It's been a fair while in the making, but I'm pleased to be able to (finally) release the upgraded version 2.11 of Aquatics.
All of the original ships are present from version 1.x, but the following improvements have been made:
Several new ships are added:
HammerHead hauler carrier plus associated cargo sleds.
Barracuda fighter escort (including police and player versions).
Leviathan system platforms.
Orca class destroyer.
Very occasional instances of the above two getting stolen or going rogue.
Improved military and police versions of the Manta-Ray, including a new player version of the former.
A brand new headquarters station for the Aquarian Shipbuilding Corporation, in orbit around Aqualina.
A new mission - The Kraken Hunt (for commanders ranked Dangerous or higher).
The OXP also makes use of the new BigShips OXP for oversized trader craft (a copy of that OXP is included within the package for Aquatics 2.1).
Also there have been some improvements, streamlining and standardisation within the coding, so unfortunately save games using the older versions of the Manta and Shark will no longer work with the new one. But it's quite simple to fix, if anyone needs to know how just PM me.
I will upload some pretty pictures when I get chance (here and to the wiki), but in the meantime enjoy! And watch out for when the HammerHead unloads, it's a busy time for the station control...
Congrats Thargoid, a marvellous job you did here. It adds something new to Oolite, specially the Hammerhead. The german members would probably say when they see it in action: "das schiff ist ein hammer".
I was in the habit of testing the ship already in your wip version. As mailed in a PM I notice a difference with the release version.
I have problems with the new texture file of the hammerhead. It is to big for my "outdated" mac. The first time I added the hammerheads in system they wee just black. Only the exhaust plume and the cargo sleds were visible. Than I added a second ship. Same problem. After switching Oolite to the background, doing some other stuff and switching back, both ships suddenly had their texture.
Strange. Sounds like a memory problem on my mac, oolite can't handle right. I switched on the texture debugging, but no messages other than loaded the textures file. Difference is of cause that in your wip version the hammerhead texture was only 73 kb large and in the release version it is 1700 kb with several layers. (20 times as big)
Today I retried but never got my texture back, even after restarting the computer and starting Oolite as first program to get maximum memory. I now put the old texture from the wip version in an other oxp that loads after aquatics, forcing the big texture to be overwritten by the old texture. It works. No nice texture but I can see the ship again.
So I wonder how many players are affected by it. I have a 700 MHz mac with 630 MB memory and no shaders. If there are more, it could be an idea to add a small oxp in the package with the simple texture file for all those with old computers like me.
I've still got the WIP basic texture around, so if it's a common problem then I can make that available via a little zip file, or perhaps a second package of the full OXP (not sure which would be better).
As you say it would be a shame to lose PAGroove's excellent work on it, plus it would mess up the shaders too (but I guess any computer that couldn't handle the texture won't be shady either). I was just taking my own laptop as the base for all this, as it's also quite old and useless (about a 1GHz processor, no shaders and only about 1GB memory running XP) and that can support the texture.
If other people do want this then please post here and I'll put it together.
Unfortunately Screet has just alerted me to a minor bug in the script for the OXP (a small problem with a mission variable name) which affects a part of the offers if you are successful in the mission.
I will upload a corrected version v2.01 this evening when I get home, plus a patch for v2.00 to correct the problems (to save too many downloads).
Also I've made a minor tweak to the Destroyer which I meant to do before but forgot.
Hey, I'm the one who has to apologize! I've flown that mission during testing several times, but apparantly didn't pay enough attention to the guardian system until my main player did the galactic jumps to Aqualina
OK, I've now fixed things, v2.01 of Aquatics can now be downloaded from the same URL as in the first post of this thread.
Not yet fixed. Wait for 1.02. I just PMed Thargoid an other more serious bug that affects his ships and turns plain ships into stations. Solvable by adding a key to the ship definition.
I've just updated both the patch file and the main one to solve Eric's bug. So people can (re)download either of those, and then you will have a (hopefully) bug-free version.
For those interested, I had given 4 of the ships the role "aquatics_stationDefense" in the shipdata.plist. But it seems that having "station" anywhere in the role turns the ship into a station, and others try and dock with it. So I've just changed all instances of that role in the shipdata.plist to "aquatics_defender".
Hopefully this should be the final fix. I will learn not to write such large and complex OXPs! (yeah right).
.
.
