Oolite Bulletins

Hi,

I started to work on comms Demo and trying to find a usefull way to communicate with other ships. Which pagroove asked if I can do. I am using a special equipment to enable comunications with the other ships just by priming the equipment and pressing n to give options.

I am at the moment working on Kaks initial idea about 3 options, Ask for credit, Insult and greet the captain of the targeted ship. And I achieved the first one.

The original code required to target a trader.

If the target of the player ship can be pirate, police, station, astreoid, cargo, thargoid, military or some thing else I can not thing about for the time being.

And I will try to find a way other OXP writers to access this OXP in a way. It will require a lot of coding time. And what I am asking you all is to contribute to that OXP by giving Ideas.

Kaks, since its your Idea to start with I will keep the original readme and add to it.

There are a lot of good ideas which exist in other OXP's like asking for fuel, changing manifest items(please don't spell as Manifest) or having special AI's to change the target ship AI with a pirate AI and get bounty on them.

Erm.
To avoid reinventing the wheel - the new Vector already has such a mechanism and if this works well I'll include it in Cabal_Common. Usage is fairly simple and pretty flexible and scripts only have to pass their data, can remove it when necessary, etc.

Edit: Should I put a small demo online, so you can take a look?

Ask for help (against pirates?) and ask if they need help...are 2 other things I'd like to see in the Comms options.
Traders might only be willing to help 10-75% of the time, maybe even affected by whether they have low/medium/high/full energy at that moment. One with low energy or already in a fleeing mode might never help, as expected.

Hi Okti,

I pm'd you some idea's in the earlier PM's.

But I repost them here

- Become part of the squadron if you fly close enough to other ships. They then ask you to join the group. Otherwise you have to take distance or otherwise they come after you.
- Inflight trading-- If you jettison 2 ton food you get 2 ton Computers or something like that.
- Insults -- Some commanders may first insult you then try to evoke conflicts of course you can insult too
- Insults from and the ability to insult to pirates

Thanks Kaks,

I already started a thread on Discusions on that subject. Finding out and implement your orijinal idea consumes a lot of time. During my spare time I will try to implement your orijinal idea first and than try to expand it by the help of the coomunity.

That was actualy posted in another thread a minute ago.

But after seeing pagrove's post I decided to post here as well.

Thanks you for having a look at what can be done out of that old demo!

Seeing that there are already more ideas here than in my own paltry excuse for an oxp, you might want to rename this thread (by editing the subject of your first post): maybe something like 'Comms Oxp Discussion' ?

Done that,

I think I'll strip out the bits for standard ships in my approach and make my comms-thingies only useable for mission specific stuff. This way it won't collide with your idea.

But please, check a few things before you are applying such comm-channels to ships:
- Standard primaryRole (trader, hunter, etc.) && standard shipscript or script_info key that specifies explicitely inclusion
- Legacy actions, specially the death_actions

Otherwise it is likely to break mission related things, specially if you are planning to change behaviours.

Good luck .-)

pagroove wrote:

- Insults from and the ability to insult to pirates

Would this then have an effect on the pirate's combat ability / behaviour.

You could have a crybaby pirate AI - you call them a little weed and they go all berserk on you, firing their missiles and q-mines without any real regard for strategy...
...or they change from trying to attack you with lasers to going kamikaze on yo ass
...or maybe the taunts unleash a deadly killer

Here we go for Alpa test Phase two;

This OXP project seems like it will take a long time.

If the OXP is installed A new equipment Communication Handler is installed.
You can prime the equipment By "N" and get the options by "n".

In two seconds you can change the options and after that time selected option may give other options.

Up two now I just implemented those which where in the original Version

Target a Trader,( at the moment you can even talk to an astreoid, buoy or Thargon but never mind that )
You have 3 initial options
1-Ask for money
1a- Ask for 1 Credit
1b- Ask for 5 Credits
1c- Ask for 20 Credits
2-Insult
2a- Apologise
2b- Laugh Scornfully
3-Great the Commander
4-Cancel Communication

All those actions has a result message.

I am just trying to get replies about using primable equipment is better, or I must use in flight mission screens which most of the developers did not like the idea. But they can still be used.

The A2B test version is available from Here

How about ask for help and offer help for traders?
(...Assuming you or they are under attack by pirates.)

Hi Okti,

Is this version 1.75 only?

pagroove wrote:

Hi Okti,

Is this version 1.75 only?

Unfortunately it is 1.75 only. Because 1.74.2 does not support primable equipment.

Switeck wrote:

How about ask for help and offer help for traders?
(...Assuming you or they are under attack by pirates.)

That is not a release. I am just trying to find out if Primable equipment and options selected in a determined time will be good for the aim of the OXP. Or shall I try the mission screens in flight?

At the moment the OXP is not checking for anything at all.

But the ideas may be

If there pirates around the targeted ship, help can be offered for a price,
if the communication is made to a pirate, Ask for money more then the bounty of the pirate to clear the legal status,

and more

As I said before this is going to be long running project. And if we can find the right communication method, the rest can be implemented by the help of you all. Either by giving ideas or contributing to the code by having a joint OXP.

Good ideas Okti.
I download a fresh 1.75 this week to try it out.