addMoon in 1.69.1.1-mac

[Commander McLane]

It seems that addMoon: doesn't work in 1.69.1.1-mac. Don't know about former versions. I wanted to add two new planets to a system, but had to resort to 1.65 to actually see them in-game.

I don't know whether this is an issue that has been reported in association with Assassins, so--just in case--I report it here.

[LittleBear]

AddMoon is still working on 1.69.1 (at least on the Windows build).

[JensAyton]

It seems that addMoon: doesn't work in 1.69.1.1-mac.

It does, you know. You may need to be more specific about your problem.

[Commander McLane]

Oops, don't know what I did wrong. Now the planets are there.

Never mind.

[Commander McLane]

It turns out there is a problem.

Changes made to planetinfo.plist don't have an immediate effect. Sometimes they work, but sometimes everything is like before. Then I take the OXP out of the addons-folder, fire up Oolite without the OXP, quit the game, take the OXP in again, start again and now I see the changes.

Maybe it's a cache-issue?

[another_commander]

You can just hold down shift when starting up the game and achieve the same result. The cache needs to be rebuilt in order to see changes applied to most of the plists. What you are doing by removing and reinserting the OXP folder is forcing the game to rebuild the cache "the hard way", since you are modifying the search paths twice, once when removing and once when reinserting the folder.

Hope this saves some time. It is not an actual problem, it works as per specification.

[Commander McLane]

Thanks for the hint. Which plists exactly need a rebuilt cache? Before I never had a problem when modifying script.plist, missiontext.plist, shipdata.plist, descriptions.plist, commodities.plist or equipment.plist. All changes were recognized by the game without forcing the cache to be rebuilt. I just had to start the game again without pressing SHIFT.

[another_commander]

The planetinfo, equipment and demoships plists are definitely cached. For the rest, I am not really sure, maybe Ahruman can explain better, since he wrote the cache code.

If you want you can even check it yourself by doing this: Edit logcontrol.plist and change the line
$dataCacheDebug = no;
to
$dataCacheDebug = yes;
Run the game and hold down shift. You will rebuild the cache and in your log there will be information related to what Oolite was looking for while rebuilding it.

Hope this helps.

[JensAyton]

Essentially all plists are now cached, except logControl and keyConfig. Whether a change is picked up depends on how precisely you make the change. Specifically, Oolite looks for changes to the modification dates of any directory in its search paths, which includes the various AddOns folders and OXPs themselves. (The idea is that normal users should not be affected, but checking for changes should take as little time as possible. As it is, only OXP-makers should have cache-related problems.)

[Commander McLane]

Okay, thanks again for the clarification. I'll just take on the habit to press SHIFT every time I fire up the game while scripting. It's really hardly any disturbance at all.