Ship Rationalisation / Balancing Project

[Cmdr James]

I would hope that sendrak would only take model 2.

But you are correct, there is a potentially infinite number of variants, and no easy way to prevent more. I think this is actually the same problem as we might be seeing with redesigning ships, there is a boa, and a griff-boa, and a neooolite-boa which under the cover, should be the same thing.

To some extent the packaging of versions simplifies life for us, if you want the OSE types, then you download OSE and no other OXPs. If you want the balanced types then you download the "balance" set. I dont know if this is satisfactory, but I dont really see an alternative.

EDIT: as for your 1 official version suggestion, I quite agree, I would prefer to see Lestradae and Sendrak offer suggestions for improvements, which the original authors can work back into their ships if they wish. In the case of the kirin, we see that this is unlikely. In many cases this isnt possible as the authors have moved on.

[Sendraks]

I would prefer to see Lestradae and Sendrak offer suggestions for improvements, which the original authors can work back into their ships if they wish. In the case of the kirin, we see that this is unlikely. In many cases this isnt possible as the authors have moved on.

I'm thinking that this is my preferred approach. I can write suggestions, analysis, thoughts on these forums and tinker with my own game, but not produce an OXP. This has a number of advantages:

1 - While I could have a stab at writing an OXP, all I'd be doing is copying other people's work and trying to mash loads of disparate files together. The reason for this is that I have no experience writing computer scripts of any kind. I'm sure I could learn, but it would take a while and as indicated elsewhere, the end result could simply be the "turns the ships pink" oxp.

2 - I'd rather write down my thoughts for discussion and come up with a "guide" of how things could be for OXP creators to consider as they see fit. Ultimately if someone wants to create the "uber" ship, they will and having multiple versions floating around the wiki is not helpful to anyone.

3 - I think oolite ship design is about trade offs and if the designer of an OXP does not want to make trade offs, it all goes out the window. If the design of a ship, such as the Kirin, as basically to be a slow moving, but largely unstoppable ship, then changing so it isn't will mean it is not the Kirin anymore. However, I'm sure the Kirin isn't supposed to be unstoppable, it is slow, ungainly, but has the means to defend itself without having to be too agile. The question for me is, can the stats be tinkered with so that there is a tradeoff between the guns and the other stats without sacrificing the essential "Kirin-ness."

4 - Turrets are an unusual variable and my wondering is not whether OXP ships should have them or not, but rather why a core ship like the Anaconda does not? I'm pretty sure I remember the classic beeb ships that the manual said had "turrets" were actually able to fire lasers from directions other than port and aft. I don't see turrets as "not being Oolite" and as a teenager, it was something I wondered about why the big ships on my Amiga Elite did not have such a feature. Obviously working turret mechanics in the core ships is a bit of a PITA and then there is the question of which ships should have them or not.

Turrets ss an additional variable, mean designers have something to change other than speed, handling, capacity, energy and recharge. The Python Class Cruiser could, for example, be an upgrade on the Python simply because it has a) more cargo capacity, b) a turret and c) is perhaps a little faster. As it stands at present, the Python Class is considerably much faster than the Python, has more cargo capacity and is tougher. Effectively it is giant Cobra MkII with a grin and slight penalties to pitch and energy recharge.

You could differentiate the Python Class Cruiser from the ET and the Python by giving it a turret. It'd be slower than the ET, but faster than the Python. It's handling would be the same as the Python, slightly worse than the ET, but it would be slightly tougher. As reference though, the ET would be slower than the Cobra MKIII, but handle slightly better than the Python. In my ideal world, the Engine sub-entities which Simon added in Neolite to the Python ET, would reduce the ET's speed to that of the Python when shot off.

I know, I know, I want the moon on a stick.

Question - I know in the shipyard plist you can assign what equipment a ship can or cannot buy. Is there anyway to assign equipment to a ship that cannot be removed, in short it becomes an integral part of the ship?

