Oolite Bulletins

Hi All,

I got bored today, so there is a nother little OXP for lazy commanders.

SunSkimmerPod.OXP is not a cheat OXP, If commanders follow the SunSkimmerPodMissile all the way through it's journey, They will find out it actually goes for sun skimming and returns to the player after that.

Commanders doing long range contracts can enjoy this small OXP. Just go to a safe place and arm the pod and have drink brake. After a while the missile will come back to you and you can scoop it to fill their fuel tanks. It can be used many times when bought.

Temperoraly it has beacon sign of S. It needs improvement though but I will consider them after the feed backs.

The OXP can be downloaded from Here or from Other OXP's in my signature.

It is 1.75 compatible and it should work with 1.74 as well.

Enjoy

Okti wrote:

Hi All,

I got bored today, so there is a nother little OXP for lazy commanders.

SunSkimmerPod.OXP is not a cheat OXP, If commanders follow the SunSkimmerPodMissile all the way through it's journey, They will find out it actually goes for sun skimming and returns to the player after that.

Commanders doing long range contracts can enjoy this small OXP. Just go to a safe place and arm the pod and have drink brake. After a while the missile will come back to you and you can scoop it to fill their fuel tanks. It can be used many times when bought.

Temperoraly it has beacon sign of S. It needs improvement though but I will consider them after the feed backs.

The OXP can be downloaded from Here or from Other OXP's in my signature.

It is 1.75 compatible and it should work with 1.74 as well.

SunSkimmerPod Armed


SunSkimmerPod Deployed


SunSkimmerPod Returned


SunSkimmerPod being scooped


SunSkimmerPod scooped and fuel replenished

Thanks for the screen shots Commander Ragugaki,

I first tried to look at the game time on the screen shots, to understand how long it take to sunskim. It seems to take about -ten hours

According to the distance from sun it usually takes between 2 to 10 minutes, I think. The closer to the sun is better.

Edit: I changed the - one hour to 10 hours.

Okti wrote:

I first tried to look at the game time on the screen shots, to understand how long it take to sunskim. It seems to take -one hour and forthy minutes

How do you gather that? The pod gets armed at 16:08:35 hours, and returns at 06:15:51 hours the same day, which is 10 hours earlier. Seems to be a relativistic pod. The additional 3 minutes for the scoop camera shot (06:18) and another two minutes for the scooping (06:20) don't give any additional information.

So, as time doesn't run backwards in Oolite, I'd say that the first screenshot isn't part of the same set as the others, and there is no information at all as to how long the pod has travelled.

Question: do you have to wait in the same position for the drone to return, or does it find you anywhere in the system? And what happens if you're docked at the time it returns?

Commander McLane wrote:

Question: do you have to wait in the same position for the drone to return, or does it find you anywhere in the system? And what happens if you're docked at the time it returns?

For the earlier post I forgot 0 , yes you are right nearly 10 hours earlier.

You don't need to wait on the same position, the pod will follow you where ever you are. If you are docked, that means it will not find you and will remove itself from the universe.

Edit: If you don't travel away from the sun on torus, it will find you

Commander McLane wrote:

So, as time doesn't run backwards in Oolite, I'd say that the first screenshot isn't part of the same set as the others, and there is no information at all as to how long the pod has travelled.

Correct! Had a spot of trouble with the first set of screen shots. Tried to catch up with the missile and take shots.

The truth is that you can't even keep up with the missile using injectors - when you jump you catch up and catch a glimpse and whoosh it's off again.

Well spotted guys, will try and keep the screen shots in time sequence.

Thanks again Commander Ragugaki,

Actually going to sun skimming is much quicker than waiting for the missile to return , I just wrote that little OXP to have an aim on writing more complicated AI's.

What I can do is to add a inter system jumps for the missile, on the way to the sun and back to keep the time shorter.

And Any Idea about Interstellar space

Okti wrote:

And Any Idea about Interstellar space

Well, obviously you can't sunskim in interstellar space, so the pod shouldn't do anything there. Just float behind your ship awaiting to get re-scooped.

