Oolite Bulletins

Greetings. Although I have played a while now I have yet to experiment with any OXP of my own.

My stupid question is this:

If I want to phart around with an existing ship - say Cobra MkIII to try to change some of the parameters, which file should I go into and change stuff?

And is there a recommended wordpad or something that I should use?

And do I save the resultant changed file as name.(what extension)

Thanks

You'll hopefully get more helpful responses from people more knowledgeable than me, but in the meantime you could do worse than look at this page and this page on the wiki.

The file you're looking for is the shipdata.plist in the config folder, although it is generally advised against tinkering with the core Oolite files.

There are reskinned versions of the Cobra available (with the core stats unchanged) from Griff and Simon B (Neolite) and you should be fine tinkering around with the config files for those OXPs.

You can change the plists in notepad but the content will be unformatted and difficult to read, I use VIM text editor instead.

The key thing is that you use a plain text editor, do not use MS Word or any tool which will save it in a different format (rtf, doc, etc.)

vim is a good choice (ha, real men use vi, not vim :p ), but my guess is that someone asking about editors would not be experienced with vim, and if you are on windows you should probably stick to notepad or notepad+ or textpad, whatever you are comfortable with.

I would add that Notepad is not advised. Wordpad is fine.

There's only three kinds of stupid questions:
* The question that hasn't been asked.
* The question that was already covered in the manual.
* The serious sounding question which was answered with "42".

El Viejo wrote:

I would add that Notepad is not advised. Wordpad is fine.

Another awesome editor, Notepad++.

Finally, something Wyvern and I agree on...

Notepad++ is a GREAT program!

Just to recap, in case there's any confusion:

m$ notepad => free with windows, adds extra characters inside any text, and adds the .txt extension to filenames the moment you're not looking. evil

DonHO notepad++ => free good quality text editor, does exactly what it's supposed to do. good

Thanks for the prompt replies....

Just one more question...does the completed ship design have to reside somewhere in the shipyard.plist file in the main game in order that the ship can be bought....?

Thanks again

Hemlock wrote:

Thanks for the prompt replies....

Just one more question...does the completed ship design have to reside somewhere in the shipyard.plist file in the main game in order that the ship can be bought....?

Thanks again

Correct
Download a custom ship and have a look how other people have done this, It helped when i made my first design

Thanks everyone...now I am away to design the Bus from Spaceballs

Below link is a good page if you want to build a ship from scratch using wings.
http://www.oolite.org/old/cyoship2/