Again, that would open design characteristics for certain ships that would give them a feel and a role. For example: the neolite Fer-De-Lance always seems to be for sale with 2 passenger berths fitted as standard and these are not listed as being part of the ship on the trade screen. However, they can be removed. My ideal scenario would be that they couldn't be. This to me fits with the concept of the Fer-De-Lance having this luxury interior which the commander could use to transport sophisticated clientelle. Now of course you don't have to trade those passenger berths in, but you can, leaving you with 12tonnes of cargo space in a relatively fragile but incredibly fast ship. Which doesn't have the same "feel." This might be limiting the "sandbox" aspect for some of Oolite's ships, but I think there is a virtue in having only a few craft (or just the Cobby MKIII) as the fully customisable ships.

The Python Class would come with the fuel scoop as standard, included in the price of the ship, not as an extra. The trade off for this is in the stats of the ship.

This is all just pie in the sky thinking. I might throw these out as suggestions, but the core of this project will still be suggestions (for discussion) of simple changes to the core stats that anyone with a text editor could do.

[zevans]

EDIT: as for your 1 official version suggestion, I quite agree, I would prefer to see Lestradae and Sendrak offer suggestions for improvements, which the original authors can work back into their ships if they wish. In the case of the kirin, we see that this is unlikely. In many cases this isnt possible as the authors have moved on.

...and again, this is the beauty of open source, because a new author can always produce an updated version of the OXP incorporating the feedback, even if the original author has moved on. Which makes Cmdr James' argument all the stronger.

[Lestradae]

I don't know about the "suggestions for improvements" idea. Tell you why.

There are now potentially X versions of the same original ship because there is no consensus, I think can be no consensus and consequently will be no consensus about what an improvement to a ship is.

For example, Selezen's IC and OSE. There are no alternate versions. Atm, his new and rather unloved old IC version are in OSE exactly the way Selezen made them. Only thing changed is the price and TL availability. And in the future, they are going to be expanded into a whole class of ships, but the originals will still stay in as they were, unchanged (except the old version is going to get the new version's better model )

If I now suggested a change to the stats of his (new) IC it would be one I would favour, who belongs to the "ships can be a bit on the uber side, too" fraction here. My change would make no sense to the purist crowd who basically want no (player) ship to be essentially better than their first Cobra III.

Example 2: The cap for ship speeds in vanilla Oolite is 0.4 LS about. For the purists, any improvement to that that includes raising that cap wouldn't make sense. The cap for ship speeds in OSE is 0.999 LS. I think this makes sense - this is supposed to be the light speed barrier, and any non-witchjump effect that makes your ship even faster (injectors, torus drive) is getting you into an area of massive relativistic effects - speeding you up to 0.99999 LS perhaps, but not to the sevenfold speed in linear numbers.

So if someone made an oxp that has ships with a speed of, say, 1.21 LS without a proper explanation of how this ships breaches the LS - lightspeed - barrier, I would deem this inconsistent! So anyone suggesting something like that would not suggest an improvement to me, etc. ...

It also works the other way around. The purist fraction suggesting to downgrade the stats of certain ships, Kirin perhaps, would improve that for them, but not for me - for me this would be a reduction. And so on.

So I think that perhaps it is no problem that there can be five versions of the same ship out there. Perhaps other ship packs similar to RS/OSE that cater to other tastes than this one are in order. Players can then choose if they want the version with the higher caps or the "leveling out" purist version or if they'd like to stay with the original oxps only, thanks you very much.

At least these are my 0.2 Cr

L

[Selezen]

See this is the core problem. Everyone has their own idea what the specific stats and performance SHOULD be. Everyone wants to enforce their own ideas and restrictions/improvements on a ship.

There's no consistency. Now I'm not saying that the original stats for the IC (either version) were absolutely spot on, and it probably isn't, but then who's to say that the RS version is absolutely right either.

As you say you will never have complete agreement by a community on what the "definitive" version is - so why create seven different versions that are all going to have the same problem? The RS version isn't liked by everyone and no doubt the OSE or Sendrak version wouldn't be universally acclaimed either - the only difference is that the autor of the new OXP would have a version that fits with his or her own view of what the ship should be.

