always a lot of stuff going on around you even without your involvement. The nice thing is that you can involve yourself if you want. So the first thought when seeing distant signs of fights can be like Captain Hesperus is saying. But the following action can be to hit your jumpdrive and rush right into it! (That's at least what I am doing all the time. )

However--and this is what this thread was about--the underlying Ooniverse is quite static. There are of course a few missions (like Nova in the game itself and for instance Assassins as an OXP) that will change parts of the Ooniverse while you are playing them. But these changes are always mission-related and therefore indeed somewhat player-centered. (You have to play the mission in order to trigger the changes; without you playing it nothing happens at all.) But there is no mechanism that will over time slowly change some characteristics of systems/planets/societies, as you would expect in reality.

There is however nobody pursuing this idea right now--not to my knowledge, at least. So it's just one of the many ideas and suggestions hanging around on the board, waiting for someone to catch up.

And in case you also have some ideas to improve this great game, or anything else to contribute (as a coder, as a scripter, as a designer or modeler, or as a critical user, whatever), feel free to do so in one of the friendliest communities you can find on the web!

[JensAyton]

*grumble* That is not what object-oriented means.

[Commander McLane]

Oops.

Here you can see that I am no programmer (and C_H isn't either). I honestly thought my explanation was correct (and it does make sense, doesn't it?, from a player's point of view).

So my apologies to the great A for circulating nonsense about programming languages. (But I am quite sure I'm not the only one on this board making that mistake.)

[LittleBear]

I thought it meant that too!, but yes that is one of the big differences between Elite and Oolite. Each ship has its own AI and so gets on with its own thing. Traders, pirates, police ships and Thargoids are always added and get on with their own things. The numbers added depend on the type of system you are in. A pirate may attack you, but may also attack an NPC trader. If you help out, ships may radio you to thank you. OXPs often add more types of ships (Commie ships in Commie systems for example). Many mission packs add ships to the game that are not related to a mission (eg local freedom fighters fighting the local dictators navy). There's a lot going on in the Ooniverse!

[reills]

"Obeject Oriented" refers to the the actual way a given program is written (and the language used).

In the old days programs were written procedurally "first do this, and then do that, but only if this criteria is met" sort of thing. This led to the "top-down" programming method. You first made "big" statements like "Create Universe" and then wrote subroutines to handle portions of the overall task "Generate Planet Coordinates," and "Place Planet at Specified Coordinates". This made for easily maintained code, but not very portable (could not easily reuse the code in another program).

Some lazy programmer (might have been Ahruman... not sure ) thought up the idea that it might be easier to understand and reuse code if the chunks of code were "objects". These objects were written to behave in certain ways based on the other objects. This behavior is determined by the "methods" written into the object. So, you would have an object called "Universe" and within the Universe is a method called "Add Planet" which would create a planet object. To create a specific planet you would write a call to the "Universe.Add_Planet" method and pass along the new planet's features.

That, at least, is my feeble understanding of the "Oo" in Oolite.

[Arexack_Heretic]

Changes to the OOniverse need not entirely be dependent on what a player does.
You could set it to trigger at the whim of a scripttimer, keeping track of 'playtime'.
Or something arbitrary such as number of hyperspacejumps. (This would again be playercentric, but he/she can do little about it) (Also this latter timer-system only keeps track of the number of jumps SINCE inctalling the OXP.)

I'm currently learning to code in python which is also a VHL-OO language.
I'm not quite clear at all about these distinctions.

[Commander McLane]

Changes to the OOniverse need not entirely be dependent on what a player does.
You could set it to trigger at the whim of a scripttimer, keeping track of 'playtime'.

That's roughly what I had in mind with DynamicOoniverse.oxp. Just haven't invested a lot of time to actually do so. (Don't have that time ATM.) Still the main question for me is: How randomly can the changes be? And how can conflicts with OXPs changing planetinfos be avoided (or dealt with)?

[Arexack_Heretic]

you could 'randomly' set a few variables the first time the script is run,
from this various events may or may not happen or may be delayed in time.
certain events may only happen after others.

{
condition = ("mission_random_seed_1 equal undefined");
do = ("set: mission_random_seed_1 [d100_number]", "set: mission_local_variable [mission_random_seed_1]",
"add: mission_local_variable [mission_random_seed_1]");
},
{
condition = ("mission_local_variable lessThan [script_timer]");
do = ("something");

[Miangele]

that pirate cove oxp that got mentioned sounds quite interesting. where would one go about getting it? i've never seen it on oosat2 (although i imagine that it;s actually part of some oxp that i have in fact seen)

anyway, just curious, but you do get paid for hunting down pirates? i see some bounty counter come up when i shoot one down, but i'm not entirely sure if that's bounty i'm owed, or bounty that's on ME. er, right. i might be going somewhere with that.

anyway, would it be easier to destroy and create new stations over time than to change a planets tech level? i'm not to sure how the internal scripting things work. though, i'm assuming what the station sells is based on its planet? hm. what about just changing the station's model every so often?

anyway, there are various ways to achieve a dynamic world. the oblivion modding community has done some really interesting stuff in regards to that. i'll go get info on that and talk about it later.