Oolite Bulletins

I've just finished military fiasco which was great fun! could i make a couple of suggestions?

I think it needs a bit more feedback as to how you're doing. So perhaps a message on screen every time you kill one of the stolen ship designs. Also the stolen leviathan was not differentiated from legal leviathans. In the end I just killled everyone I saw until I got a nice message when i docked. Could it have a different name or perhaps appear as red in the scanner?

Anyway, great fun

Hoopy wrote:

I've just finished military fiasco which was great fun! could i make a couple of suggestions?

.... Also the stolen leviathan was not differentiated from legal leviathans. In the end I just killled everyone I saw until I got a nice message when i docked. Could it have a different name or perhaps appear as red in the scanner?

It has one very big difference: it is programmed to attack the player. So you know when it is the right one.

But I agree that it takes some time and one could get desperate when still not seeing anything of the ship. There are however messages after 1, 8 and 19 kills of the pirate ships. But when I remember well, I also missed some feedback. And it still has a famous bug that when a player launches from within an offering screen without having made it's choice, it will stop offering any choices in future. It's a bug that is in many OXP's because they use the mission variable itself to make the offer.

i have 4 military lasers and a leviathan doesn't move very quickly so i killed it in the time it takes to overheat four lasers. I didn't notice any difference between a friendly one and the stolen one. It was a fairly unpleasant system so it may just be that the half dozen other ships hanging about made it hard to notice that it was attacking...

By the way: You don't have really "finished" it. The mission-part is over, but the stolen ships will keep turning up. (My own personal current killcount for them is 59.)

As for distinguishing between the stolen Leviathan and the legal ones, I would suggest giving the stolen one the scanClass of a civil ship, like with the other stolen ships. In the current shipdata it has scanClass CLASS_MILITARY, unlike the pirate Hydras, Basilisks etc.

good stuff - I'm on 36 at the moment i think

I'd better put the OXP back then! (I move out completed missions in an attempt to stop them slowing things down)

I think that's a good idea.

Hoopy wrote:

good stuff - I'm on 36 at the moment i think

I'd better put the OXP back then! (I move out completed missions in an attempt to stop them slowing things down)

When you are using version 2.1 than it is rewritten to do less calculations after mission ending. But I looked at it yesterday and I do some additional changes to it. Putting it in JS will be one evening work I think.

cool. Is there some sort of debug mode that could generate a report of how long was spent in each OXP? It would enable the community to see which OXPs are most in need of optimising.

Hoopy wrote:

cool. Is there some sort of debug mode that could generate a report of how long was spent in each OXP? It would enable the community to see which OXPs are most in need of optimising.

Not at the moment.

i bet you really want something to add to the to do list as well...

I took it on me to do some improvements on Military Fiasco of Murgh. In the last update I only changed the behaviour of the military Leviathan an his escorts. I restructured the code so that it wasn't so active anymore after mission ending.

I missed only a bug were launching from within a offering screen blocked all future offers. That I now corrected. I don't want to change the behaviour of other OXP's. That it takes so long before you spot the target could be on purpose so the player gets desperate and starts to attack the friendly Leviathans. Also the strength could be so low that starters can do the mission also. e.g. the pirate-leviathan has 12 defenseships on board but will only launch 2 or 3 during an attack I think.

I translated it in JS and it is working now. In this version I will do some additions to the original. One is that I added a small change it restarts after ending a mission by doing a new offer of yet an stolen ship. (the messages will remain the same but I added nr shipkills to it) In this second round I will make the ships a little more tougher.

I am currently bouncing around galaxy 2 in the region of zaria.
Have been tasked with "hunting down stolen navy ships" and finding the "missing leviathon".

Have various oxps' installed and have now got into a bad habit of blowing the daylights out of every leviathon i see.
Usually dropping out of witch to a navy sector base, there is one parked with various escorts - a quick salvo from front and rear military lasers and then a quick snap of the energy bomb see's both the leviathon and any other colleagues off nicely.

does NOTHING for my legal status !!!!

Where can i find the ship in question ? plus some fun with any other stolens ships of smaller scale ? (I think I have had 2)

Any tips on this would be really nice ) The mission seems to be taking me nowhere ( i like guidance of "fly here and blow this up")

Jason Whitelock wrote:

...does NOTHING for my legal status !!!!

Where can i find the ship in question ? plus some fun with any other stolens ships of smaller scale ? (I think I have had 2)

Any tips on this would be really nice ) The mission seems to be taking me nowhere ( i like guidance of "fly here and blow this up")

A joke from the original author? The ship is not there but only comes after you killed enough of the "stolen ships".

You will get messages on progress after killing certain amounts of "stolen ships". The real Leviathan target will come after you when you meet him. The ones you see now are the regular ones. The only reason you stay clean is that they are not police, but military ships. (They have the same colour on your scanner) With military ships you only become offender when a police sees you attacking him. And military ships refuge to cry for help like traders do.

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I just oploaded a new version of Military Fiasco: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Military_Fiasco

Version 2.2 Additions by Eric Walch:

1) Translated the script into JavaScript. On Oolite 1.65 or older the old scripting will be used. On version 1.70 and newer the JS scripting will be used. It will not run on the intermediate test versions 1.68 or 1.69 because they use an to incomplete implementation of the JS commands.

2) Added a progress message that pop's up occasionally to confirm to the player that the script is still doing something.

3) With the JavaScript version only, the mission will restart sometimes after completion. You will have the choice to accept or reject the restart of the mission.

Fit military lasers to all 4 ports then you can just shoot the leviathan. It doesn't move much so using the yaw controls means to can blast it from each port which will just kill it. Your legal status will suffer less as you don't kill all the Vipers etc surrounding it.

This trick also works on Thargon carriers.

There was a bug in my 2.2 version of Military Fiasco. It did work on my computer, but the first initialisation of the new progress variable had a bug. It now works as before but is not printing the newly added progress messages.

I today replaced it with version 2.2.1. Now you really get after about every 5 or more kills of the target-ships an extra message to go on. (when there was no regular message on that docking). It used to take sometimes up to 11 kills until a next regular message was shown. This bothered a lot of players who thought the game itself was doing bad and were desperately looking for the bad Leviathan.

The progress messages even will come after completion but than the ships appear significant less frequent.

Download page: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Military_Fiasco

I just happened to get the military fiasco mission today (!), then upgraded to your new version 2.2.1. Now my missiontext on page 5 has disappeared.



Is that supposed to happen, a bug, or is it just not possible to upgrade while running the mission?

Curious,

L

Edit: Reinstalled the previous versions of Murgh`s ships (I hope its the right one) and the older Military Fiasco 2.1.

My mission text has reappeared.

Can I rest assured that my mission isn`t broken now?