By the way, and because I've downloaded the OXP now:

• You certainly have discovered already that in JS many things can be done in more than one way. One example is the check for interstellar space, which you do with system.ID == -1. That's a valid check, of course. The more common check, however, would be to check for the system property system.isInterstellarSpace.
• When the player ship is docked, it still exists. Therefore your code would not remove the missile. I think it would get parked 1000 meters away from the station.
• Your world script (SunSkimmerPod-Main.js) seems completely superfluous. It doesn't contain an event handler, and the function queryInterstallerSpace is called from nowhere, as far as I can see. It also doesn't do anything useful which isn't already available in the system.isInterstellarSpace property mentioned above, and its result isn't used for anything anyway. So you could simply delete the script, and the world-scripts.plist in 'Config' as well.

Commander McLane wrote:

Okti wrote:

And Any Idea about Interstellar space

Well, obviously you can't sunskim in interstellar space, so the pod shouldn't do anything there. Just float behind your ship awaiting to get re-scooped.

By the way, and because I've downloaded the OXP now:

• You certainly have discovered already that in JS many things can be done in more than one way. One example is the check for interstellar space, which you do with system.ID == -1. That's a valid check, of course. The more common check, however, would be to check for the system property system.isInterstellarSpace.
• When the player ship is docked, it still exists. Therefore your code would not remove the missile. I think it would get parked 1000 meters away from the station.
• Your world script (SunSkimmerPod-Main.js) seems completely superfluous. It doesn't contain an event handler, and the function queryInterstallerSpace is called from nowhere, as far as I can see. It also doesn't do anything useful which isn't already available in the system.isInterstellarSpace property mentioned above, and its result isn't used for anything anyway. So you could simply delete the script, and the world-scripts.plist in 'Config' as well.

Yes you are right about SunSkimmerPod-Main.js, In the first script I made an error spelling systemID instead of system.ID, so I thought systemID(misspelled) is only available for world scripts , But after correcting that I didn't delete the above mentioned js.

I will try to simulate if the player is docked with a station, but the purpose of the OXP was to avoid the player to dock with a station to refuel. Because docking with a docking computer progresses game time with 20 minutes.

In any case player.ship.fuel = 7.00; is much easier to do than what I did.

Edit: Downloading the OXP before and querying about things after can be more usefull to the development of the OXP's which are in [WIP] status.

Okti wrote:

Edit: Downloading the OXP before and querying about things after can be more usefull to the development of the OXP's which are in [WIP] status.

True, but I can't be bothered to download all OXPs, especially not all WIPs. If I'm interested in the concept, or know the answer to a question, I'll post anyway. Only if I get more interested in the details I'll go and download and examine the code (which happened in this case, which is good, isn't it? ).

One last remark: Knowing that it's a WIP, I'd still suggest that you don't release it under version number 0.00. Obviously you've already created something which is more than nothing. Therefore, depending on how close you feel it to completeness, you could call it 0.01, or 0.1, or even 0.9. But 0.00 does look a little strange.

Okti wrote:

Downloading the OXP before and querying about things after can be more usefull to the development of the OXP's which are in [WIP] status.

One other way to say it is a WorkInProgress, is adding a OXPMessages.plist to the oxp. That way people know that it might contain bugs and should not use it for normal gaming.

Another small problem: the equipment.plist is missing the "requires_empty_pylon" = true; condition. You don't want to be able to buy it if you don't have anywhere to put it.

Commander McLane wrote:

Another small problem: the equipment.plist is missing the "requires_empty_pylon" = true; condition. You don't want to be able to buy it if you don't have anywhere to put it.

Thanks Commander McLane

Okti wrote:

SunSkimmerPod.OXP is not a cheat OXP

Hmm, following Commander McLane's fine example, I haven't downloaded the WIP yet, but I do have a question: what happens if you're in a nova system?

The nova mission is meant to be difficult, and to 'gently' guide you towards doing The Right ThingTM, but using this oxp while the sun is about to go nova would add another option for commanders to Do The Wrong Thingnot TM yet. Or does the pod overheat & explode in those cases?

I guess that in systems that are already novae, it probably won't have time to do anything before overheating, though...