Oolite Bulletins

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere I've searched but can't find any answer. Just discovered Oolite yesterday and am reliving my Spectrum 48k childhood again.

I spent 3 hours on version 1.72.2 last night including a 30 minute fight against a pack of pirates while trying to get to Lave. Made it back alive (funny how you remember stuff you used to do as a kid) killed two of them in the process. Saved the game and went to bed.

Loaded up again tonight to carry on, only to find my kills are back at zero. Everything else seems to have been saved but not my hard earned kills! I've spent the evening trading at safe planets so not been in any scraps tonight but I want to make sure I don't lose any more kills. Any suggestions?

I've not loade any OXPs just playing as is for now. Please help.

Cheers
Mart

Welcome to the boards, Commanderscum.

Thinking on your problem...but don't think I can help. It tickles something in my memory, but I can't recall it. However, better brains than mine will probably help - I've only been back in the cockpit for a couple of months.

I highly recommend the System Redux OXP, and the Fighter HUD is excellent.

Hmm its not a bug Ive heard of. Losing kills accidentally reloading from a save instead of saving is possible, I normally use "quicksave" and every so often create a new save witha new name, normally 3 "generations" of the same pilot, just in case I do something stupid.

Ive had a few oddities with the way vista handles file locations (oolite is best not ran from within the program files folder under vista) and another where for some odd reason my save games were being saved in a really odd location. I think that was when I copied the game rather than reinstalled from vista to an xp computer and it was still trying to save the games in a programfiles(x86) folder that the regular xp didnt have...

Thanks for the welcome. I should have mentioned I'm on XP not Vista.

I didn't accidentally load instead of save. It was the following evening when I loaded the game from the previous days save. Everything was fine, location, credits, cargo on board. Just the kills were back to zero.

I've done a bit of trading and got some money together so I'll stick a beam laser on it and go and get into trouble and see if it happens again.

Don't want to start adding OXPs until I've sorted this out.

Cheers

Might be interesting to check what is actually recorded in your save game -- to see if its a problem with the save file, or with oolite reading it.

Commanderscum wrote:

Thanks for the welcome. I should have mentioned I'm on XP not Vista.

I didn't accidentally load instead of save. It was the following evening when I loaded the game from the previous days save. Everything was fine, location, credits, cargo on board. Just the kills were back to zero.

I've done a bit of trading and got some money together so I'll stick a beam laser on it and go and get into trouble and see if it happens again.

Don't want to start adding OXPs until I've sorted this out.

Cheers

Its very odd, the save file for this game is a plain text file in the oolite \ oolite.app\oolite-saves directory, within it quite far down the file you will find the following key-

<key>ship_kills</key>
<integer>x</integer>

Where "x" will be the number of kills its recorded, might be worth checking there.

Losing kills is certainly not a common problem... Once progress is granted on the F5 screen - which you can check in flight it stays there. Did you see the kill score increase on the F5 screen at any point?

I believe oolite goes by "kill shot" for what gets granted the kill, no matter how much damage you do to a ship, if a passing npc gets so much as \ grazing shot and thats the final kill shot then you wont get credit, same if the ship hits another ship etc.

Another possibility Im not sure what happens on kill credit if the pilot ejects before the ship is destroyed? The ship becomes effectively space junk then I think.

Right, a kill is awarded for actually killing a ship. So a ship that you get down to one point of energy, but then dies from something else (heat damage, crash, etc.) is not a kill.

I think a kill is awarded for the ship even if the pilot ejects. There has been some discussion of awarding the kill to the guy who forced the ejection, but I think its still for getting the ship.

I would also suspect that you probably weren't awarded the kills in the first place. Just to be sure: did you have a look at your status screen (F5) after the alleged kills and before saving? Were they displayed then?

Oh, and of course a warm welcome to the boards and this great game, Commanderscum!

Wow, thanks for all the responses, I do feel welcome indeed

To answer the questions asked. Haven't checked the save game and I'm working today so won't be able to until later or tomorrow.

The kills were definitely awarded. I got one with a pulse laser (eventually) and saw it go up. The reason I remember there were 2 listed is I didn't know I'd got the other one. Must have been one of the missles I fired off all over the place.

They were definitely there when I docked and saved. I then loaded up and had an uneventful flight to a station at another system I'd not been to yet. The kills were still listed when I docked and saved there too. It was when I loaded the game the following day I was at the right system (and remember, hadn't been there before so it must have been the right save) but the kills were back to zero.

Weird, but thanks to you guys I know where to look in the file to put them back. I'll let you know what happens next time. Thanks again

Update

Tried again last night. Got a kill on the way back into Lave. Saved the game. Quit out and re-loaded it and it was still there, so I edited the text file to give me my 2 lost kills back. Re-loaded, nipped to another system and saved, quit, re-loaded. All fine.

So I've got my 3 kills and it seems to be keeping them now, no idea what happened first time. Thanks for all the help, I think I'll check out those OXPs that El Viejo recommended next.

Cheers all.