Oolite Bulletins

All,

Pleased to announce the availability of the new and revised Tianve OXP. Thanks to Commander McLane's input this is now much improved. You can now buy yourself a souvenir to mark your trip to the Pulsar!

For those of you who wrestle unsuccessfully with the concepts embodied in the file 'readme.rtf' - the necessary details are below.

Tianve OXP v1.3 can be downloaded from here.

Please note you MUST remove previous versions as they will cause incompatibilities and may crash your Ooniverse!

Cheers,

Drew.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Usage

Tianve.oxp v1.3
Copyright © 2009 Drew Wagar - http://www.wagar.org.uk
Contributions by Commander McLane.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco,
California, 94105, USA.

Warning!

Please remove any previous Tianve OXPs (either v1.0, v1.1 or v1.2 - check the readme!) as this OXP will conflict with them! Older versions should now be disgarded in favour of this one.

Description

This OXP adds 'flavour' to the Tianve Star System in the top right corner of Chart One. It adds a 'Pulsar' to the system, and a series of liners travelling to the Pulsar from the main station in orbit around Tianve. Other items include an extra station in orbit around the Pulsar, ad-boards throughout and a few other surprises for tourists to the system. There is also an exclusive opportunity to purchase a souvenir for your ship at the Pulsar station, so you can prove you've 'Seen the Pulsar'. You can locate the Pulsar using your 'advanced space compass' by selecting position 'P'.

Save Game

This download includes a save game for Oolite - Commander 'Cheapskate' - well, you should have used your own ship or taken a luxury liner
This should be put in your <oolite dir>/oolite.app/oolite-saves directory.
This will provide you with a basic ship to go exploring the Tianve system without needing to travel there, however you won't be able to keep your souvenir unless you use your own vessel.

Notes

This OXP should be combined with the following OXPs to get the author's desired overall effect for the Tianve System.

Tori.OXP
Famous_Planets.OXP

These can be downloaded from the Elite wiki at http://wiki.alioth.net

Bugs and Feedback

1.1 Fixed bug with shipdata.plist where equipment wasn't selected as 'true' correctly.
1.2 Fixed bug with shipdata.plist where equipment was erroneously selected.
Fixed bug with chance encounter ship location, which was making it almost impossible to locate.
1.3 Fixed bugs with ship AI preventing correct behaviour around the pulsar
Fixed bugs causing ships to crash when docking at Pulsar Station
Removed extraneous ships from planetinfo.plist
Added Tianve Pulsar specific equipment item, descriptions and availability
Added player interaction to internal character
Revised planet descriptions
Altered in game graphics

Feedback and bug reports on the forum www.aegidian.org/bb or in person to [email protected]

Nice one!

(Psst: "disgarded" --> "discarded")

Also, it might be better to say
"into your Oolite save directory, which, by default, can be located in the following locations:
Mac: ...
Windows: ...
Linux: ~/oolite-saves/
"
rather than "oolite.app/oolite-saves" as that is not the default save-dir, at least, under Linux or Mac.

Documentation niggles aside, very nice

I am missing 'moved the pulsar to its correct location again' among the fixed bugs. Hope you have done it?!? If not, we probably will see version 1.3.1 soon?

Note: together with the pulsar itself you also need to move all waypoints in both AIs.

drew wrote:

Added Tianve Pulsar specific equipment item, descriptions and availability

Yep. Works. Got one!

drew wrote:

Added player interaction to internal character

Yep. Met R. when approaching the Pulsar Station. Maybe the lady was a bit pissed at the guy who set up all the billboards that sell "Status Quo" as a true story, thus blowing her cover...

drew wrote:

Altered in game graphics

There I noted something peculiar that was not there with the old tianve oxp:
(dang, I should have taken a screenshot...) When entering the pulsar monitoring station I can see a dashed white or light grey line around the docking bay, at about 5% of the depth of the bay (hard to describe... If this does not make sense to you, I'll shoot the screen next time ).
Game settings: 800x600 full screen, reduced detail on, wireframe off, detailed planets off, shader effects not available (Don't laugh, that's the best I could get without a gfx card, and it gives me up to 23FPS on a sunny day!).

Yours, Christian

Commander McLane wrote:

I am missing 'moved the pulsar to its correct location again' among the fixed bugs. Hope you have done it?!? If not, we probably will see version 1.3.1 soon?

Note: together with the pulsar itself you also need to move all waypoints in both AIs.

Oddly enough, the position in the current config is the 'original' original position - so I'm leaving it where it is! You wouldn't want a pulsar very close to a planet to be honest - pretty well sort of, erm, extremely dangerous really.

It's dangerous work moving a pulsar about anyway!

Yep. Met R. when approaching the Pulsar Station. Maybe the lady was a bit pissed at the guy who set up all the billboards that sell "Status Quo" as a true story, thus blowing her cover...

Strangely, there is also an 'in book' reference to the same, in the second edition of SQ...

Excerpt from Status Quo 2nd Edition wrote:

Ahead the ad-boards loomed. These ads were everywhere nowadays. They seemed to spring up almost overnight. The Your-Ad-Here company was backed by a huge cartel and seemed to have completely taken over the market. Rebecca could see one with the lurid advertising for the Pulsar, another board proclaimed some new book that had just been published. She squinted at the text as it blurred past her, the author's name seemed oddly familiar.

Some sort of weird intertextuality going on... can't be a coincidence, surely?

There I noted something peculiar that was not there with the old tianve oxp:
(dang, I should have taken a screenshot...) When entering the pulsar monitoring station I can see a dashed white or light grey line around the docking bay, at about 5% of the depth of the bay (hard to describe... If this does not make sense to you, I'll shoot the screen next time ).
Game settings: 800x600 full screen, reduced detail on, wireframe off, detailed planets off, shader effects not available (Don't laugh, that's the best I could get without a gfx card, and it gives me up to 23FPS on a sunny day!).

