Oolite Bulletins

i'd like to be able to purchase multiple ships and put them in storage. so i'd only be flying one at a time, but i could switch between outfitted ships as i liked. =D feedback?

Hi nijineko,
I had a chat about the subject a while back, and now I've just put my Supercobra in storage at Envebe.
It involves a bit of "outside the software" role-playing:
1. I made a backup copy of my save file.
2. I traded in the Supercobra for an L-Crate, and kept a note of the date, and how much trade-in I got for the Supercobra.
3. I edited my credits in the save file to be what I'd have if I hadn't sold my ship.
4. Some time I'll work out a storage price per day for my ship (any suggestions) and, when I pick up my Supercobra again, I'll sell the l-crate and minus the storage charge and adjust any other changes in the old backed up save file.

A little complicated, but it works for me. The downside is that missions and kills etc will require quite a bit of save file editing when you retrieve your ship.
I'm just out to earn lots of cash as a delivery driver, then hopefully find a Tiger somewhere. But I'm hanging on to the SuperCobra in case I never find one. If I do, I guess I can go back to Envebe and sell it to the garage, via a bit more save file editing.

*cat

Well, this is quite a complicated process, and certainly not for scripting-unexperienced players.

The real answer is (and as this is another quite frequently discussed request I'm going to add this to the FAQ), that for the game the player is his ship. There is no way of distinguishing between player and ship. So for one player there is one ship. Period.

Changing this would require major rewriting of the whole game and is therefore unlikely.

I am a scripting-unexperienced player, so what I say may be so much nonsense, but it seems that all that needs to be done is to keep a record of what your old ship was, and to sell you that ship for free when you go back to pick it up. The question is whether that information can be stored in the save file (probably not), and whether such shipyard-related things can be modified by scripts (probably not).

hmmm, yeah, i can see that adding in a change to how save files are read would be a fairly major rewrite.

nijineko wrote:

i'd like to be able to purchase multiple ships and put them in storage. so i'd only be flying one at a time, but i could switch between outfitted ships as i liked. =D feedback?

I think this would be a great thing. And I really don't think that it would require a rewrite of the entire game to be able to store an extra ship configuration in the save file and be able to script retrieval of that information.

It would open up some nice possibilities for racing OXPs - and for the Sidewinder Commander OXP, which mainly stranded on not being able to script exchange of different ships and configuration or store the player ship.

i wonder... now that i think of it, a garage could be a place that you purchase that is like a special store where the only ships that are in there are the ones that are "sold" into it. with the price set at either 0, or some storage fee. (preferably a flat fee... ^^) then when you go to the garage, you can either sell another ship into it or exchange a ship, just like a ship purchase screen. hmmm, in order to simplify the whole process assume that a garage comes with a "maintence drone" say a 10-10-30, or some other really cheap ship. that way the whole "player as ship" idea can be preserved. that way you can store your ship, go right back to the store, and then purchase another ship. i guess for the sake of continuity, one could start with two drones so that there is always at least one drone in the garage.

the last question would be where. lave might be a good place. since almost all store purchasing options are not mobile, it would seem logical that the garage would have to be as well. maybe. that or we could have a transportation fee, plus a time offset for the ship to be brought from it's location to your current location. and the other ship put back. could account for some of the larger cargos, i guess. ^^

we could use the '4' key, as that's not used for anything else.

That's an interesting idea. I wonder if someone could craft a mission/station OXP that fits the bill. Would that work within the existing framework? And if I'm thinking of this, I bet someone else has as well. Feel free to crush my hopes and dreams with the hard cold truth of reality...



EDIT: just realized that you would need a way to get a new ship to/from this "garage" station. Does it have a stock of ships? If so, does the stock rotate? How do we keep the "stored" ship at a cost of 0 if other ships are being traded in or bought and sold? I guess I need to do some digging... New language/environment, here I come.

It has to be a hollowed out asteroid - preferably with a bored sentient AI.

perhaps it could be a mobile version of a rock hermit, but it specializes in storing ships instead of other stuff. perhaps what it could be is a mobile ship shop. with the added feature of "garaging" your ships.

the problem comes in with trying to garage your ship leaving you without a ship, due to the player-as-ship issue. perhaps the garage could have a special ship that costs 0 to buy or sell. when you "sell" your ship into the garage, you are charged the storage fee, and moved to the 'temp' ship. the temp ship cannot launch from the garage, so the player will have to pick a valid ship, either one from the shop, or one from the garage.

this should take care of the player-as-ship issue. when you store a ship in the garage, you receive a new item, a 'garage key'. you activate it and after a certain amount of time a carrier ship arrives with your garaged ships. you are charged a retrival fee upon docking with the ship, covering cost of fuel and insurance. i imagine that it would not function in a witchspace bubble, aka malfunctioned jump.

• so i'm proposing a mobile ship of some type, maybe a variation of a rock hermit.
  
  when you dock, it only gives you the option of the garage and the ship/weapon/item store. probably more expensive than average.
  
  you can't leave the garage unless you are in a valid ship.
  
  a temp ship is issued to you to enable you to garage a ship and then shop from the selection of ships-but this ship cannot leave the garage.
  
  a storage fee is charged. if you garage a ship, you are issued a garage key.
  
  this key can summon the garage, after a suitable time lag.
  
  you are charged a retrival fee upon docking with the garage (to cover the cost of fuel and insurance and whatnot).
  
  if the garage is attacked it will warp out.

hows this sounding so far? oh. and it just has to be called "uncle albert's ship and weapon shop". ;D

Don't forget: the main part of that has to be achieved by hacking the code. There is no way of doing it in a script (= via an OXP).

E.g. we have no possibility at all to influence the shipyard of a station by an OXP. Also we cannot disable the 1-key for launching whenever the player wants.

Just to mention very few of the problems...

ah, that is all very good to know. =D

Commander McLane wrote:

E.g. we have no possibility at all to influence the shipyard of a station by an OXP. Also we cannot disable the 1-key for launching whenever the player wants.

Give them a rickshaw or something then?

Commander McLane wrote:

Don't forget: the main part of that has to be achieved by hacking the code. There is no way of doing it in a script (= via an OXP).

E.g. we have no possibility at all to influence the shipyard of a station by an OXP. Also we cannot disable the 1-key for launching whenever the player wants.

Just to mention very few of the problems...

Want to add another: We cannot define new keystrokes (for "summoning the garage").

And there is another one:

Capt. James Maladorn wrote:

Give them a rickshaw or something then?

We cannot "give" the player a ship. The player is his ship, the one that he has bought.

One way of hacking a garage would be to somehow get the shipyard to do most of the stuff.

Need to be able to:
-make possible to not trade-in owned ship, instead save properties to a file.
-Force offering of specific ships by script.
-dynamically define player's ship(s) that are offered.
-Incrementally increase cost of ship (swap) according to 'time stored' * 'shipvalue/size'.

Some problems are:
-we cannot influence shipyard by script.
-dynamic shipdata is not possible except for player-entity ship.
-I do not understand java-script. or C++. Thankfully, I am not the one coding oolite.