Oolite Bulletins

For everyone's information, there has been some interesting discussion in the past (thread is here) about the Cloaking Device being too strong a weapon once acquired, practically giving a huge advantage to the player. One of the proposed solutions had been that when cloaked, any weapons fire (lasers or missiles) would cause automatic deactivation.

For quite a few SVN revisions in trunk now, this has been added. The addition is on a per-ship basis and the key to use in shipdata.plist is cloak_passive, which defaults to NO. If you add this key to any ship and set it to YES, then whenever said ship uses weapons while cloaked, will result in it decloaking. If you do not use this key, obviously things stay as they are now.

On a different note, this is one of the last new stuff additions to the trunk for 1.73. We are now entering a feature lockdown phase. There will be no more new features until 1.73 gets released. From now on, we are in bugfix mode only.

Hi A_C,

wanted to know if the new decloaking feature also extends to NPC ships that use a CD, i.e. will they also decloak when they fire weapons?

Happy to hear that 1.73 is nearing final stage btw

L

Lestradae wrote:

wanted to know if the new decloaking feature also extends to NPC ships that use a CD, i.e. will they also decloak when they fire weapons?

Yes, if those ships have cloak_passive=yes in their shipdata.plist.

not having the cloak myself in Oolite, but didn't it (in Elite) used to make weapons inoperable whilst running? i'm sure you couldn't fire when cloaked...or am i thinking of another game entirely?
:-/

Killer Wolf wrote:

not having the cloak myself in Oolite, but didn't it (in Elite) used to make weapons inoperable whilst running? i'm sure you couldn't fire when cloaked...or am i thinking of another game entirely?
:-/

I think you're thinking of Star Trek...

This would be morally correct

I have never been shot at by a cloaked npc btw & I only use my cloak to position before firing if outnumbered by a large group of higher ranking fugs...
or if the shields are depleted to let them recharge- usually the same scenario...

Do it...

shooting whilst cloaked is for chickens

Agreed!

I totally agree that using the cloak and fire at the same time is a cheat
Now it is more fair.
Maybe in the future we should make passive cloak standard.
If i remember correcty in an old conversation Ahruman agreed in the use of passive cloak as a default operation in oolite

Good job A_C

There is another option, lifted from the Escape Velocity-games.

In the EV-games your shields are completely depleted whilst cloaked. So whenever you uncloak, you have no shields and have to wait until they have been charged again. As you also cannot fire whilst cloaked, this adds a nice dangerous touch to using your cloaking device.