Oolite Bulletins

I'm playing through assassins at the moment (wow - it's a lot harder than your average pirate!) and I've found a couple of possible bugs.

If you cloak when the super mambas attack then they just sit there. So you can just shoot, cool, shoot cool etc until they die. Or, if you're a bit impatient you can just drop a Q mine and they sit there and let it take them out in a blaze of glory

Second problem is similar except that I didn't even need to cloak and the Fer-de-Lance and escorts didn't move.

I can understand that if they're waiting to ambush you then maybe the Mambas wouldn't move but once they get shot a bit surely they should at leave try to evade?

Anyway, it's still an excellent OXP. I was just forced to do it without using the claking device to take advantage of the above.

I'm using 1.69.1 on a PC.

If you have an uber ship with a loads of energy banks and naval energy unit, it will recharge faster than your cloak discharges, so it gives you a bit of an unfair advantage, I tend not to use it unless in real danger a la Harry potter mode.
I thought LB had disabled the cloak in assassins though.

my energy drops slowly with the cloak on. So I'm just about able to do two full bursts from front and rear mil laser allowing them to cool inbetween.

The cloak is disabled when you're after a specific target (perhaps we need to invent a 'reason' for this - so that the guild can check with the Elite agency for the gun camera showing the target dying?) but the Mambas attack whenever you exit a station/witchspace for a while until you take out the next target. So they're not targets themselves, so the cloak still works.

I've never dug around in an AI script before but I guess they just have:
1) If can see user then attack

Thinking about it I guess the mamba AI just needs to add a few extra instructions.
2) if there's nothing going on then fly around aimlessly or in a regular pattern or something
3) if you're shot then do some sort of evasive pattern.

Glad your liking it! The Soin Sisters were one of the first AIs I wrote (your only about 5% into the OXP atm), so its a very simple one. If you look at your ship in external view whilst cloaked it flicker on and off. This doesn't fool a player, but the poor old AI constantly gets a stream of TARGET FOUND / TARGET LOST and just dithers between attacking, breaking off and attacking again. Later AIs I wrote give the ship secondary targets if the first one is lost. You can't use the cloak in missions (the Soin Clan are not a mission as such, more a pesky consequence ) So this should not usually be a problem.

The frozen ships is an occasional bug on 1.69.1 rather than somthing to do with the OXP. Occasionally an attacking ship goes to sleep and keeps fireing but dosen't move.

The reason for the non-functioning of the Cloak was given when you joined the guild. The Mark Transponder Scanner won't work when cloaked. The game won't award you a kill if you make it cloaked, so no record of your kill means no proof that the mark has met with an unfortunate accident.

You get a similar problem when trying to get a target lock on a renegade - it's cloaked so you get loads of target lost/found messages. maybe the targetting code needs a bit of tweaking so it can cope with cloaked things?

The stationary ships weren't firing, they were just sitting there. Maybe it's anothe manifestation of the 1.69.1 bug? Any way I can investigate this for you?

As someone who was entirely new to assassins I didn't quite understand the whole mark target scanner things from the text given. Perhaps a sentence or two explaining that a tagert is called a 'Mark' and that the assassins guild are VERY interested in knowing what happened so the cloak will be disabled. But that still doesn't explain why you can't use it to sneak up...

The renegades I also did and use a similar AI to the killplayerAI used by the Soin Clan. The ones I'm doing ATM for RandomHits are more advanced. Actually a quick tweek to the renegadeAI of TARGET LOST = "setAITo: pirateAI" would make the renegade behave like a normal pirate until you de-cloak. The problem with the Cloak is that it makes things too easy. As the later missions give out a lot of cash, allowing the player to use the cloak woul d have unbalanced the game and make the missions no fun to play. When you got the Cloak, you knew the ship was there even though it wasn't on the scanner as you could see its lasers and the ship visually. For NPCs however a cloaked ship does not exist and they'll take no action even if the ship is on their six blasting them to bits! Would be better maybe if cloaking just reduced the acuracy of NPC shots and their chances of noticing you if you are minding your own buisness.

"the mark" in slang is the victim of a proposed crime, particulaly a con trick, but can also apply to the victim of a hit. As in "You don't play your friends like marks kid!" (The Sting). So a Mark Transponder Scanner is a device that identifies the uniquie black box transponder aboad the victim's ship, confirming that the ship was destroyed without the launch of an escape pod. The energy needed to scan through the ship's shields to access information normally kept secret prevents cloaking whilst the device is active.

Hoopy wrote:

But that still doesn't explain why you can't use it to sneak up...

The Assassin's Guild maybe a bunch of rascally ships-for-hire, but they aren't cowards. Any pilot who needs a cloaking device to sneak up on their target should really be looking for a new line of work.

Captain Hesperus
...Seen by the Assassin's Guild as an Efficient Cleaner and presently defending himself against Esreatesian Triad Hit-ships.

@LittleBear: I agree with you about the cloaking device - it should just reduce the accuracy of the NPC shots. Then it would be fair/similar for both sides.

I've not seen The Sting, so it's my own fault

@Hesperus: Maybe the assassins introduction could phrase it like that? "Any coward that uses a cloaking device to kill their mark has no place in the guild. You'll find that the mark target scanner will disable your cloaking device to prevent you getting tempted to use it..."

IMHO, the Mark Transponder Scanner / Cloaking Device explanation that exists currently in the Assassins readme sounds quite a bit better, really.

i hadn't realised just how comprehensive the readme is!

As the player was warned when he joined the Guild, he will not be able to use a Cloaking Device
whilst within one light-year of a mark. Cloaking breaks the Mark Transponder lock. The Guild
must have proof from the Mark Transponder Scanner that a victim has been terminated!

Hoopy wrote:

i hadn't realised just how comprehensive the readme is!

Well, basically, that's why it says, it pleads, it begs, it screams "Read me!". What else shall it do on top of that to draw the attention of players???

Well, basically, that's why it says, it pleads, it begs, it screams "Read me!". What else shall it do on top of that to draw the attention of players???

Well....

I remember games that once in a while stopped and asked the player to get the manual, find page 26 and type in the 6th word of the 8 sentence of that page. That will make sure the player reads at least that part of the manual.

The readme is smidge long (and full of spoilers) to expect everyone to read it.

if chunks of it were extracted and renamed to 'assassins guild membership Terms and conditions' then it would fit in with the game and reading it would become part of playing the OXP