I say let people download the vanilla version and if they want to suggest improvements on the performance or whatever, that's what the forum or the Wiki discussion pages are for. If they're accepted then fair do. If they aren't happy about it then there's nothing stopping them making their own custom version, is there? All the instructions are on the forum and on the wiki and the plist files are fairly easy to read. The community has proved its intellect and good taste by choosing Oolite for their gaming needs, so they obviously have enough intelligence to mod a ship for themselves!

[Commander McLane]

Question - I know in the shipyard plist you can assign what equipment a ship can or cannot buy. Is there anyway to assign equipment to a ship that cannot be removed, in short it becomes an integral part of the ship?

Again, that would open design characteristics for certain ships that would give them a feel and a role. For example: the neolite Fer-De-Lance always seems to be for sale with 2 passenger berths fitted as standard and these are not listed as being part of the ship on the trade screen. However, they can be removed. My ideal scenario would be that they couldn't be. This to me fits with the concept of the Fer-De-Lance having this luxury interior which the commander could use to transport sophisticated clientelle. Now of course you don't have to trade those passenger berths in, but you can, leaving you with 12tonnes of cargo space in a relatively fragile but incredibly fast ship. Which doesn't have the same "feel." This might be limiting the "sandbox" aspect for some of Oolite's ships, but I think there is a virtue in having only a few craft (or just the Cobby MKIII) as the fully customisable ships.

Unfortunately this is not trivial. Equipment is equipment, and from the perspective of the game engine there is no difference between "standard" and "optional" equipment. If an item can be removed (like the passenger berth), you can remove it from any ship that has it installed, regardless whether as a "standard" or an "option".

You could however come up with a cleverly scripted solution. For instance each time you visit the F3-screen, the script would automatically remove the original passenger berth and replace it with a dummy which cannot be removed. When you leave the F3-screen, the script reverses the exchange, so on all other screens the berth stays functionable.

The Python Class would come with the fuel scoop as standard, included in the price of the ship, not as an extra. The trade off for this is in the stats of the ship.

That's basic functionality of shipyard.plist. You can put equipment either in the extras-section or in the optional-section. In the first case it comes with every ship on sale, and you have to raise the ship's base price to reflect the presence of the equipment. In the second case only a certain fraction of the ships on sale will get it, and the engine will raise the price accordingly.

[Lestradae]

Selezen, your suggestions have two big problems imho:

1) They would make any pack like RS/OSE, even alternate versions like Simon's or Griff's new core ships basically impossible.

2) There is no "absolutely right" or "spot on" value for ship's stats - as this is nearly completely in the eye of the observer. It's a game. None of these ships actually exist

No offense meant, but the way you seem to (<- please note that I wrote "seem to", apologies if I misunderstood you) see this would lead to a sort of "community-approved" list of original oxps which could not be developed any further.

So there could not be the Simon ships and Griff ships and Sung ships Ooniverse, as we would have to consent on which ships with which stats are the "real ones". There could be no OSE because this would only be thinkable as a personal tweak etc.

Seriously, I think all efforts to restrict people on how to modify existing stuff should stop. This leads nowhere. There will be twenty versions of diverse options including oxps one day because there are 20+ different ways of enjoying this game, and I don't see this to be a problem, on the contrary, that's the beauty of the oxp system imho as it allows everyone to have the game tweaked to one's own tastes publicly.

Any attempt to create "the real Oolite" will only lead to pointless quarreling.

Hope not getting on your nerves too much already

Cheers

L

[Cmdr James]

This doesnt have to be absolute. I think what Selezen I saying is that we should not encourage multiple diverse versions. This is not the same as trying to enforce a rule that this will never occur.

There is nothing to stop a reskinning project, and this could be done in collaboration with the original author, as could a rebalancing. I think[/b[ what Selezen is trying to avoid is version a chaotic mishmash.

