Oolite Bulletins

Since I lack any of the necessary skills to make an OXP of my own, I thought I'd post my ideas here. I have an idea for a GalCop OXP. Here are some thoughts:

- GalCop transponder. This piece of hardware can be bought from hacker outposts, and when activated makes your ship show up purple on other ships' radar screens. This is often enough to scare away pirates, and in some cases might even fool the cops themselves (especially if you are flying a Viper or other GalCop-favoured ship). Obviously impersonating a police officer is a very serious crime and if you get caught your legal status will be affected accordingly.

- GalCop recruitment! Join the GalCops! Anyone with a clean legal status and a rating above "mostly harmless" can join the force for an exciting career in law enforcement. A good way for young pilots to build up their ratings and bank account.

-- Signing up commits you to a 12 patrol tour of duty, after which you can either return to civilian life or sign up for an other tour.
--When you sign up your ship is automatically sold at market rates and replaced with a standarad issue GalCop Viper (or other oxp-added Galcop ship, ie barracuda). GalCop transponder fitted as standard, of course. Details of your own ship are stored by the game, to be offered for sale again at the end of your tour. (You don't get an option to keep the viper at the end of the tour)
-- You aren't allowed to buy / sell equipment on your viper while you are under GalCop contract.
-- You aren't allowed to buy cargo when you are under GalCop contract, and your viper has no scoops or passenger cabins.
-- Payment is 100 credits/patrol, and you get to keep any bounty & kill ratings you make on the job.
-- Recruitment is only available in relatively safe worlds. After your first few patrols, you will be ordered to report to a slightly more dangerous system, and patrol there, and so on until finishing your tour in a really dangerous system.
-- Each patrol is a formation flight with other Galcop ships to the witchpoint and back, shooting up any bad guys you see on the way.
-- In addition to the regular patrols, you may sometimes be called out when someone starts a ruckus on the station's doorstep.
-- If you are caught breaking the law (minor offence) while on duty, you will be reprimanded and fined upon return to the station, and then returned to duty. Major crimes would see your contract broken and you immediately reduced to fugitive status. This means your patrol-mates will turn on you, so you'd better hyper out of there pronto.
-- Of course you don't need to go on a killing spree if you can't be bothered to finish your tour properly. There's nothing to stop you just going AWOL in your shiny viper. They can fetch a nice price on the open market. Naturally, failing to report back on time from a patrol will break your GalCop contract (allowing you to buy cargo / hardware again) and lead to an instant fugitive status.
-- You may also be contacted by certain... shady characters, who will offer a generous supplement to your meagre cop's income. In exchange, they might ask you to ensure that a certain flight of ships doesn't get destroyed by your GalCop patrol. Quite how you achieve this is up to you, of course. You might try to mislead your fellow GalCops, or get them killed in an earlier encounter, or get in the way of their weapons fire, or ECM their missiles, or ram them, or bribe them (risky), or even shoot them... Of course in the latter case, you really do lose any kind of plausible deniability. And even if you manage to pull it off without making your interference obvious, there's no guarantee that you won't get found out anyway, and suddenly reduced to fugitive during a later patrol.
--Successful completion of a tour will earn you a 100 credit bonus and a nice little message on your status screen. Perhaps a medal of some kind. Extra medals might be awarded for exceptional acts of bravery.
-- A history of policework might make you more or less elligible for certain other missions available in other OXPs.
-- If you sign up for subsequent tours of duty, you will be thrown straight in to the dangerous systems, and might even qualify for special GalCop missions, worth extra cash and medals.
-- If you have a high enough status with Galcop, then you might get some perks as a civilian, after your tours have ended. 'Undercover' missions might be available, and you might even have enough influence to make local law enforcement turn a blind eye to any minor misdemeanours you may inadvertently commit...

Interesting ideas. To avoid confusion you should call it "Galactic Police" instead of "Galcop", though. GalCop has another meaning as well. First and foremost it is short for Galactic Co-operative of Worlds, the political structure which combines the 2048 systems in the eight charts.

dogscoff wrote:

- GalCop transponder. This piece of hardware can be bought from hacker outposts, and when activated makes your ship show up purple on other ships' radar screens. This is often enough to scare away pirates, and in some cases might even fool the cops themselves (especially if you are flying a Viper or other GalCop-favoured ship). Obviously impersonating a police officer is a very serious crime and if you get caught your legal status will be affected accordingly.

I somehow like the idea, but I am not sure about how OXPable it is.

You would need an alternative pirateAI to deal with the case, and an alternative route1patrolAI as well, or attach a ship script to all pirates and police ships, which is a litte awkward. But it is doable.

Note, however, that the player could not switch this transponder on and off. He would mask as a police ship permanently, as long as the transponder is installed. Which means that he would always become a fugitive in the main station aegis, which is heavily controlled by GalCop. So the main stations would become no-go areas, which ultimately defeats the purpose of Oolite.

dogscoff wrote:

- GalCop recruitment! Join the GalCops! Anyone with a clean legal status and a rating above "mostly harmless" can join the force for an exciting career in law enforcement. A good way for young pilots to build up their ratings and bank account.
...
--When you sign up your ship is automatically sold at market rates and replaced with a standarad issue GalCop Viper (or other oxp-added Galcop ship, ie barracuda).

