Oolite Bulletins

Here's what's on my mind recently:

As I was going trough the Oolite logs, I got practically used to seeing warnings about escort ships requesting escorts. (Mostly from RS OXP)

I want to put an end to this, but I'm not sure which way is the best way to do so.

I have three solutions on my mind:

1 - Remove the "escort" role from ships in question.. which would IMO reduce the diversity.
2 - Set "escorts" to 0, which is more like cheating
3 - Make escort-clones. (Like, original ships without "escort" role, plus same ships without escorts and with "escort" role as single role.)

Choice no.3 seems like best choice, but I'm not sure how the game would behave.
Would the escort-only ships get spawned without motherships? (as the motherships do)
What would be (except above mentioned) minimum difference between original and cloned ship?

Any thoughts are welcome.

Best choice:

4 - de-install RS.

In Oolite escorts cannot have escorts. All attempts to force them against the game mechanism only result in buggy behaviour (see your logs).

The report in the log is actually a warning only. Oolite has already taken care of what you want to do here by the time it has logged these messages. The solution it gives is this: All escort ships do not generate or are forbidden from getting escorts themselves. Simple as that. If you want to clean up your log, just go with option 1.

Chaky wrote:

1 - Remove the "escort" role from ships in question.. which would IMO reduce the diversity.
2 - Set "escorts" to 0, which is more like cheating
3 - Make escort-clones. (Like, original ships without "escort" role, plus same ships without escorts and with "escort" role as single role.)

As far as I can see there are several complete different reasons that lead to those warnings, so there is no single solution for it all.

I know a very old pre-1.65 oxp that uses the setUpEscorts command in its escortAI. Even when escort number for that ship was set at 0, just the use of that command leads to the warning. In the past it was just silently ignored.
These are all warnings but help programmers to remove nonsense or faulty instructions. Just give the authors time to correct their oxp.

e.g I warned the author of Saleza.oxp he has buggy escort definitions. He defined escorts of escorts. This needs rewriting as simply changing the escort number achieves not the result the author had in mind.

4 - de-install RS.

RS contains almost everything that once was released, including all bugs ever created. When you want it all, you get it all.

Alternative:

5. Wait for OSE.

In its final version, all bugs anyone ever found & told me about will have been fixed, and the escorts with escorts thing will be a thing of the past, too.

Will take two months or so, still, to finish it.

Cheers

L

Lestradae wrote:

Will take two months or so, still, to finish it.

..which is yet another reason for me to tweak the RS a little.

I'll go with door no. 3, just for kicks.