Note: Usual caveats about open licenses and so on apply, I think we are only talking about how we would like things to be.

[Selezen]

James, thanks for being the voice of reason there. Les, you think I'm trying to stifle the creativity here, but I'm not. I'm just concerned that ther soon would be no point in creating ship OXPs because everyone would just start making their own versions of the plists and distribute them as the "this is how _I_ think it should be" version.

8 disparate versions on 1 OXP is a little too much even for just a single OXP. When you consider the fact that there are now multiple versions of EVERY ship OXP out there now then it starts to get a little too much to think about.

And how would my comments and ideas make Griff and Simon's ideas impossible? If anything it would support them as the developer rather than taking their work and modifying it then not feeding back the results of that modification. I think that if any mods are made, then they should be stored against the original work rather than in someone else's uber-OXP. It would also make it easier for the developer to manage, as they can concentrate on making lovely graphics and leave the stats to someone else IF THEY WANT TO. That way the developer can assert as much control as they want and still accept input and change from the community.

I know for a fact that I would appreciate the RS OXP more if I had a copy of the modifications to roll into the downloadable version.

[Wolfwood]

If I now suggested a change to the stats of his (new) IC it would be one I would favour, who belongs to the "ships can be a bit on the uber side, too" fraction here. My change would make no sense to the purist crowd who basically want no (player) ship to be essentially better than their first Cobra III.

I think I belong mostly to the purist crowd and I must agree with what you say "of us". I think there have to be some basic physical facts that need to remain constant in order to keep the game world logical. Cobra III is supposed to be the peak of commercially available medium trading ships (and even a very good all-around ship). Going too far beyond this basic role of Cobra III in any other ship would destroy this basic starting point.

On the other hand, I can see pure fighting ships surpassing Cobra III's performance as a fighter, just as well as pure trader ships may surpass it as a trader.

However, my next step would be to make Oolite players start their game in some other ship than Cobra III. It would be interesting to have the players start with something like Cobra I or even some smaller fighter/trader and see how the game progresses from there. This way, the peak ship (Cobra III) would become something to strive for (for those who would strive for it), rather than something that you have right from the start.

[Disembodied]

However, my next step would be to make Oolite players start their game in some other ship than Cobra III. It would be interesting to have the players start with something like Cobra I or even some smaller fighter/trader and see how the game progresses from there. This way, the peak ship (Cobra III) would become something to strive for (for those who would strive for it), rather than something that you have right from the start.

This is the nub of it, really: because the original game wouldn't (couldn't) let players change ships, the player had to have something which was a good all-rounder from the start – albeit one without any added extras. But there's no need for Oolite to keep itself within these limits, apart from getting the authentic Elite experience ... but that goes out the window with virtually every OXP downloaded.

I think the best way to start the game would be to give a new Jameson a bunch of money and access to a shipyard and F3 equipment screen – probably limited to what might be available at Lave's TL. (This would have to be a pre-set shipyard, rather than just what happens to be for sale on Lave at the time, since then you would have "lucky" and "unlucky" starts, which would just irritate players and would mean lots of starting and restarting to try to hit the ship they want.) Then let them assemble their own starting ship – which, if they want, might be a completely unequipped Cobra III and ₢100 change.

[Diziet Sma]

I think the best way to start the game would be to give a new Jameson a bunch of money and access to a shipyard and F3 equipment screen – probably limited to what might be available at Lave's TL. (This would have to be a pre-set shipyard, rather than just what happens to be for sale on Lave at the time, since then you would have "lucky" and "unlucky" starts, which would just irritate players and would mean lots of starting and restarting to try to hit the ship they want.) Then let them assemble their own starting ship – which, if they want, might be a completely unequipped Cobra III and ₢100 change.

VERY interesting idea... I like...

[Lestradae]

@Selezen & Cmdr James:

Yes, this clears things up to my understanding, I think

Concerning RS/OSE I can only say, that these are (and even will be in OSE) unmodified versions stats-wise! Perhaps there is some confusion as to how I re-tweak the ships until everything is something sort of monster adder.