This might be something to do with the additions the good Commander made to allow docking to actually work at the Pulsar Station... I'll check into it...

Cheers,

Drew.

drew wrote:

Strangely, there is also an 'in book' reference to the same, in the second edition of SQ...

A big "booohh!" for blatant advertising here (and for an ineffective one, too, because you should at least provide a link to it).

Now that the billboards come to my attention again - as they have neither engines nor Q-fuel, should they not appear as passive objects like asteroids on the radar screen? I would not even mind getting a bounty for removing them

drew wrote:

This might be something to do with the additions the good Commander made to allow docking to actually work at the Pulsar Station... I'll check into it...

What do you mean with "docking to actually work"? I've been docking in the monitoring station countless times before. Although - the dorking pilot always dropped me into an upright docking slot in the old tianve oxp, and into a horizontal now. Maybe it was a good thing to get the more "roundish" python before I first visited the monistation instead of trying to enter with a "generally more flat" cobby?

Another idea that popped up in my mind tonight: Why don't you make the pulsar object a kind of asteroid? You could shape it to add the rays, and attempting to fly through the rays could even be harmful to the ship doing so (although this would be a collision, not a ray burst damage, but dead is dead...). Of course, the pulsar object should be at least as indestructible as a station.

And as you are stuffing the system with more than enough tourists and other non-spacers, how about some teens doing a kessel run around the pulsar? Maybe the one or other might demonstrate how it is to be killed by the pulsars rays

Yours, Christian

A big "booohh!" for blatant advertising here (and for an ineffective one, too, because you should at least provide a link to it).

Were you referring to this link?

Another idea that popped up in my mind tonight: Why don't you make the pulsar object a kind of asteroid? You could shape it to add the rays, and attempting to fly through the rays could even be harmful to the ship doing so (although this would be a collision, not a ray burst damage, but dead is dead...). Of course, the pulsar object should be at least as indestructible as a station.

To paraphrase a certain Doctor...

"I'm a writer, not a javascript programmer!"



Cheers,

Drew.

drew wrote:

Were you referring to this link?

Ouch, that hurt my ears! No need to shout.

drew wrote:

"I'm a writer, not a javascript programmer!"

I am neither, I am just wearing my fountainhead-of-creativity-hat here.

Yours, Christian

drew wrote:

A big "booohh!" for blatant advertising here (and for an ineffective one, too, because you should at least provide a link to it).

Were you referring to this link?

Another idea that popped up in my mind tonight: Why don't you make the pulsar object a kind of asteroid? You could shape it to add the rays, and attempting to fly through the rays could even be harmful to the ship doing so (although this would be a collision, not a ray burst damage, but dead is dead...). Of course, the pulsar object should be at least as indestructible as a station.

To paraphrase a certain Doctor...

"I'm a writer, not a javascript programmer!"



Cheers,

Drew.

Been thinking about the Pulsar...

Does anybody know if it would be possible to put a Thargoid Laser in the centre of the pulsar:

- Change its colour - more suitable to the colour of the pulsar itself
- have it fire constantly and in random directions.

This would represent the emissions of deadly rays from the Pulsar itself

As ever, just a thought, I have these strange wild imaginings sometimes.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Does anybody know if it would be possible to put a Thargoid Laser in the centre of the pulsar:

- Change its colour - more suitable to the colour of the pulsar itself
- have it fire constantly and in random directions.

This would represent the emissions of deadly rays from the Pulsar itself.

What about modelling lots of plasma turrets that look like hills or bumps onto the pulsar and which randomly fire their plasma at everything that's there?

The slower-moving plasma, especially if the right colour, would then look like an energy storm of sorts and actually have that ingame effect, too.

Lestradae wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Does anybody know if it would be possible to put a Thargoid Laser in the centre of the pulsar:

- Change its colour - more suitable to the colour of the pulsar itself
- have it fire constantly and in random directions.

This would represent the emissions of deadly rays from the Pulsar itself.

What about modelling lots of plasma turrets that look like hills or bumps onto the pulsar and which randomly fire their plasma at everything that's there?

The slower-moving plasma, especially if the right colour, would then look like an energy storm of sorts and actually have that ingame effect, too.

These are pretty cool ideas! Would there need to be something added though to stop NPCs from "retaliating" against the pulsar?

Ideas are the only thing I can really bring to Oolite (and a little background fiction of course) - some of them are good ones too!

If shaderfied planets become standard then a shaderfied Pulsar perhaps using a variant of the camo' shader mixed with the freaky thargoid shader would really give us a "pulsar".

Plus throwing out plasma and deadly streams of energy really would make it (even more) a sight to behold - and add an element of danger too! (You'd earn that bumper sticker!)

Disembodied wrote:

These are pretty cool ideas! Would there need to be something added though to stop NPCs from "retaliating" against the pulsar?

Probably not yet, thanks to a bug Commander McLane found a while ago, but yes, it would make sense to override ship scripts in tianve to make them ignore the pulsar as a target!

DH, you can use Ahruman test planet .dat to do a 'proper' pulsar in 1.73.4 already! All it's missing is a Griff!

Thargoid wrote:

Sounds like a perfect use for the MASC'M code to me - planet-sized of course. As you wouldn't want the planet appearing on the scanner anyway, if it didn't then NPCs couldn't lock onto it.

Or easier: define a scan_class = CLASS_NO_DRAW for that "planet". That way there is no countermeasure possible to draw it. I used it with Oolite 1.65. In later versions is was no longer valid in shipdata, but at least since 1.73 you can use it again.