Cataclysm.oxp (1.1) now available

[Commander McLane]

proudly presenting...

Cataclysm v 1.1

Introduction

Things aren't looking too good at the Thargoid front. The Thargoids don't confine themselves to intercepting ships in witchspace anymore. Attacks on the space lanes, on main stations, even on planets themselves have become more frequent.

The Galactic Navy has tried to keep on par with the threat. The Behemoth and Leviathan class of capital ships—together with new and capable fighters—have been introduced, new and powerful anti Thargoid weapons have been developed, Navy Sector Commands are sending battle groups on the space lanes and in interstellar space.

But it seems the Thargoids are always one step ahead. The introduction of the Behemoths saw the advent of new classes of Thargoid Battleships, gigantic Thargoid Carriers have started threatening the GalCop worlds, and the Navy Frigates and their battle groups are now being countered by what seems to be a second wave of completely new Thargoid Ships, together with new and fearsome variants of Thargons.

A while ago the Navy had obtained and—with the help of a certain fearless space commander—securely delivered some secret defense plans of the Thargoid Hive Worlds, and Naval Intelligence was confident that these would give the troops the means for a push against the Thargoid home system. But what has come out of that? Nothing seems to have happened since, no news of a main strike against a Thargoid home world have made it to the public. Or did it all end in a disaster, and this new and unprecedentedly angry wave of Thargoid attacks on GalCop worlds was only triggered by a failed invasion attempt on their space? The Tionisla Chronicle does certainly not know.

But now we are on the very brink of new and important developments. The atmosphere is highly charged with anxiety and anticipation, and somehow it is going to discharge violently. Veteran spacefarers can sense a cataclysmic event at the horizon. The future of the Galactic Co-operative of Worlds is at stake. Something has to happen, ... and indeed something has happened.

It all starts when—after a particularly vicious wave of Thargoid attacks in the middle of Galaxy 1—a well known officer of Her Imperial Majesty's Space Navy contacts a certain fearless space commander, and asks for help. Captain Curruthers has made a rapid career and become Rear Admiral since the Constrictor incident, and he hasn't forgotten who got him out of the trouble with the stolen prototype. Nor have Captain Fortesque and Agent Blake—their unaltered ranks perhaps indicating that the Thargoid Plans plan didn't turn out as a huge success. But this new thing has all the prospect to become one...

Technical Overview

Cataclysm.oxp is a mission OXP that takes up the threads of the native Constrictor Hunt and Thargoid Plans missions, and sends you on a mission far bigger than anything you have done for the Navy so far. It gives you the opportunity to re-visit places you have visited before, and re-meet people you had contact with during these missions. And of course it will let you meet various other people, and lead you to a lot of new places, some of which you probably haven't visited before.

The mission starts in the middle of Galaxy 1, roughly in the area where the first part of the Constricor Hunt took place. After a ruthless Thargoid attack on a main station, during which you once again excelled in the defense force, it is time for Rear Admiral Curruthers to contact you with an important news. (If you don't excel, you won't be contacted unless you excel.) From there on you are in the service of Her Imperial Majesty's Space Navy again, and soon find yourself on a quest that will lead you through most parts of the known Ooniverse. What are you going to find in the end? Only %R knows!

The mission requires an able commander with an equally able ship. Therefore it is not suited for a beginner. Anyway, you will have to have finished both the Constrictor Hunt and the Thargoid Plans missions, and be in Galaxy 1 in order to get Cataclysm started, which means that you have to have cycled the eight galaxies at least once before you are offered this mission. So you will probably have been ☆ Deadly ☆ for quite a while before the events depicted here start to unfold. The OXP requires you to be 'twice deadly'—having at least 5120 kills—to get started. At the end of it you may well have come close to ★★★ E L I T E ★★★ ...

Minimum Requirements

Cataclysm.oxp requires at least Oolite 1.72.1.

The OXP doesn't require any other OXP for running; however your experience will get more varied, more exciting, and probably more difficult as well, if you play with some other OXPs installed (most of those mentioned in the introduction):

Thorgorn Threat and Second Wave will give you a greater variety of Thargoid ships involved in the action.

If you play with Thargoid Wars installed, the beginning of Cataclysm.oxp will blend naturally into the scenario you are used to from that OXP.

Behemoth and Military Fiasco will at some points add valuable reinforcements on your side.

Missiles and Bombs will give you a greater choice of weaponry.

Asteroid Storm will give you a greater variety in asteroid fields.

Galactic Navy will not be used in any specific way by this OXP, but may add to the atmosphere of being at war with the Thargoids. (Although there seems to be a strange bug in Oolite 1.72.1 that may lead to ships from Cataclysm not being created when Galactic Navy is installed as well.)

Thargoidcarrier will also not interact specificly with this OXP, but may add to the atmosphere as well.

PAGroove_Stations will give you many more stations that look like the added stations in this OXP, thereby unifying the design.

System Redux will just enhance the scenery. (If you usually play with System Redux, you will perhaps notice changes in a couple of systems. This is because the additional planets and moons have been partially disabled by this OXP, in order to prevent possible location clashes.)

Known Problems

Due to a not-yet-fully-understood bug in either Oolite or some OXPs there are some OXPs that will prevent other scripts from creating additional ships with role 'police'. Cataclysm wants to create a couple of those ships at one point in the story. However, the police ships are not a story necessity. The two OXPs that cause this behaviour on my own system are Commies and Galactic Navy. I hope the developers find and eliminate the problem.

Download Location

This OXP is available for download through the Elite Wiki.

