Oolite Bulletins

My first oxp. (It's actually been done for literally a few months)

http://www.box.net/shared/ejnt2yu0z4

Let me know of any problems. (sorry: no pictures!)


This oxp adds a small, yet powerful ship that can (or hopefully can) be used by npc's and players.

50 years back, a small derelict ship was found decaying quite a distance off the space lane of Malama. Apparently, it hadn't been touched for hundreds of years. Upon inspection, it was found that all cargo was intact, and what was there was billions of credits worth of antimatter, preserved and suspended in a perfect vacuum. Realizing how much their find was worth, the Malaman government stocked up on the feared Antares Class Cruisers (coming soon), giving Malama one of the most feared military forces in existence. Because of this fact, in Malama can be found some of the most advanced equipment there is to have in the orbital Navy station. However, back to the ship. Malaman scientists examined the ship and built an exact replica, and after a few test flights, started mass producing it under the name the Cow Interceptor. Hoping to strike it rich (or, rather, richer), a shipyard was build just for the ship to promote sales. It was fast, maneuverable, and cheap. It turned to be a popular ship for pirates. In fact, so many of these were used by pirates, it became unpopular to the general public due to the high amount of deaths due to young Jamesons (especially the ones without a scanner targeting enhancement), who had always been informed of the high rate of pirate Cow Interceptors, and, had often mistakenly, and mercilessly, ended the lives of any Cow Interceptor to come into scanner range that was not yet at an average ranking.

All this oxp does is give a new player ship and NPC pirate ship available for use. There is still much more to be added in the future as I learn a bit more about oxp'ing.

Cows wrote:

Let me know of any problems.

Only the tiniest of problems: You forgot to tell me your box.net username & password.

ARGHHH!!!!

EDIT: Does it work now?

..or maybe go to all files, and click the blue Share (or Shared) next to the file name to get the actual download link...

Works perfectly - downloaded and unzipped. Will have a look in a mo.

How about a description of what the OXP does, or a link to the wiki-page about it?

I've had a peek at this now.

From my rudimentary understanding of how things work, it looks to me like it's included as a NPC ship only.
Or am I just getting confused looking at the shipdata.plist?

I tried hacking a savefile to get the ship as the player ship (using the same method I've succeeded with in the past; replacing old ship name with new ship name in 3 places), but get the error message that the oxp is not installed.

I do like this bit though: laser_color = brownColor
Is this a high tech version of shooting the shit?

Hi Cows,

CheeseRedux is quite correct. You need a separate entry in shipdata.plist for your player version - with the same internal namekey as in the shipyard.plist. Atm it's not working as a player ship, but will appear as a pirate NPC ship. And you should keep the version with the "player" role separate from the one with the "pirate" role also.

Hope that helps, good luck

L

CheeseRedux wrote:

I do like this bit though: laser_color = brownColor
Is this a high tech version of shooting the shit?

Does that mean if you shoot at this ship you'll get a pat on the head?
Still the shields are good, most laser fire just skimmed off it, well semi-skimmed anyway.

Can someone get this into dry dock so we can take a look at this bad ass bovine?

ClymAngus wrote:

Can someone get this into dry dock so we can take a look at this bad ass bovine?

Unfortunately not. Dry Dock quits with an error when trying to open the model. It seems the dat-file isn't quite correct.

Reason: the complete "TEXTURES" part is missing. So ATM there is no texture defined for this ship. Makes it kind of hard viewing it...

@ Cows: something seems to have gone wrong when you exported from Wings3d (or whatever you used to model, and especially texture your ship). No textures were exported. Please try again.

Furthermore, a word about file names and their uniqueness: oofighter.dat and oofighter-texture.png are not good choices of filenames. You should at least precede the name of the OXP or your own name, in order to avoid name conflicts with other OXPs. Like cows-oofighter.dat. It is much more unlikely that somebody else will choose this name again. As you name the ship "Cow_Interceptor" in its shipdata, I don't see why you don't call the model "Cow_Interceptor.dat", and the texture alike. Wouldn't it be much better to give the model and texture the same name as the actual ship?

Even further, the shipdata.plist is broken as well. Oolite won't open and use it in the first place. Replacing the opening brackets "{" with closing ones "}" in the end certainly wouldn't hurt. Then put an ";" behind the first closing bracket. And finally a "=" between "Cow_Interceptor" and "{".

If you do all these, at least Oolite will recognize your plist at all and you get a chance of actually seeing your ship. Makes me wonder whether you even tried to playtest it, before you uploaded it? You would immediatly have seen that there are a couple of serious bugs.

After you corrected the showstopping bugs, you should spend some more thoughts about the actual content of your shipdata. For instance "interceptorAI.plist" makes no sense as an AI. It is not a generic AI for any ship, but only an AI some kinds of ships switch to during attack. As soon as the attack is finished, they return to their original AIs, which in case of your ship would be ...? Something else: The shipdata specify a non-existing model "Oofighter.dat"; the model actually is called "oofighter.dat" (note well: for a computer "O" is not at all the same as "o"). And it doesn't have a legal role. "Pirate" doesn't exist, the generic role in Oolite is "pirate". Oh, and if you want your ship to be called as a pirate by the game, you either have to give it "pirateAI.plist" as an AI, or to set the "auto_ai" key to "true", preferably both.

All in all: I'm sorry, but it's "back to the drawing board" for this one.

model size: 826.593 x 73.117 x 729.597

pretty big sob .

And no texturing - you need to do UV-mapping before exporting the ship to .obj. And after convering the .obj to .dat (using obj2dattex.py), you need to edit all texture references to correct .png entries.

In shipdata.plist you can duplicate your "Cow_Interceptor" data as "Cow_Interceptor-player" with some additions (check Oolite\oolite.app\Resources\Config\shipdat.plist and *-player -entries for which lines to add) and change the shipyard.plist entry to "Cow_Interceptor-player" too.

EDIT: pay heed first and to all that Commander McLane posted

Ah, fixer upper eh?

But I like the name.
Here in the Netherlands we got many cows. Nice to have a cow-interceptor then

Hmm...
It worked for me just fine. I must have uploaded an older file to Box. I'll have a check through that.

model size: 826.593 x 73.117 x 729.597

Really? that's meters, right? It's going to shrink by a factor of ten (or something like that).

I'll have the real file up within the next 24 hours or something like that.

I love the name Cow interceptor. I haven't seen it at all, I picture it as a big, not too glamorous ship. It's a mobile fuel station with the pump on the underside and a plasma turret at the rear (beware of the Cow's kick!).