Perhaps I can clear something up concerning RS/OSE: It is extremely rare that I fiddle with the stats of one of the ship oxps that I include. Over the top of my head, I think the only ship I ever seriously changed something there is/was on the Fer-de-Lance. Nothing else, methinks.

OSE does:

1) Change the price according to a formula that compares every ship to the Cobra Mk III as standard. So any ship below 150000Cr is supposed to be a less good ship than that one, any ship at this value to be very comparable to the "standard" but with different weightings and any ship beyond that is better all in all than the Cobra III. Millions-of-credits ships are really cracking, high-tech ships.

2) Change the TL span in which you get the ship, according to price, as a measurement of how good this ship is.

3) Add additional versions of this ship that are worse (a "rusty" version, and some "upgraded" versions"). Not every ship has every upgrade version - which, depends on the original roles distribution of the original oxp.

And btw, the upgrade versions are not that "uber". There will be no INRA Battlestar in player hands, much less something which is to that one like that is to an Adder! A "courier" version of a ship with, say, 1/1 pitch/roll and 0.3LS will have 2/2 pitch/roll and 0.37LS, for example. And cost double for that, higher TL nescessary. Etc.

Ships can have one, two, three or even all four of these upgrades but for one "section" only - cargo, reactor, weapons, or speed - but not on top of each other. There is no "uber courier". And the "Super" version with all four upgrades costs 16 times the standard ship, and you will meet them as NPCs, either.

4) The cargo bay is distributed for the large cargo bay into a 4:3 ratio between original cargo space and large cargo bay, for ships above 15 tons max. This is done because now the large cargo bay actually does something also for big ships.

5) The NPC versions of the ships have double max energy than player ships to simulate having shields.

6) The NPC versions have a much higher probability of having fuel injectors and also the fuel to use to burn them including in combat, so also another player advantage squashed that might make the game boring

That's it. The original stats & version stay untouched, in OSE.

Perhaps now it's at least clear how I envision what I'm doing. I have no suggestions for stats. I let them stay the way they are.



L

PS:

This is the nub of it, really: because the original game wouldn't (couldn't) let players change ships, the player had to have something which was a good all-rounder from the start – albeit one without any added extras. But there's no need for Oolite to keep itself within these limits, apart from getting the authentic Elite experience ... but that goes out the window with virtually every OXP downloaded.

Seconded, 120%.

This is completely my point with the armada of ships beyond the Cobra III. For me, it is a starting point, as Oolite is not Elite. For the purists, it is the end point, as they want to play Elite with knobs on.

I think we will simply have to agree to disagree on these issues. I don't completely understand why this is so hard or what should be the problem with that. Perhaps it's just me.

[Cmdr James]

I would go a little further. I would say oolite is elite with knobs on. The question really is how far you can go by adding knobs before you either get a mess, or you need to start again with a new codebase.


I play oolite because it is elite. I would imagine anyone who wants a generic (not elite) big space battle game could probably find something closer to their ideal, and if not, should maybe look at forking oolite, as lots of the limitations are there by design, and could easily be removed by someone who didnt want elite.

[Lestradae]

The thing is, Cmdr James, for me OSE essentially is the vision I had of what Elite could/should become without the technical restrictions of its time. So I don't "don't want" Elite. For me, the Ooniverse with many oxps from people here and my own OSE is Elite with bells on.

But as Disembodied said correctly (imho): The moment you install any oxp the "authentic Elite feeling" is out the window. So from there on, it's your individual vision of where could I/we go from here?

And I think to deny people who are not of your opinion about what is "genuinely" Oolite or not is at least slightly ... impolite. Imho. And has led to the biggest quarrels the board has seen since I am here.

I really, really don't get why it is not possible to agree to disagree over issues like that here, even if we are strictly talking about what we would individually like or not in our games. It's like the difference between a dictatorship (one opinion) and a democracy (contradictory opinions coexist side by side), again imho.



L