Installation

Move or copy the file Cataclysm.oxp from the main folder to the AddOns folder inside the Oolite main folder. Restart Oolite.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Griff for his willingness to allow me to use his model of a burning station, and other models as well. As always, all his models improve the look and feel of this OXP substantially. Also thanks to another_commander for his very encouraging feedback after looking at a halfway ready preview version of Cataclysm. Of course thanks to Eric Walch for some invaluable help in the early stages of the JS-scripting of this OXP, and for the very enlightening exchange of ideas time and again. And—last but not least—my thanks go to Aegidian, Ahruman, and the development commOonity of Oolite, the people who are making OXPs like this possible in the first place.

[another_commander]

Oh boy, it's finally out. Time to readjust the coding / playing ratio methinks.
Downloads ++

[Commander McLane]

I hope it's as much fun as you anticipated.

[Lestradae]

Very much looking forwards to doing those missions, but not reached the nescessary battlerank ("just" at Deadly (~3000)) ... yet.

[another_commander]

Ehm, I am getting these when I startup Oolite with Cataclysm 1.0 inserted:

Code: Select all

(oolite.app/Resources, AddOns, AddOns/behemoth.oxp, AddOns/Cataclysm.oxp, AddOns/Debug.oxp, AddOns/griff_boa.oxp)
[dataCache.rebuild.explicitFlush]: Cache explicitly flushed with shift key. Rebuilding from scratch.
[shipData.load.begin]: Loading ship data...
  [shipData.merge.failed]: ***** ERROR: one or more shipdata.plist entries have like_ship references that cannot be resolved: 
  [shipData.load.error]: ***** ERROR: the shipdata.plist entry "cataclysm-military-hydraspike" specifies no roles.

If I enter myself a role in the cataclysm-military-hydraspike shipdata, like

Code: Select all

<key>roles</key>
<string>cataclysm-military-hydraspike</string>

or declare it as subentity using

Code: Select all

<key>_oo_is_subentity</key>
<true/>

then the message becomes

Code: Select all

(oolite.app/Resources, AddOns, AddOns/behemoth.oxp, AddOns/Cataclysm.oxp, AddOns/Debug.oxp, AddOns/griff_boa.oxp)
[dataCache.rebuild.explicitFlush]: Cache explicitly flushed with shift key. Rebuilding from scratch.
[shipData.load.begin]: Loading ship data...
  [shipData.merge.failed]: ***** ERROR: one or more shipdata.plist entries have like_ship references that cannot be resolved: 
  [shipData.load.error]: ***** ERROR: the shipdata.plist entry "cataclysm-military-hydraspike" specifies non-existent model "mil-hydraspike.dat".

Bottom line: A required model is missing.

[JensAyton]

or declare it as subentity using

Code: Select all

<key>_oo_is_subentity</key>
<true/>

Shh, that one’s a secret! (It’s supposed to be inserted automatically for all subentities.)

Edit: oh, and the line “ERROR: one or more shipdata.plist entries have like_ship references that cannot be resolved:” should continue “cataclysm-military-hydra, cataclysm-military-rattlecutter”. The hydra-spike doesn’t get the sekrit _oo_is_subentity attribute because there’s nothing using it as a subentity once cataclysm-military-hydra is removed… although the subentity test should probably happen before the like_ships test to avoid that confusion.

With appropriate rearranging, the highly accurate error messages are:

Code: Select all

[shipData.load.begin]: Loading ship data...
  [shipData.merge.failed]: ***** ERROR: one or more shipdata.plist entries have like_ship references that cannot be resolved: cataclysm-military-hydra, cataclysm-military-rattlecutter
  [shipData.load.error]: ***** ERROR: the shipdata.plist entry "cataclysm-military-hydraspike" specifies non-existent model "mil-hydraspike.dat".

[another_commander]

Thanks for correcting that Ahruman, I don't know how I missed the entire error messages earlier. Indeed, the two missing military ships are the origin of the problem.

[JensAyton]

I’m a tad concerned about the names not showing up under Windows.

[another_commander]

The names of the missing ships come up fine in the trunk version logs, but something seems to be wrong in 1.72.1 with regards to this.
Edit: Slight omission in the 1.72.1 code was the cause of the missing ships not reported. Fixed.

[JensAyton]

Gosh, that was a silly bug. :-)

[Eric Walch]

Before people get afraid of this version of the oxp by all those bug reports: They are onle generated because there is currently a dependency with Military Fiasco. Have you that oxp also installed, playing will be save with this first version.

[wackyman465]

Looks SWEET!

[Lestradae]

Before people get afraid of this version of the oxp by all those bug reports: They are onle generated because there is currently a dependency with Military Fiasco.

Perhaps it makes sense to simply state up front that this oxp is dependent on military fiasco oxp then, problem solved.

[Commander McLane]

Is there a way of suppressing the error message from within the oxp?

My basic idea was: There are a couple of ships with role cataclysm_military. Three of them I copied from other OXPs, with all the files needed. But the other two are optional, and will only show with Military Fiasco present. So at the point where the Cataclysm military ships are used, the engine will either choose from a set of three or five different ships.

That's why I wrote in the documentation:

Behemoth and Military Fiasco will at some points add valuable reinforcements on your side.

(Which is indeed not very clear, I have to concede.)

What I didn't think about is the confusion the resulting error-messages are going to cause.

If there is no way I can take away the confusion by suppressing the error-message, perhaps it might by the most simple thing to trash my original idea and include the required models and entries anyway.

[JensAyton]

Is there a way of suppressing the error message from within the oxp?

My basic idea was: There are a couple of ships with role cataclysm_military. Three of them I copied from other OXPs, with all the files needed. But the other two are optional, and will only show with Military Fiasco present.

Why yes, that’s exactly what is_external_dependency is for. However, there is a bug such that the “nonexistent model” error occurs even with is_external_dependency.