Oolite Bulletins

I want to have a fiddle with "Ra" - Galaxy 1 planet 72.

I want to add a small moon for which I now have my own texture.

I want to put a con-store "in orbit" around the con-store (I've got my own texture for this version of the con-store)

I want to put a specific ship next to the con-store that does nothing unless its attacked in which case it does its best to run away (this ship is going to be another re-texture of a ship already available)

I want to put my own "Your Ad here" tetraboard at the witchpoint (to which I want to add my own advert specific to this system) and another to replace the mainstation nav buoy with the same.

The problem is that I don't understand the numbers in the planetinfo plist and although I've gone over the wiki as best I can I still don't get it - nor do I understand the placement using the pwm or other co-ordinates. And there is a lot of threads that seem to gleam some of what I think I need but not all of it and I run out of time to search more thoroughly!

I seem to spend my whole time looking and not doing and then RL steps in again and another window of opportunity closes. It's quite depressing.

Considering what amazing oxps everybody else is knocking out I'm quite ashamed but hey ho...

Any help much appreciated.

DH

Welcome to the confusion about the planet numbers. As you may know a planet with for example number 40 is actually 39 in the planetlist. So you have to distract a number from it. But it's very confusing.

You may learn something from the discussion between me and Capt Kev in the famous planets tread. Capt Kev helped me a LOT. He seems to be the specialist on the planets. I'm only good at texturing

It should be nice when a good coder wrote a little program to put simple things into systems, namely a system editor so that anyone could put his stuff in a system like textures, stations, planets and objects.

pagroove wrote:

Welcome to the confusion about the planet numbers. As you may know a planet with for example number 40 is actually 39 in the planetlist. So you have to distract a number from it. But it's very confusing.

The fact about all arrays in coding is that they start with 0, so 0 is the first element of any array. You will notice this is true for all arrays in javascripting. for example if you make a list of 5 ships the first ship of that list is ship[0] and the last is ship[4]. But it is up to the programmer to use array element[0] for anything.. but i suspect java-scripting, or infact i would claim i know, uses common pratice and throw the first element into [0]

regarding the planets...

In the grand old days and also today, but of more significance then, then maximum value a byte can hold is 255 or HEX #FF..

ofcourse David Braben and Ian Bell made the most use of the limited memory of the machines back then, as did everybody.. and used 0 for something so that for each byte they would get an extra value.. instead of just treating 0 like 0.. they would treat 0 as 1. to get an even larger number they would use two bytes

byte1*256+byte2 = maximum value of 65536 and interesting enough thats 64 k. which is the maximum address an 8 bit machine like the c64 could use...

why 256,because 255 is the maximum value a byte can hold... but remember we use 0. just like with the Arrays.

So everything in coding is optimized towards memory and speed.. allways keep that in mind..

As a side note Classic Elite as with Oolite could theoretical support 256by256 galaxies.. but that was just a ridicouless number of galaxies, so they reduced it to 8.

@DaddyHoggy, Fly to the position where you would like to place the moon/station then press Shift-F, this should display the coordinates in pwm format to use in your planetinfo.plist.

Hope this helps and good luck with the OXP.

Cheers CaptKev - a very neat and succinct reply!

Frame wrote:

pagroove wrote:

Welcome to the confusion about the planet numbers. As you may know a planet with for example number 40 is actually 39 in the planetlist. So you have to distract a number from it. But it's very confusing.

I added a version of the planet lists at
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_planet_list

where I used the # symbol to indicate counting from zero (oh the joys of C vs Fortran etc. )

As a side note Classic Elite as with Oolite could theoretical support 256by256 galaxies.. but that was just a ridicouless number of galaxies, so they reduced it to 8.

Not quite, the 'Universe in a Bottle' chapter (see off-world topics) has this nice quote

Obviously, Bell and Braben couldn't have an infinity of other galaxies. That would just be silly. But they could, they agreed, have a coolly huge number of galaxies, as they explained to Acorn, showing off the feature. In fact, they said, they planned to have... 2 to the power of 48 of them, approximately 282,000,000,000,000 - two hundred and eighty-two million million galaxies. It was one of the few moments when Acornsoft put its foot down.

Acornsoft could see that having 282,000,000,000,000 galaxies would rub the player's nose in the artificiality of what they were enjoying. A number that gigantic made it inescapably clear that some sort of mathematical concoction was involved. And it exposed the underlying sameness of all the star systems, generated as they were from only a handful of varying qualities. The pink volcanoes would come round again and again. It would be better to be more modest. Somewhere between the unimpressed response to a small game universe and the disbelieving response to a ridiculously large one lay a zone of awe. That was where they should be aiming, and eight galaxies containing 256 stars each seemed like a reasonable guess at its whereabouts.

and it is true, Oolite could still do this if anyone was insane enough. The seed for a whole galaxy is six bytes (look in your save file) hence (2^16)^3; although most would be uninteresting if too far away from 'prime-ish' numbers. Galaxy 4 is an example of the limitation of Elite's seed generator, no Corporate States etc, but it also adds fun to the game.

@Dr Beeb

Very neat! And that it is now on the Wiki