Oolite Bulletins

I just took stock of Oolite's OXPs:

• we have 311 in the "normal" table,
• another 16 that are works in progress, and
• finally 12 that are currently not working.

This totals 339 OXPs

A big pat on the back for everyone! Liveliest community ever!

I wonder if anyone's got them all?

Thargoid wrote:

I'm just more worried as to how many of them I've had a hand in at some point in their production...

Likely quite a few, is my guess. . .

well i've got another ship ready and waiting for those HUD tweaks to be sorted, and i'm currently skinning another OXP in the meantime : i'm sure many others are working on stuff as we speak so how many will we have by year's end? should we try for an even 500?!

While it certainly looks impressing, I don't think that the sheer number of OXPs as such is really saying that much. You can quickly get to 500 or above if each new ship design equals one additional OXP. How many of the 300+ OXPs contain just one or two ships?

I feel that if we want to get a more meaningful overview of the creativity here on the boards, at least we need to break down the total OXP number into categories.

I just did, and I got

• Activities: 11
• Ambience: 30
• Dockables: 14
• Equipment: 32
• HUDs: 15
• Mechanics: 21
• Miscellaneous: 9
• Missions: 24
• Retextures: 11
• Ships: 131
• Systems: 5
• Weapons: 8

So—as was to be expected—the bulk of OXPs in the list are ship OXPs. If we add the dockables and the retextures for existing ships we get to quite exactly half of the list (156 of 311).

While this is certainly an impressive number, personally I am more impressed by the 21 different approaches to change the game mechanics in meaningful ways. And we can even add a number of the equipment OXPs and some from the other categories (like Anarchies) to that number, bringing it closer to 30.

Another thing to consider is how many of those OXPs are contradictory -- meaning using them together either doesn't work right or even causes major game problems.

I'd think HUDs would tend to conflict, at least the ones meant for generic ships.

There's been a few special hyperspace jump trick OXPs over the last ~4 months. These tend to fall under "equipment" category, but I'm sure there's a mission or 2 that might do the same as well.

Antimissile systems meant to counter ECM-resistant missiles are another group of equipment that might conflict. There's at least 5 of them! Even my simple Auto-ECM OXP contributes to this problem.

I don't think that the sheer number of OXPs as such is really saying that much

i have to take issue w/ your statement, Cmdr McLane - i think it says a lot, that we've got that many people putting that much effort into the community. granted a certain amount of OXPs might confict others, and frankly i don't see that an OXP w/ one ship or twenty is an issue - if you counted up how many different ships/stations have been added it's all very impressive. Variants add even more, and tho it might not seem that there's any diff between a Diamondback and a Diamondback "Purgatori" variant, there was still effort in skinning them and coming up w/ sensible relative stats etc.

Does this OXP tally include Series OXPs, for example the two I've been most heavily involved in - YAH and Snoopers, there are seven YAH OXPs (there would be eight but after I compiled the data for Ark - whom I thought was dealing with the issuing of them I didn't hear back from him - I need to investigate that), and Snoopers is currently only in Charts 1 and 2 but will eventually cover all eight.

And while you can have as many or as few YAHs as you want installed, it only makes sense to install a per Chart Snoopers - so when we finish all eight - you should only sensibly have one installed at a time.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Does this OXP tally include Series OXPs

It is a line count of the [wiki]OXP List[/wiki]. Snoopers and YAH! only have one entry each.

maik wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Does this OXP tally include Series OXPs

It is a line count of the [wiki]OXP List[/wiki]. Snoopers and YAH! only have one entry each.

Thank-you. I guess I could have just looked myself...

Killer Wolf wrote:

I don't think that the sheer number of OXPs as such is really saying that much

i have to take issue w/ your statement, Cmdr McLane

No problem, buddy. Of course my statement reflects my own point of view more than anything else. And I happen to be not that much interested in ships (most of the ships that I encounter are still the basic, vanilla Oolite ships), and more involved with tweaking the game mechanics.

If the OXP List even with length restrictions gets too big for a single web page, an easy change would be to put the Ships OXPs into their own table. The fact that I'm even considering this possibility is testament to the work of all OXP authors in producing so many high quality OXPs.

The most impressive OXPs for me are the ones under the category "Systems" as these are multi-faceted. In some games, expansions like these might be classified as "partial conversions". However, from the largest and most complex to the simplest and smallest, I appreciate all OXP authors efforts.

If you sorted also how many OXPs are made per author, it would show that the community actually has quite a lot of OXP makers.
There may be a few lurkers as well who haven't released an OXP yet...but have stuff in the works.

Yeah Switeck, you hit the nail on the head. Lots of good stuff's a comin'!