Oolite Bulletins

According to the wiki, you can redefine planet attributes in your copy of planetinfo.plist. (wiki:Planetinfo.plist)

You can also define an object in interstellar space:

<key>interstellar: 0 7 129</key>
<dict>
...
</dict>

My question is, what is this good for? What can you put in interstellar space? How do you get to Interstellar space, since you pass it by in witchspace. I must be missing something.

If you don't fly straight and level when making a witchjump, you'll likely as not end up in interstellar space. Try hauling back on the stick just before the jump countdown hits zero ...

...and be prepared for a little fight or two!

edgreenberg wrote:

According to the wiki, you can redefine planet attributes in your copy of planetinfo.plist. (wiki:Planetinfo.plist)

You can also define an object in interstellar space:

....My question is, what is this good for? What can you put in interstellar space?

Almost anything, including planets. Only dockable objects have a drawback: When launching from anything in interstellar space you end in normal space.

Hmm, I wonder if it would be desirable, and - more intriguingly from a personal point of view - actually achievable if we were to 'correct' this drawback for 1.75 & (M)NSR...

A few OXPs seem to rely on the current behaviour IIRC.

Kaks wrote:

Hmm, I wonder if it would be desirable, and - more intriguingly from a personal point of view - actually achievable if we were to 'correct' this drawback for 1.75 & (M)NSR...

A few OXPs seem to rely on the current behaviour IIRC.

Have it a scriptable option?

Legacy oxps relying on it - use the default - which is fall back to main system space - but if a flag is set - you stay in interstellar space...

Looking forward to 1.75 (and properly saving anywhere!)

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Looking forward to 1.75 (and properly saving anywhere!)

<wakes up>What's this... saving anywhere? Please explain<resumes slumber>

El Viejo wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Looking forward to 1.75 (and properly saving anywhere!)

<wakes up>What's this... saving anywhere? Please explain<resumes slumber>

It's still my hope that one day - you will be able to save anywhere natively from within Oolite rather than using the (excellent) saveanywhere.oxp hack.

It's the only thing I really don't like (I can't square away with my perception of the ooniverse) that the most desperate fugitive must battle through a hoard of vipers to dock with the main station (so that he can save his position).

It's a limitation on a genuine career criminal attitude and I don't like it - never have.

Ah… there we hold opposite opinions. I think that only being able to save at a station is one of the ‘magic’ bits of Elite/Oolite. Remember those first few promotions… ‘Right on Commander’ on your screen. Lots of damaged kit, but you’ve splashed the bandits… now all you’ve got to do is make it to a station alive… or it doesn’t count. As for criminals, the ability to dock under heavy Viper fire is a must for any career fugitive, be he pirate, privateer or contrabandista… it makes for an ‘interesting’ life.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

... that the most desperate fugitive must battle through a hoard of vipers to dock with the main station (so that he can save his position).

It's a limitation on a genuine career criminal attitude and I don't like it - never have.

So Renegade stations (Anarchies OXP) don't let you save? That would be remiss. I've seen one, but being a goody goody I would never dare dock on one.

Poro wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

... that the most desperate fugitive must battle through a hoard of vipers to dock with the main station (so that he can save his position).

It's a limitation on a genuine career criminal attitude and I don't like it - never have.

So Renegade stations (Anarchies OXP) don't let you save? That would be remiss. I've seen one, but being a goody goody I would never dare dock on one.

Unless you've got the saveanywhere.oxp installed (does this still work?) you can only save at Main Stations - because they are the only stations that are guaranteed to appear when you reload a game. OXP stations are not (not quite true - but you could remove the generating OXP inbetween save and reload) or you've docked with a random chance dockable object and that info is not in the save file on reload.

And I have to disagree with EV for exactly the reasons he states - it makes no sense that there aren't a multitude of places for the real/career fugitive to go/trade/hang-out outside Galcop and its main stations.

Oolite is not Elite - while it retains the essence of Elite, it is clearly so much more - nobody is complaining about Fuel Injectors and Q-mines are they? Saving at non-main stations was never an issue for Elite because that's all there was...

As previously stated this is a game code limitation - it does not fit into (my perception of) the Ooniverse - a fugitive may never have to (need to) visit a main station but in Oolite (RL(tm)) you must because that's the only place to save your progress - immersion kicked over the bar and into the crowd.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

It's the only thing I really don't like (I can't square away with my perception of the ooniverse) that the most desperate fugitive must battle through a hoard of vipers to dock with the main station (so that he can save his position).

