Oolite Bulletins

As I seem to be having a release-kick at the moment, allow me to introduce the third of the current trio of new OXPs, Energy Equipment v1.00. I promise this will be the last for a little while! Ok, maybe it will

As you can probably guess, it introduces two new bits of equipment relating to the players energy reserves:

• The Emergency Charge Device (ECD) - a pylon-based item which when triggered transfers an energy top-up to the ships systems (think of it as a fuel tank for energy, as that's where the idea came from).
• The Emergency Energy Unit (EEU) - a variant on the ECD, directly fitted to the ships systems and triggered automatically when energy levels get critical.

Both are single-shot items that are destroyed on activation, and neither increase the maximum energy storage capacities of the ship (any excess energy is dissipated).

Lastly but not leastly, they can be downloaded here. I've tested both and they seem to work as intended, but of course any errors please let me know.

Oh, and a nod to Frame for the loan of the script from his bounty IFF add-on, modified for the EEU.[/color]

Methinks we'll have to come up with a way to fit all this new equipment currently in production to the F5 screen. Won't be long before the items list starts spilling over the hud...

another_commander wrote:

Methinks we'll have to come up with a way to fit all this new equipment currently in production to the F5 screen. Won't be long before the items list starts spilling over the hud...

Mine already is. If I add any more kit I think it's going to be scrolling over my feet.

Thargoid wrote:

Mine already is. If I add any more kit I think it's going to be scrolling over my feet.

Don't you have a second monitor attached for that list?

another_commander wrote:

Methinks we'll have to come up with a way to fit all this new equipment currently in production to the F5 screen. Won't be long before the items list starts spilling over the hud...

Could the same system not be used as in the shipyard, when there are too many ships to display on one screen? Obviously it means a bit of guddling in the program itself, but in my head it would seem easy to do.*




*This, of course, is how disasters begin to happen...

Hi Thargoid,

I am posting this in a random thread of yours, because it concerns all your OXPs.

Please forgive me for repeating all over again a very old speech of mine: I just downloaded your OXPs and notice the packaging problem. You have put your readMe's in your OXPs. This is a bad idea, because it means virtually nobody who is using a Mac will ever even know that there is a readMe. (Not that many people actually read readMe's, but you never know...)

Why is this so? Because of the way the Mac OS handles OXPs. On your PC (or Linux-puter) OXPs look like ordinary folders. So you can open them, see the different sub-folders within (like Config, AIs, Models, Textures, etc.), and even readMe's and whatever documentation an OXPer chooses to give out with his OXP. Everything seems fine.

Not so in OS X. Here an OXP is a package. It looks like a single file (like for instance the Oolite-application itself), and it has a special icon. You have to be an advanced user to even get to the idea that you could open it. (If you simply double-click, it will not open, instead Oolite will launch.) So you have to use a trick to even look inside. Which means that only very few end-users will ever look inside. So they will get old and die without even knowing that you had written a readMe with some explanations about your OXP.

So what to do? Never ever include anything you want to be noticed by your users in the OXP-folder itself. Instead create a mother-folder around your OXP-folder. Put your documentation in that mother folder, along with your OXP-folder. Now you are on the safe side. (So yes, there is a reason why you have downloaded many OXPs which are packed exactly in this way.)

Thank you very much.

Thanks, although now you overdid it a little.

That I repeatedly mentioned the folder-vs-package issue was not supposed to mean that you should wrap your OXP in two mother- (and grandmother?) folders. It's now becoming something like a russian doll.

Don't know how brief the window was. I downloaded just 15 minutes ago. Although the answer could be that for the Energy Equipment OXP I used the direct download link from your post, probably the new version has another direkt link?

Anyway, it wasn't harmful. I was just a little amused and threw away the outermost folder.

Double wrapped for extra freshness - sounds like a marketing ploy/slogan!