Oolite Bulletins

I've mentioned it a couple of times in other threads, but I find the dead zone of the mouse control really impinges on long range sensitive aiming - especially when using a military laser.

When the RMB instantly centres the controls - why is there any need for a dead zone? At the very least could it not be reduced within a plist? (Sorry if it already can be, I just haven't found it yet)

It is possible to aim sensitively, by noticing the point on your cross hair where movement begins, deliberately aiming wide, and then slowly bring the ship back on aim - but it takes a while. If I fail to hit an enemy at long distance, I want it to be because my skill wasn't good enough, not because I failed to fiddle around with the interface in just the right way.

Alternatively, do any linux users know if there is a joystick emulation program available? I was thinking that if the mouse-emulated-joystick controlled aim like it does now, I could then hold down a keyboard button to engage the sensitivity 'hat' feature and then fine tune my aim.

Poro wrote:

When the RMB instantly centres the controls - why is there any need for a dead zone?

I’ve been wondering this on an off for some time, and the only answer I can think of is that <whisper>aegidian is a keyboard player</whisper>.

So as of the next nightly, the dead zone does not apply to mice.

Great! This'll be the first time I've tried a 'trunk' build.

I know players are warned that they are not as stable as release builds - but have there been any truly horrible stories of OXPs going wildly wrong, or save games messing up?

Looking forward to it.

Any OXP that generates a deprecation warning in 1.74 won’t work in trunk. Your saved games are probably safe.

Ahruman wrote:

Any OXP that generates a deprecation warning in 1.74 won’t work in trunk. Your saved games are probably safe.

Plus any OXP that is only supported on 1.74 and nothing higher (like all of Thargoid's, and some others) won't work with trunk. At least those are listed on screen at startup. And yeah, my saved games have continued to work as normal. No sudden additions of a million credits or a thousand kills, darnit!

Thargoid wrote:

Most of mine will work, but you would have to remove the required.plist file from them.

It's deliberately set to only work with 1.74.99 and below to prevent some of the "bug reports" that turn out later to be due to trunk errors instead. Hence you have to deliberately change the OXP to get them to work, which serves as a warning and a sanity check...

I'm glad you said it, thus removing the temptation for me to say it. I considered adding this info in my original message, but figured if you wanted to come out with it, you would.

As an aside, this isn't really an "error" in trunk, it's a behavior they've changed by way of rooting out some of the more difficult bugs: The script time limit is catching a lot of scripts, from what I've seen over the past few days. The one of yours that I saw hit by it are drones_Launcher and stellarSerpents_head.js. I presume they aren't really in an infinite loop; one of the scripts I'm working on gets caught by it too, and it's definitely not "stuck". But to quote Ahruman, "I expect nightlies won’t be very popular for a while..."

The script time limiter has been relaxed to 0.25 seconds now (and, a while back, 2.0 seconds during startup). This is because I’m going on holiday next week and don’t expect to use the time to find script interface hot spots. :-)

Ahruman wrote:

I’m going on holiday next week and don’t expect to use the time to find script interface hot spots.

Good! You are one hard-workin' dude, I must say, and you deserve some time off. May your holiday be joyful and may it leave you refreshed and replenished.