Oolite Bulletins

Perhaps some people are interested in this.

Katharsis & me are working on a program that can automatically expand one ship type into a whole class of ships. To do that, it reads in some variables and info from the complete shipdata and shipyard plists of one ship, it needs a player version and at least one (can also be more) NPC versions of that ship.

From that data and the roles contained in the NPC version, a new template for that ship is generated, and then diverse player and NPC versions - the ship is expanded into a whole class.

Also a lot of features are included as standard via that process. If you want to know what they are, have a look at the very first post in the OSE thread the below link, well, links to under "special ship classes".

When the program has worked in helping to produce finished OSE, we will probably make it available as a feature for ship oxp creators.

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... &start=203

I think this might be interesting for hardcore oxp'ers, coders and OSE fans.

Cheers

L

I'm actually curious as to the reasons behind making this template program.
In other words, what are the advantages of using this instead of like_ship?

Kaks wrote:

In other words, what are the advantages of using this instead of like_ship?

If you have a closer look, like_ship is used massively for the whole tree. It all starts with a template for all player & NPC ships, the standard player ship is like_ship'ped from that, from this follow the alternate ship versions for the player (again via like_ship), and then the five different NPC meta-roles are generated via like_ship from the player-defined ship types.

The only things that are repeated are the things that change at each like_ship step. It's actually quite sophisticated I fear.

Have a closer look, and you'll see what I mean.

Hope to have cleared the muddy waters a bit?

L

A bit! But I must confess that I've been distracted by RL. If the template program is all buttons and 'enter the new top speed here' etc.. I can see the advantage for people who haven't got the patience to figure out all the text inside plists, though.

Kaks wrote:

I can see the advantage for people who haven't got the patience to figure out all the text inside plists, though.

Yes and no. It doesn't do everything for you I'm afraid - because while this template series does expand a single ship type into a whole class range of ships, you still have to define the prototype for all this lovingly and by hand.

You have to determine all the stats, think which roles it is going to have first - trader? pirate? escort? police? navy?

The list then takes this "standard" and creates up to 17 different variations from it, one being the original - but which and how many still depends on your original choices for roles, stats etc.

So a Boa will, after having been extended, still be a crappy gunship, and a Black Monk vessel will still be a crappy trader.

Cheers

L