Oolite Bulletins

Hi,

Would it be possible next to your legal Status in the F5 screen if you are either an Offender or Fugitive to display the bounty as well?

I just thought it would be really cool.

I don't know if that's possible... but as someone who often runs illegal, I rather like that idea.
In fact, I like it a lot... the wizards of dev will have an answer.

It certainly gives you something to aim for...

"Nah, I don't think 100cr is nearly enough! Muwahahaha!"

Darkbee wrote:

"Nah, I don't think 100cr is nearly enough! Muwahahaha!"

Too right!

I'd be too tempted to see how high a "rating" I could get.
...especially while testing OXPs.

I think my idea has released a lot of "dark pirate" inner feelings!

Just let it all out, you will feel better in the morning.

I’m no pirate… never gutted an innocent trader yet… I’m a contrabandista!

Well, it would be nice to know. Just for educational purposes of course.

I'm innocent too, naturally. Why, there's no spacer alive who could say for a fact they've ever seen me gullyin' some poor innocent trader. That we may be involved in perfectly legitimate rescue and salvage operations from time to time or acting as private contractors protecting the interests of impoverished dirtside countries, well.. What's not innocent about that?

Local system police apparently have a bit of a problem with our cargo sometimes, but we're usually in and out of the station before they even have to bother with switching on the lights for us. When there's a local need for medical supplies or firearms that are surely intended for the legitimate sportsman and collector's markets, there's no point in taking up the local police officers' valuable time with such trifles. In and out quick, so they don't usually even have to divert from their usual duties is best all around for everyone.

And so far as that "Sentinel Station" thing that went missing in the Lasoce system, well.. Careless of them to mislay such a big ugly hulking thing as that. That's what I'd call it. Pure carelessness.

But yeah, it'd be at least educational sometimes to know what sort of a bounty may be being offered by misinformed individuals, at least until one has the computer records corrected.

Technically it's possible, however it's slightly unlikely it'll appear in the core game, since you can already (and easily) make an OXP for people who must know their 'worth' down to the last credit.

I believe Commander McLane did make such an oxp a while ago, or maybe he just did one that displayed the player's cargo & passenger reputations. If it doesn't display the player's bounty already, you need to add 'Bounty: ' + player.bounty to the strings it displays...

Display_reputation.oxp only deals with what it says on the tin: displaying the player's cargo- and passenger-ferrying reputation.

Of course it would be easy to create another OXP that displays also the player's bounty on the manifest screen. However, displaying it on the status screen is a little trickier. I think it would need modifying the code.

Personally, though, I like the little amount of vagueness in the descriptive form. Everybody knows (or can know) that "offender" means any number between 1 and 50, and "fugitive" any number above 50. Personally I don't want more precision by default.

Commander McLane wrote:

Personally, though, I like the little amount of vagueness in the descriptive form. Everybody knows (or can know) that "offender" means any number between 1 and 50, and "fugitive" any number above 50. Personally I don't want more precision by default.

I agree. I would not want to have Oolite look like yet another RPG full of experience points stuff.

another_commander wrote:

I agree. I would not want to have Oolite look like yet another RPG full of experience points stuff.

Well, there's nothing to say that a bounty would necessarily follow the legal status perfectly. A bounty might be withdrawn when you go clean, but it won't necessarily go down when you go from fugitive to offender. Also, if you were formerly fugitive and go fugitive again, it wouldn't seem to follow that the second time could ever have a lower bounty than the first.

Having said that, you would most definitely not want it as the default. You want enough information collected that an OXP could produce such a feature, but the default should be exactly as it currently is.

Such an OXP might collect the Galcop version of the rap-sheet. This would actually be quite useful for extensions that provide missions with the Galactic Navy, et al, as certain codes of conduct might be deemed "inappropriate" for higher-profile missions.

This would counteract the RPGish aspect but make it closer to the real-world in the way people react.

The purpose of experience points in an RPG is that you gain something from them. Legal status isn't really any more like that than the kill count to achieve Elite or whatever status. That only resembles RPG experience points in that certain missions and etc only become available if the rating is high enough. That's kind of necessary though, so that opportunities are spaced out a bit and a beginner doesn't tangle with a mission they wouldn't have enough actual game experience to have any chance of completing successfully.

But neither number is like an RPG where one would gain abilities or "hit points", so I don't see where there's much danger of Oolite heading in that direction in any case.

Getting more proficient in Oolite is entirely accomplished by actual practice and learning things about the game and the Ooniverse. There is no "levelling up" or etc. I haven't seen much if any sign of people in these forums obsessing over their "rating" and I doubt anyone would start obsessing over the number the game uses to track legal status. It's a matter of something that would be nifty to know, maybe, but would give no direct advantage in the game that I can think of.

Displaying the player's current bounty as a hard number might be a bit crude; it would also let the player know exactly how many jumps they would need to make before they were clean again. It might be more interesting, using Commander McLane's Display Reputation OXP as a model, if various rankings were used instead: Rapscallion, Rogue, Brigand, Public Enemy, Shoot on Sight, etc.

imipak wrote:

Well, there's nothing to say that a bounty would necessarily follow the legal status perfectly.

In fact there is. In Oolite, "legal status" and "bounty" are exactly the same thing. In the old scripting system (and internally) it's called "legal status", in JS-scripting it's "called" bounty. But in all cases it is simply a positive integer. The terms "offender" and "fugitive" are merely a human-readable expression of the fact that the bounty is between 1 and 50 ("offender") or above 50 ("fugitive").

So the bounty doesn't only follow the legal status perfectly, it simply is the legal status.