It's a limitation on a genuine career criminal attitude and I don't like it - never have.

I feel ya, brah. One of my commanders put a promising criminal career on hold because he couldn't be arsed to have a nasty dogfight every time he wanted to lay his head down for the night.

But let me speculate for a bit ... an OXP can create new main station types, right? Like the torus, transhab, trade outpost, Nuit, etc. So couldn't an OXP create a station with max_police set to zero, which thus never launches any police to harrass fugitives? And create those stations in selected systems, like Anarchies? Yes, I guess you'd still have to dock manually (I think, but maybe not), but at least you could do it without a bunch of Vipers crawling up your butt. Okay, I'm definitely trying this!

Yes, it would break with the concept that the main stations are GalCop territory and are only minimally affected by local politics, but I think I can live with that.

Now, enhancing the core game to give OXP stations a "can-save-from" property, which authors can set true or false as is their wont, would be nice. And handling the scenario where the player saves at an OXP station, and then removes that OXP or it becomes non-functional due to core game changes, could be handled in one of two ways:

First, of course, the saving station would have to be recorded in the save file. Then, when you load the game and that station is no longer available, the game either

1. Displays a spinning question mark for that commander, same as with a missing OXP ship, or
2. Lets you load the commander, but when you launch you emerge from that system's main station.

The first way is more visible, the second more playable. But either one requires more work for the developers, and I never want to buy more work for somebody else.

So, pile on, folks. Tell me how misguided I am here.

Okay, after a brief test, I have confirmed that indeed you can make a main station that will not launch police. I was not able to make it dock you automatically when you have Fugitive status, though. Got some unexpected JS behaviors, due no doubt to deficiencies in my understanding of oolite's scripting environment. Primarily, System.mainStation.dockPlayer sounds like it should, you know, dock the player, but I guess it doesn't. Or maybe it only works if you're not a Fugitive.

Also, there's an event handler called playerDockingRefused, which never fired during my testing. It doesn't tell you which station you were refused from, anyway, so I'm not sure it would be safe to do the above dockPlayer call in it. Maybe if you did some extra checking to see if it was the main station you were trying to dock with.

Also, I think that having no-police stations somewhat disrupts the game balance: You can launch, sit in the mouth of the docking bay and kill everybody you see, clean or otherwise, and with no police around, you stay Clean. Dock, save your kills, rinse, repeat. I assume the NPC traffic to that station will eventually dwindle, but I saw the opportunity to rack up dozen or more kills without any real work or consequence just during my very limited testing.

Still, I haven't entirely rejected the idea of an Anarchy Station yet.

[EDIT: Well then! That System.mainStation.dockPlayer call works fine when called from a world script. I still get the "Docking denied" audio message, but it docks me anyway. And I've changed the station's ship script to use "this.dockPlayer", but haven't been able to test it yet. I'm still not happy with the world-script code, though ... presumably you could get the playerDockingRefused event from any arbitrary station, but since it doesn't tell you which station refused, my current code would dock you with the main station regardless. Quite a leap! I guess I need to add more code to check if it's the main station you're trying to dock with, although I'm not entirely sure how to do that.]

There is a break in the logic for me. A main station is also as far as I am aware the police centre for the system. A fugitive, by definition should not be welcome there. It is possible to dock and launch as a criminal, but its risky, much like you would expect.

I think the ultimate solution to the career criminal path should be some kind of network of pirate coves or similar that can be used to save. Thats assuming that a criminal career is worth (Im not making a value judgement here, if its wanted then cool) supporting properly.

Cmdr James wrote:

There is a break in the logic for me. A main station is also as far as I am aware the police centre for the system. A fugitive, by definition should not be welcome there. It is possible to dock and launch as a criminal, but its risky, much like you would expect.

I think the ultimate solution to the career criminal path should be some kind of network of pirate coves or similar that can be used to save.

I cannot disagree. And with Pirate Coves or Anarchies or something similar installed, along with Save Anywhere, you can pretty much have that now. As long as you're willing to put your finger in your ear and stand on one foot when you save. (At least that's how I remember it from when I tried it. No longer works in trunk, it seems.)

Cmdr James wrote:

Thats assuming that a criminal career is worth (Im not making a value judgement here, if its wanted then cool) supporting properly.

I'm totally and unequivocally against theft, murder, and the destruction of navigation buoys in real life. But in this game ... as DaddyHoggy implied, being a pirate is almost a viable alternative career path, and being able to save without risking death each time would pretty much put it over the top. If, as you say, you'd need to be among "your own kind" to do that, well that seems right to me too.