Oolite Bulletins

One of the discussions in the Discussions forum put this idea back in my head. I think it's been suggested before, but here it is again. Why don't we make OXPs of ourselves?

The conversation was that multiplayer oolite would be cool because it would allow us to bump into our mates on the forum whilst flying around. However, MM Oolite is unlikely in the current climate (what with the recession and all) so in the meantime why not OXPify ourselves.

Requirements:

1 custom ship. Take one of the default ships and retexture it (remember to add the details to the main shipdata!) or design your own variant.

1 set of custom plists - a nice new shipdata file to set out what your ship is called and who you are. Note that it would be an idea to not go too overboard with the "souped up" specs...

1 AI with many customisable options for speech, conversation, actions and so on.

1 script to wrap it all up. I suggest that one forum persona will appear in every system, and it's luck as to whether you as the player find and interact with that character.

Is this doable? Is it a good idea?

Very cool idea!

and I can see no reason it couldn't be done.. it's not really so different from several other OXPs out there..

Nice idea

"1 AI with many customisable options for speech, conversation, actions and so on. "

i dunno how to do this bit, so if there's tutes anywhere to help w/ the requirements mebbes links would help me & others.

actually, that's got me thinking : all the AI craft out there, doing their own thing ~ does the game record their actions? or could it be scripted? was just thinking it'd be fun (mebbes?) to say have "me" set up as a trader, and at the end of a competition period see how much i'd earned - we could have a compo for the most successful trader, most kills bounty hunter etc.

This is an awesome idea, although I am fearful of a possible deep space encounter with the "Intergalactic Spam Assassin."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO MY SCREEN IS FILLED WITH TEXT!!!!!!

Really cool idea.

Perhaps a template oxp into which the characteristics of the members in question could be provided for the not-so-jack-of-all-trades in scripting people?

Nice idea indeed!

As individual ships can have their own AI, maybe there's scope for a competition among them, with participants writing/modifying their ships' scripts as they wish. Core Wars for Oolite, type of thing.

I think something similar has been mentioned before - in a Robot Wars style combat between AIs but it was Eric who pointed out that most of the AIs only affect when to fight and when to try and run away - the Oolite inner code deals with all the accuracy and stuff.

However, how this applies to trading... who knows!! Although other than ships which pass through wormholes unless they're scripted are not persistent but are created as you jump into a system for the first time.

However, I think it's a wonderful idea - even if some of the traders on passing by expressed vocalisations that mimicked some of our in-forum personnas, would give me a warm glow...

If you want to meet Eric - install UPS-courier .-)

Or run Random Hits. You could end up 'meeting' a number of the people on this board, but sadly not for long...

But the original idea sounds good!

Great idea!

Although, given my lack of texturing skills, I'll personally prolly just go for some sort of a logo or coat of arms on the side of the ship...

The difficult thing is to choose the ship to use... And naturally I need help with a good AI script as well...

Cool, glad it seems to be a workable idea then.

Now, since I'm the ideas man and have no time to do all this, we need a team of happy volunteers to Get It Done!



I think a skeleton OXP could be created with the basics that would be needed. All the developer would need to do would be to draw up a ship, mod a texture and fill in the blanks in the plist. An instruction sheet could be supplied to outline the process.

Anyone up for it? Either that or someone creates an OXP and makes it available and everyone else butchers it to their own needs!!!

Nice idea.

And again it seems a direct rip-off of the EV series. (Which I always love, because at the end of the day EV was a rip-off of Elite. So it is like going full-circle.) There you would meet the personalities of the game-coders whilst flying around, and each of them would greet you with some catch-phrase. But it was not advisable to attack them. All of them had uber-ships which would very likely eat you in split seconds.

Oh, and as for the scripting part: I could create the skeleton. What I would need from everybody who is interested is

1. his/her character name,
2. his/her ship
   1. model
   2. texture
   3. shipdata
3. a list of catch-phrases for communication with the player.

I would then bundle the whole thing into a package, which of course will be open for adding new characters. This way we can have one OXP, and everything will be in the same format.

& it could be added to along the same lines as Your Ad Here...
What are we waiting for? Commanders, we need your alter egos!

Do you want the details emailing/PMing or just posted on this forum? Posting them here would mean that everyone would see what everyone's OXP would be like and would know it instantly when they saw it.

And the beauty of it all is that it can link up to people's personal pages on the wiki! And be linked from everyone's signatures!!! Yay!

OK, here's a brief overview of mine:

Name: Selezen
Ship: Imperial Courier (V2 model)
a. V2 standard model
b. custom texture forthcoming
c. shipdata forthcoming

Catch-phrases:
- "I'll get it done when I have time!"
- "I'm BUSY!"
- "You talk too much!"
- "I'm more of an ideas man, really!"
- "I'm not slow, I'm just careful!"
- "Are you listening?"

That's just for starters.

Another spinoff from this could be creating NPCs from people's stories - Drew's characters would be one idea...