Oolite Bulletins

Taxi Galactica Corporation

History:
The Taxi Galactica Corporation was founded in the late 2800's by Rufus Skywelder, a reputable businessman from Isinor. He envisioned a network of ships ferrying people around the Galactic Co-Operative of Planets, and making a tidy profit from every single passenger. By 2943 the Skywelder family had expanded their business to cover five of the eight galaxies, and by the end of the century they had a Taxi Station in every system that was ruled as a Confederacy, Democracy or Corporation (this was due to licensing agreements and safety issues).



Recruiting:
Occasionally, the Taxi Galactica Corporation will ask those pilots who have a good-standing reputation in the field of passenger transportation to work part-time for them. Those pilots with a good enough reputation should visit their local Taxi Station and apply today!

Download
Taxi_Galactica_Teaser.zip - Version 0.2 Teaser Release
Taxi_Galactica_Teaser_Patch_v0.201 - Version 0.201 AI-Fix Patch



Notes:
EDIT: You can now fly a single mission, which is a joint mission between GalNav and Taxi Galactica. You must have a Clean legal status and a score of 128+. Dock at the Leesti Taxi Station to begin this mission. The Taxi Station is a retexture of the Pi-42 Stations from the YOUR AD HERE! OXP and the Rebel Frigate is a retexture of the Navy Frigate by matt634 from the Galactic Navy OXP.
EDIT: Added update patch to fix error in AI that kept producing the same messages every time you shoot at a Rebel ship.

Brilliant - and nice to see the original Pi-42 being used so much (standard issue space entity!) - retexturing is all I did for my Tescoo Oxpress (as seen in YAH). and the oxp is a great idea - since there's such a debate at the mo' about the validity of passenger contracts.

Is it in any way related to the Frog Space Rickshaw?

And if not, could it be? Just a suggestion.

Sort of...there are lot's of different transport organizations in the ooniverse I would have thought, this is one of the larger ones. At the moment I've scripted that the Taxi Stations (really needs renaming) appear in all Confederacy, Democracy and Corporation systems, but as this is an awful lot of systems to cover, expecially from a scipters point of view, so I am going to need to play around with the story line a slight bit and limit the systems I place these in.

Basically, I've started to script the Taxi Station's menu now, but I'm trying to do it in Legacy first, purely because its taken me long enough to get to grips with Legacy (since March!) just to get this far - but it's a learning curve. Not saying I don't want this to be a fantastic, brilliant OXP because to admit defeat this early would be pretty stupid, I'm just saying I'm new at all of this so be patient whilst I figure it all out.

But as for missions, I was thinking of (and this is of course why I need to learn JS!) making your reputation for tranporting passengers on the stock-scripted side of the game a requirement for starting to work for this (or another? ) taxi company. Just have a random selected destination and price accordingly (I know this is possible because of the Galactic Navy - my favourite - and the UPS Courier OXPs). Well I know the random destinations bit is, I'll figure out the pricing thing - can't be that hard?

So, I think what I really would like to know is what anyone else thinks? If anyone has any suggestions I'd be most honoured to hear them and if anyone thinks I'm being a fool is most welcome to say so as well, lol.

pleb87 wrote:

(really needs renaming)

take a pick

http://wordnavigator.com/contains/taxi/

some history of the word

http://podictionary.com/?p=805

Galactica Fare for example.., however i would pick Star Fare...
since fare is the french word for taxi as explained in the article..

or Outworlds Fare.. something like that,

pleb87 wrote:

But as for missions, I was thinking of (and this is of course why I need to learn JS!) ....Just have a random selected destination and price accordingly (I know this is possible because of the Galactic Navy - my favourite - and the UPS Courier OXPs). ....

In UPS I use a very complex way to get the name of random destinations. Only until 1.71 it became possible to also get a name of such a system with a single command. For this command you will need JS. (It returns a system-name for a random number, or returns a system number when you have a system name)

Pricing is a bit more harder because you don't have a hint about distances between the systems. Internally there are functions to calculate these distances of course. Maybe you should make it a scripting request now to have a function that returns a sort of normalised distance between two systems. The internal one is probably much to complex and still gives partly wrong results. It assumes you always make the largest possible jumps: In Oolite time it is faster to do a jump in between when possible.

Nice ideas here! Maybe some passengers could be unpopular for some reason (spys, criminals, enemies of the Galatic Mob etc) and you might get into trouble with the law or attacked by their enemies (random chance perhaps - higher with higer paying jobs)? You could use mission variables to measure repuation. Player starts as a noobie taxi pilot and has gets points for completing jobs (maybe more points for a speedy delivery of the passenger but less if he takes his time and maybe none and an angry 'fare' refusing to pay if he takes ages). More points opens up better paid or more interesting jobs? If you want to have a look at the Random Hits descriptions.plist and script.plist (legacy) that may be of use for randomisng mission descriptions and destinations.

T.A.X.I. = Transporting Anywhere Xeno-friendly Institution?

How about spacecabs, starcabs, stellarcabs etc

Cabstar

Ooniversal Cabs

Coobs.

Galaxicabs.

Selezen wrote:

Galaxicabs.

Oo-Cabs?

The Yellow Adder Cab Co.?

Captain Hesperus

Thanks for all the input people! Really good to know I haven't come up with an idea no one cares about, lol. I've made a small update to the teaser, and I've updated the top post accordingly.

You can now fly a single mission, which is a joint mission between GalNav and Taxi Galactica. You must have a Clean legal status and a score of 128+. Dock at the Leesti Taxi Station to begin this mission.

This mission was written in Legacy and didn't take very long to write. It just adds a bit more content to the Teaser OXP and also gives a small glimpse of another OXP I made for my own enjoyment and one I might polish up and release one day (if I can get matt634's permision!)...

EDIT: Added update patch to fix error in AI that kept producing the same messages every time you shoot at a Rebel ship.