Oolite Bulletins

This may be a feature of the setup I have, but has anyone else noticed odd missile behaviour? All I have to do is make sure they don't hit my front screens and that they then approach from behind. At that point, they begin wildly spiralling around the ship exhausts and they stay there forever.

A bug, possibly?

Hi,
I haven't so much noticed them doing it to me but they sure do it to ships I'm trying to get the attention of, permenent attention that is. Tis quite frustrating. I have shot my own missile a few times by accident because of it.

Missiles may look dumb because their default accuracy is 0. Just try to set the key accuracy in the missile entry in shipdata.plist to 10 and you'll find that missiles have become much more clever and dangerous.

another_commander wrote:

Missiles may look dumb because their default accuracy is 0. Just try to set the key accuracy in the missile entry in shipdata.plist to 10 and you'll find that missiles have become much more clever and dangerous.

I've once searched for it, unable to find it - it appears the key is entirely missing and needs to be added! I suggest to change that behaviour as default for the next release...and include Thargoids more powerful thargons/thargoid ships, too, as it's stupid that the built in ones only release the thargons right before they die.

Concerning the missiles, I've got a screenshot where a whole galaxy of missiles is flying around an enemy ship. When I closed up to that ship, every few seconds one of those missiles did hit ME (without exploding the warhead, just destroying the missile) because the space was so extremely filled with them. Pretty much like Warcrafts "lightning shield" - and none of those many missiles was able to hit the target!

At least it shows how fast oolite can handle such things

Screet

Oooooh! I'd loooove to see that screenshot!

Rxke wrote:

Oooooh! I'd loooove to see that screenshot!

...thus I finally did create an account for images

However, I noticed that the best screenshot apparantly got deleted in some dumb moment by me when I noticed that it did not only contain oolite, but also the other monitors info. Should have cropped it instead...there were nice shots, including some similar to the Condor-docking scene Jody B did post.



None of those missiles did hit, as is the usual sight in such a case.

Since I'm just adding...here's another one of a "Thargoid Retirement Party" showing what the game can do:



I was suffering from the ATI problem, both CPU and GPU were idle and the framerate went down in a horrible way. However, the Thargoids did suffer the most!

Screet

Did you fire all those missiles? Or where did they come from?

Rxke wrote:

Did you fire all those missiles? Or where did they come from?

The other image did have even more of them! IIRC they were a salvo of another Condor. The one you can see in the image is a pirate and there are police blips on the scanner.

I did have encounters with multiple pirate condors, fighting each other, though.

Screet

Charlie has a lot to answer for.....

Captain Hesperus

Captain Hesperus wrote:

Charlie has a lot to answer for.....

Please keep a few things in mind:
- I had RS running at that time (which is now being completely reworked!)
- The condor you can see has been added by a test-version of deep space pirates

Thus they are not from the original condor package, but two other oxp's did work together (without being designed for that purpose) in order to create it.

The condors are stupid, in my eyes, as they fire a full screen of missiles at once, instead of using salvos of 2-5 missiles, which usually would be enough to destroy any ship. The sight is impressive, though.

Screet, who has a screenshot with more trumbles than Hesperus' ad!

Screet wrote:

[huge image]

None of those missiles did hit, as is the usual sight in such a case.

Since I'm just adding...here's another one of a "Thargoid Retirement Party" showing what the game can do:

[another huge image]

I was suffering from the ATI problem, both CPU and GPU were idle and the framerate went down in a horrible way. However, the Thargoids did suffer the most!

You know, with those huge screenshots, I'm glad that I'm looking at this page on my desktop box and not on my EeePC. (And if I were using that, be glad that it isn't a 700-series).

And I still have to set the browser window to full screen and press Ctrl-‘-’ once or twice to avoid horizontal scrolling…

_ds_ wrote:

And I still have to set the browser window to full screen and press Ctrl-‘-’ once or twice to avoid horizontal scrolling…

Hmmm...should I re-upload with 800x600 rescaling then? Initially I didn't like the rescale options as the file size was pretty small and I thought it would be better to see all those blips without scaling effects that could blur too much, but if it's a big problem, I could re-upload. Those are the first images I did add so far...

Screet
P.S.: Reduced in size by two steps...is this OK?

Screet wrote:

Hmmm...should I re-upload with 800x600 rescaling then? Initially I didn't like the rescale options as the file size was pretty small

I always use optipng and advpng. If I want to rescale, I'm about as likely to use mogrify (or convert if I want to keep the original) as the Gimp.

Screet wrote:

and I thought it would be better to see all those blips without scaling effects that could blur too much, but if it's a big problem, I could re-upload. Those are the first images I did add so far...

Thumbnailing, or at least scaling down to some reasonable size, is good, as is cropping the image. There's never any problem (that I can see) with inlining a shrunken or cropped image and using it as a link to the full version, though.

Actually, a little less than 800px wide (I'd go for 768px) for the 7" displays out there, but reducing to 25% or 50% is probably best.

Screet wrote:

P.S.: Reduced in size by two steps...is this OK?

Better. But these ones would benefit from being links to the full images, IMO…

(Mass battles against Thargoids are fun. Especially when some idiot lets off a Q-bomb and you're suddenly having to race against “Press Space, Commander”.)[/b]

2 questions about those screenshots:

where did you get the console in the first one?

What ship is that in the second one? EIGHT missiles - WOW!

harry747 wrote:

2 questions about those screenshots:

where did you get the console in the first one?

What ship is that in the second one? EIGHT missiles - WOW!

The console comes with the Kestrel and Merlin. I was flying the Merlin, but it's unfair, as the ship is so small that the NPCs have much trouble to hit it. Ships with two lasers typically miss left and right with me flying between the beams. I had to copy the Kestrel HUD to the Merlin, as the Merlins one (they are the same!) had the wrong offset for the image. I didn't like the small scanner, but it was nice. Flying the Merlin, I had a day with 1K kills

Later I switched to another ship and modified it to the stats of the Merlin because I thought it was too easy flying it. I like the model very much, though.

While doing the other screenshot, I was flying a Caduceus from Caduceus.oxp - my favorite ship! I cannot imagine switching to something else anymore. It has some turrets which did quite some magic back at Geteve for me, as due to malfunctioning ATI drivers my 4870x2 was only delivering less than 1FPS. Have been able to bring it up to 5fps, still slower than old nVidia mobile chipsets are. Thus, with that few fps, it was practically impossible to shoot anything down. It was very difficult to get a target lock for the turrets, but once I managed, they did prove to be very effective.

The Caduceus is a very big ship, yet it has only limited cargo (50T with bay expansion) but that's good as it's balancing the high firepower the ship comes with. If you ever have the money and see one for sale, I suggest to save your commander to some backup file and give the Caduceus a try!

The Caduceus itself comes with Medusa HUD, but somehow I did stick with the original one. Don't know why, maybe just because I was so used to the normal one

Screet