Again, I like the idea, but it stops right at this point. Currently there is no way in Oolite to automatically switch player ships. Workarounds are again more or less awkward. By the way, no actual police ship can currently be bought or flown by the player.

dogscoff wrote:

- GalCop transponder. This piece of hardware can be bought from hacker outposts, and when activated makes your ship show up purple on other ships' radar screens.

I somehow like the idea, but I am not sure about how OXPable it is.

You would need an alternative pirateAI to deal with the case, and an alternative route1patrolAI as well, or attach a ship script to all pirates and police ships, which is a litte awkward. But it is doable.

Note, however, that the player could not switch this transponder on and off. He would mask as a police ship permanently, as long as the transponder is installed. Which means that he would always become a fugitive in the main station aegis, which is heavily controlled by GalCop. So the main stations would become no-go areas, which ultimately defeats the purpose of Oolite.

Shame. Although with certain OXPs installed (anarchies, FTZ), life as a fugitive does become a little more playable.

I also forgot to mention in my first post that the cop transponder should be available to pirates as well. Every now and again, a purple lollipop would turn out to be a pirate.

dogscoff wrote:

- GalCop recruitment! Join the GalCops! Anyone with a clean legal status and a rating above "mostly harmless" can join the force for an exciting career in law enforcement. A good way for young pilots to build up their ratings and bank account.
...
--When you sign up your ship is automatically sold at market rates and replaced with a standarad issue GalCop Viper (or other oxp-added Galcop ship, ie barracuda).

Again, I like the idea, but it stops right at this point. Currently there is no way in Oolite to automatically switch player ships. Workarounds are again more or less awkward. By the way, no actual police ship can currently be bought or flown by the player.

Damn shame. Viper was my second favourite ship back in my Elte II: Frontier days.

Commander McLane wrote:

Note, however, that the player could not switch this transponder on and off. He would mask as a police ship permanently, as long as the transponder is installed. Which means that he would always become a fugitive in the main station aegis, which is heavily controlled by GalCop. So the main stations would become no-go areas, which ultimately defeats the purpose of Oolite.

I obviously know nothing about Oolite's API, but why not? I can turn my cloaking device on and off.

I think that as there is no way to assign a keypress to the action, there is no practical way to switch OXP equipment.

maik wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

Note, however, that the player could not switch this transponder on and off. He would mask as a police ship permanently, as long as the transponder is installed. Which means that he would always become a fugitive in the main station aegis, which is heavily controlled by GalCop. So the main stations would become no-go areas, which ultimately defeats the purpose of Oolite.

I obviously know nothing about Oolite's API, but why not? I can turn my cloaking device on and off.

Like Cmdr James says:

Cloaking device = in-built equipment = key already assigned to it = you can toggle it on/off

any OXP-equipment = no key assigned to it by the original Oolite code = no toggling

Could it be a missile-mounted piece of equipment? I know a lot of other equipment OXPs do this.

Select your "transponder missile", fire it, and then the OXP switches you into "fake viper" mode for a set period of time - maybe 3 minutes, or until you next dock (whichever happens first.) I'm sure a fun technobabble explanation could be dreamed up to justify this implementation.

Not a perfect solution, admittedly, but making the transponder a disposible piece of hardware has the advantage that you can easily get rid of the evidence before docking.

I imagine the ability to control OXP-created equipment directly is something that is often requested of the OOlite programmers. What are the chances of it ever being implemented?

dogscoff wrote:

I imagine the ability to control OXP-created equipment directly is something that is often requested of the OOlite programmers. What are the chances of it ever being implemented?

Quite slim, I'm afraid. The problem is not so much how to get Oolite to recognize key presses; we already have proof-of-concept code that allows four (or more, but a finite number anyway) keys to be assigned to user defined actions. The problem is that there are so many OXPs and so few keys. Conflicts between OXPs trying to assign equipment activation on the same keys are inevitable. There have been a couple of ideas around on how we could overcome this, but they all lead to an interface redesign, which can be of quite a substantial magnitude.

As my friend Kaks would say at this point, anyone wishing to have this feature in, feel free to dive in the code and give it a go. It's all there, available and open to the public. We would be glad to get your patch in the mainstream, if it is deemed a good solution.

Thargoid wrote:

But the other thing to mention of course is that you don't actually appear on your own scanner

Or on anybody else's, for that matter.

another_commander wrote:

The problem is that there are so many OXPs and so few keys. Conflicts between OXPs trying to assign equipment activation on the same keys are inevitable. There have been a couple of ideas around on how we could overcome this, but they all lead to an interface redesign, which can be of quite a substantial magnitude.

As my friend Kaks would say at this point, anyone wishing to have this feature in, feel free to dive in the code and give it a go.

Belatedly: did someone mention my name?

I've been having a bit of a think about how to implement this stuff without making it too complex for everybody involved, and I might have a solution...

Some extensive tests are in progress, I've got to say the initial results seem encouraging!

Kaks wrote:

I've been having a bit of a think about how to implement this stuff without making it too complex for everybody involved, and I might have a solution...

Some extensive tests are in progress, I've got to say the initial results seem encouraging!;-)

I think that a milestone in Oolite development was committed about half an hour ago. Someone get this guy the big wings avatar and a medal. Further tests seem to confirm that something big is on here.

another_commander wrote:

Someone get this guy the big wings avatar and a medal.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

What are you doing, standing here and staring? Go and use your admin powers!

Kaks= The hero of the
O o n i v e r s e