Oolite Bulletins

I'm a bit of an old school man myself and I like the original ships. Having said that I'm not against the fantastic new versions that are around at the moment, so I'd like to use the Deepspace, Griffs normals, and Neolite ships all together.

I have downloaded all the different versions (Griff's are from the all in one Dizzy pack), but I'm slightly confused as to how I should install them all.

I have seen that Griff's and Deepspace's ships come with overide plists (not sure about the neolite one as I haven't examined it yet). But how do they all work together? Do they all just attempt to override the core ships? Or with they attempt to override each other? Should I leave the overide plists in all, one or none of the packages? I'm a tad confused!

Something else which may (or may not) confuse the issue is that I'm also using Griff's new player only ship too. Some months ago I bought a Supercobra, so I have edited the Griffs ship data performance details to match the supercobra, added my decal, to make my own unique Supercobra!

Will that have any bearing on what I was asking above. My own thoughts are that it wont, but I'm not experienced enough to be sure.

Just as a small aside, is there an easy way of making my own ship the first rotating ship that you see on loading? I think in the past (when using just a cobra III) I have changed a key to match the original cobra III key, which worked fine. But now with my own unique ship, if I do that, my save file doesn't recognise it.

I wondered if a slightly renamed/edited copy of my unique ship could be placed in the add ons folder and ulitised in some way?

Sorry for all the long and involved questions!

the dizzy griff shippack's 'shipdata-overrides.plist' & 'shipyard-overrides.plist' will remove the appearance of the core ships in the game - they can still be conjured up and referenced by OXP's - they're not removed from the game entirely, they just have their roles changed to 'unused' (which won't ever be selected by the oolite system populator code, and their chances of appearing in the shipyard screen set to 0). You can just remove these 2 files from the oxp and you'll have the default ships back and no clashes between the oxp and the others.

I think the best solution for you is to remove 'shipdata-overrides.plist' & 'shipyard-overrides.plist' from the griff oxp and use the non override config files in Deepspaces's oxp, this way you'll get the all the shipsets working together.

Cheers Griff. To be honest though I don't really want to see the core ships (although I accept and oxp may still use them) so should I use one set of overide files at least to achieve this?

actually, now i think about it, the neolite ships will overwrite the default shipset and stop them appearing by default, so add that oxp, then add the DeepSpace shipset but use the non-override configs supplied with it, then add the Dizzy Griff bundle oxp but go to it's config folder and delete the shipdata-overides.plist & shipyard-overrids.plist from it and you'll be good to go, you'll get the neoolite, deepspace & griff ships appearing, but not the default set

Cheers Griff. Thats worked a treat.

Just one other question you may be able to help me with? I have your excellent Boa and Krait remakes in the game but I fancied renaming them (nothing personal!).

This was fine with the Boa. It still appeared in the "list" of rolling ships at the start of the game. But since renaming the Krait/s... they don't. I didnt think changing the name was specific to any other details that would prevent it from working. Is that not right?

you might need to edit the demoships.list in the oxp, by default it wants to show the... ...ships, if they've been renamed oolite won't be able to find them, just edit the demoships.plist to have your renamed kraits in there.

also, it's probably best not to rename the 'template' kraits as all the kraits that actually appear in game are like_shipped to them, if you've renamed the template but not ammended the like_ship line in each 'proper' krait, they'll not appear in game (plus there will be errors in your log about unresolvable like_ship entries).

If you just want to change the name that appears under them on the demo screen and when you target them in game, just search the shipdata.plist for the line and edit the name to whatever you want, you don't have to change any of the ship 'key names' (ie. the first line in each ships definition in the shipdata.plist - such as line 12 or line 57), they won't clash with any other oxps - unless another evil 'Griff' joins the forum and starts OXP'ing and releasing his own set of ships

Hi Griff,

Yeah, the only things I changed were anything that started with the "Name =" line. As I say that was fine for the boa.

However I noticed that in the example lines you gave above (12 & 57) it gives: "griff_krait_chrome_template" rather than "Griff_Krait_chrome_blue" as you suggested.

So should I rename the demoships plist to have "template" at the end of the line?

dalek501: If you want to rename ships, I think your safest bet would be to change their display_name rather the actual name in the shipdata.plist. display_name is what is shown in the screen, while name can also be used as identifier internally by scripts, so it would be best left as is. If display_name does not exist, it defaults to the name key, but you can always add it to change it to whatever you want.

OK cool.

Ive reinstalled the oxp and they are appeaing as normal again. So if I create a display_name key, would it go above or below the name key? Or doesnt it matter?

dalek501 wrote:

OK cool.

Ive reinstalled the oxp and they are appeaing as normal again. So if I create a display_name key, would it go above or below the name key? Or doesnt it matter?

It doesn't matter. Anywhere inside the ship definition dictionary is good.

Lovely stuff. That seems to have done the trick.

Just to update this a bit, I've been tinkering and for one of my tests I removed the neolite and deepspace ships, but when I did this the griff ships didn't overide the core ships. I checked to make sure the overide plists were back in place, and held shift, but they didn't overide. Any ideas?

I've been trying to sort this myself to save the hassle for others, and it seems like it may only be the opening rotating ship that isn't replaced.

I have looked at the overide plist and "cobra3-player" isn't mentioned. Is this why the opening cobra is the core one and not Griffs?

hi, the griff oxp won't be able to change the 'cobra3-player' ship appearing on the title screen, i think oolite must be hard coded to find a ship of this name and display it on the title screen, and the only ship with that name is the one in the default shipset

Griff wrote:

hi, the griff oxp won't be able to change the 'cobra3-player' ship appearing on the title screen, i think oolite must be hard coded to find a ship of this name and display it on the title screen, and the only ship with that name is the one in the default shipset

Yep. The only way to change the “demo screen 1” ship is to redefined cobra3-player.