Oolite Bulletins

Ooooorsome!

i love the key's on the maps. nice touch, and a useful memory aid for those species without the memory gene.

whilst i can remember all teh keys, like [shift I] for info, [shift ^] for routes etc, i did wonder if it might be an idea to add the relevant 'buttons to press' onto the screen somewhere, more for noobies really, but it needn't be annoying for them that know.

just a thought

?

Yodeebe wrote:

Ooooorsome!

Yodeebe wrote:

whilst i can remember all teh keys, like [shift I] for info, [shift ^] for routes etc, i did wonder if it might be an idea to add the relevant 'buttons to press' onto the screen somewhere, more for noobies really, but it needn't be annoying for them that know.

Hehe - yes... and no .-) The keys are different between systems based on your personal language layout/codepage/whatever and as most of them are also configurable via keyconfig.plist it would more confuse than help. That's why we have choosen the keys that are the same ones on all platforms.

Have fun with it...

Great great great work guys!
This one will definitely (or should I say... indefinitely!) be "glued" in my AddOns folder.

In fact, it was already "walled in" since v0.6...

Something I’ve noticed… the background sounds continue when the game is paused.
This includes the injector rumble and the hyperspace countdown (which puts the countdown out of step).

El Viejo wrote:

Something I’ve noticed… the background sounds continue when the game is paused.
This includes the injector rumble and the hyperspace countdown (which puts the countdown out of step).

Good catch, El Viejo.

As the hyperspace countdown is defined in customsounds.plist, there's not much we can do. The only chance would be to create single sounds for the last five seconds and only keep a background layer in customsounds.plist. But as the oxp is intended to be available as single packs too (customsounds, images and scriptcontrolled ambient/fx) it is no option.

The other thing is the engine stuff. This is script controlled and to stop these sounds when the game gets paused would require to store the game clock and compare against the stored value. I'm a bit worried about adding additional checks as the script already needs quite a few milliseconds to run. I've spent a whole while in speeding it up, so it doesn't hit the timelimiter in Oolite anymore. And I'm also not sure what happens when the sounds are restarted then (gap? would be nasty.).

Probably we'll have to live with it for the moment (but I'll do some tests .-))

Another thing is. Eric has send me today a report about an error when he had a Press-Space-Event .-)
It seems that some of the sounds from Aegidians customsounds.plist can cause trouble for some soundcards (digital clipping). I'll go and normalize/level these sounds and the overhauled sounds will be available then as additional download. BGS-A itself will be updated too.

Cool... I don't normally pause when hyperspacing or injecting, so it's no problem.

Unrelated to this oxp... I've only just noticed that you can now pause when docked.

Svengali wrote:

As the hyperspace countdown is defined in customsounds.plist, there's not much we can do. The only chance would be to create single sounds for the last five seconds and only keep a background layer in customsounds.plist. But as the oxp is intended to be available as single packs too (customsounds, images and scriptcontrolled ambient/fx) it is no option.

What? I don’t see how that precludes having a working, scripted countdown.

I pointed out quite some time ago that a fixed countdown sound does not work properly and never will. There are several reasons: pausing, the Time Acceleration Factor, and the fact that ships can have custom countdown periods spring to mind. The only way to get a countdown that sounds right is to set up a timer in response to the playerStartedJumpCountdown(time) event and play each word as a separate sound.

Ahruman wrote:

Svengali wrote:

As the hyperspace countdown is defined in customsounds.plist, there's not much we can do. The only chance would be to create single sounds for the last five seconds and only keep a background layer in customsounds.plist. But as the oxp is intended to be available as single packs too (customsounds, images and scriptcontrolled ambient/fx) it is no option.

What? I don’t see how that precludes having a working, scripted countdown.

This oxp is splitted in 3 different parts - the customsounds part should also work as standalone thing (and will be relesased as standalone oxp too). Even if this means that the countdown doesn't match the different setting for (only a few) player-ships or after pausing.

Svengali wrote:

This oxp is splitted in 3 different parts - the customsounds part should also work as standalone thing (and will be relesased as standalone oxp too). Even if this means that the countdown doesn't match the different setting for (only a few) player-ships or after pausing.

That doesn’t explain why the standalone part can’t have a countdown script.

Ahruman wrote:

That doesn’t explain why the standalone part can’t have a countdown script.

He! Right. But I've never said this.-)

Thing is I'm currently in the last stage of scripting for the new Vector, then the playtesting starts. After that OXPConfig is waiting. And doing the jump sounds takes time as this is one of Aegidians files and I don't have the raw-data.

I finally got around to play Oolite again after weeks and weeks and boy, am I impressed with this OXP!! It really adds a lot to my experience, thank you for putting this together!

Enhancement request: Is it possible to have multiple ambient sounds playing at the same time? At the moment, when I leave a station I get the background radio chatter but it stops abruptly when I initiate the hyperspace jump. Also, in the station the background noise stops when I go to the options screen--as far as I'm concerned this doesn't need to be the case.

maik wrote:

I finally got around to play Oolite again after weeks and weeks and boy, am I impressed with this OXP!! It really adds a lot to my experience, thank you for putting this together!

Hehe, thanks .-)

maik wrote:

Enhancement request: Is it possible to have multiple ambient sounds playing at the same time? At the moment, when I leave a station I get the background radio chatter but it stops abruptly when I initiate the hyperspace jump. Also, in the station the background noise stops when I go to the options screen--as far as I'm concerned this doesn't need to be the case.

The script switches the set of used sounds when jumpcountdown gets started, because the soundsources are shared between the sets. In the jump set (WITCH) the third soundsource is not used (chatter layer), because I've thought about the single file countdown, but haven't got the time to create the files for it. And the Options screens are FX excluded on purpose. It is meant as a resting point, so there's no need for FX stuff (I think), but a fadeout option would be pretty cool. Ahruman has already said that he's thinking about switching to OpenAL, then we'll see what kind of things are possible.

And you're right - the chatter needs some tweaks (and we knew it before), but considered it good enough for a first release. Anyway - after finishing the two remaining oxp-updates to v1.74 I can start working on BGS again, so this was a good reminder .-)

Svengali wrote:

And the Options screens are FX excluded on purpose. It is meant as a resting point, so there's no need for FX stuff (I think), but a fadeout option would be pretty cool. Ahruman has already said that he's thinking about switching to OpenAL, then we'll see what kind of things are possible.

I use the option screen after every docking at a station to save my progress, but just very shortly to hit quick save which takes me right back to my info screen. So for me, just continuing the background noise would actually be the better option, maintaining the atmosphere. When you're in mid-flight and hit pause I agree, all sounds should stop.

Just when I naively think that Oolite cannot get any better, someone comes out with an OXP like this. Great work!

I just committed a cardinal sin… in station space, I went to hit the comms log key, but hit tab by mistake and triggered my energy bomb. There was no explosion noise effects from the e-bomb, just silence and the on-screen message. I went back and bought another e-bomb and tried again… same result. I hardly ever, if ever, use the e-bomb, so I’ve not noticed it til tonight’s mistake.