Oolite Bulletins

AHHHHH!
Was a fugitive, entered system in G8, after a couple seconds at witchpoint came under heavy fire - green laser fire and plasma cannons. Thargoids? Nope. The only stuff on my scanner was a bunch of white hockey sticks and a few yellow traders - nothing hostile. Status light was red, though. Shields groaning at 0%, I turned to see what was shooting at me. I just saw a point where 4 laser beams emanated from - cloaked ship? Nope. Those white sticks were ..... QRBS! Missiles, lasers, and plasma came from these nasty ships. I tried to get a line of laser fire on them, but they must have been moving >1 ls! Seriously, these things were faster than an Interstellar Explorer on injectors! And they had maneuverability, too! I checked my ASC for an Orb Base in the last few seconds that my commander had to live, but - nope. No clue. MUCH worse than those regular bounty hunters you get under Anarchies - which I can usually kill in ~30 seconds, as long as my laser stays cool, but these killed my IC in about that much time!

Which Oolite version are you on?

I had Orbs in once, but they haven't worked on my system for ages ... is there a new version?

As far as I’m aware, there has never been a version of Orbs that works with any version of Oolite. How it fails to work varies. :-)

It actually did sort of work on my system under 1.65 ... the ships and "stations" appeared, there was this nice oxygen music, and they used to have huge battles with the thargoids.

I quite liked it, but after 1.65 it just wouldn't do anything at all on my system

Sort of working is not working; its failures under 1.65 are just more subtle.

I'm running 1.72 oolite and an unknown vers. of orb. It sort of works, although on my older computer it really gave me a lousy frame rate and preformance.
How would it go wrong? I don't know of any issues with it asides from huge numbers of white hockey sticks spawning near OrbBases.

What? No pity for my cruel assassination?

No offence to Charlie, he's a clever OXPer.

Most of Charlie's ships attempt to make oolite go beyond it's design limits, which usually resulted in oolite crashing hard on me. I wound up deleting Charlie's OXPs because of that.

While the Orb.oxp manages to do the easy things (spawning different Orbs), it completely fails with the more complicated things. Especially it fails to make the Orb behave as Charlie wanted and explicitely scripted, because the (clever and sophisticated as they are) methods and means employed by the script simply don't work.

One example for this: Charlie wanted to have different Orb ships interacting with each other in a specific way by making them escorts of other Orb ships, and escorts of those escorts, and so on (cascading escorts, as tried by other scripters as well). This approach is (1) extremely buggy because of the various bugs in escort behaviour in various versions of Oolite and (2) completely unviable, because escorts cannot have escorts themselves in the first place. So you will never ever meet a formation of Orb ships as Charlie planned.

You would probably never notice, because without scrutinizing the script you would never know what Charlie intended in the first place. Thus for the normal player it may seem sufficient to encounter Orbs at all and see them behave weirdly, and he may think that it 'sort of' works. But it doesn't work in the way Charlie wanted it to, it never has, and it never will.

Commander McLane wrote:

You would probably never notice, because without scrutinizing the script you would never know what Charlie intended in the first place. Thus for the normal player it may seem sufficient to encounter Orbs at all and see them behave weirdly, and he may think that it 'sort of' works. But it doesn't work in the way Charlie wanted it to, it never has, and it never will.

And I think you never would have seen them on a mac under 1.65. On the mac, ships with a shipdata.plist that contains syntax errors never showed up. I remember that I had to fix about 20 syntax errors in that plist before I could open it in the first place. After that I had one encounter than a big crash and than permanently removed the Orb from my computer.

One thing I remember was that he sometimes used O and sometime used 0. Depending on the display font they looked the same. Therefor I always preferred the Monaco font with its slashed zero in programming. I even edited it back in when it became removed in the newer system installs.