User:Ramirez
Steve Ramirez joined the Oolite community in 2005.
OXPs
Equipment Fuel Tank emergency fuel (2006-14) Mechanics BlOomberg Markets market news (2010-19) Missions Iron Raven Galaxy 8 (2010-20) Missions Resistance Commander Galaxy 5 (2011-15) Missions Trident Down Galaxy 4 (2007-14) Ships Saleza Aeronautics (2007-18) Ships Executive SpaceWays (2007-18) Systems Dictators OXP (2010-20) Systems Feudal States (2010-15) Weapons Missiles and Bombs (2008-18)
His missions build on his other OXPs, and bring new life to Galaxies 4, 5 & 8.
The complexity of the coding of Feudal States inhibited reducing the large payouts for jousting tournaments at the feudal lodges for over a decade!
He also produced some wonderful brochures and briefings for most of his oxp's. You will need to unzip the oxz to extract them. This can be done using the in-game Expansions Manager - and pressing x.
Collection (2007-12)
Ramirez's original website has sundered (http://www.arcadia-digital.net/steve/Oolite/) but Wayback machine has preserved some pages.
Ramirez's approach
1) Dictators OXP: In the dictatorship expansion I'm working on, I have government-backed militias patrolling the spacelanes, seeking out dissidents and other political enemies, while only a handful of GalCop units are present to look after the station. My thinking is that in a dictatorship, the government is more concerned with oppressing its own citizens than interfering with lucrative foreign trade, and so a small GalCop presence in the system is tolerated. (2006)
2) Feudal States OXP
Noble Houses
- Starting off in Galaxy 1, to keep things manageable I've created a handful of noble houses representing the more high-tech of the feudal systems. I've knocked up some basic work-in-progress coats of arms for each, based loosely on the colours of the planet or any interesting flora and fauna in the default planet description:
Image
- Each house will be at various stages of conflict with another, and GalCop's only concern is to ensure any outsiders to these systems are not harmed. As far as they're concerned, the feudal systems are not a threat to the Galactic Cooperation and so they can be left to fight among themselves.
The Royal Court
- Each of the noble houses holds court, and here think I may make use of Thargoid's suggestion to use his Planetfall OXP so that the court is based on the planet rather than the main space station. Here the King issues proclamations which in practice equate to random missions to go and attack/rob/kidnap ships or people from the other noble houses. As the player does more of these missions their reputation will increase and they may be asked to formally join one of the houses. From this point they can only work for the one house but they can make their way up the ranks.
The Hunting Lodge
- From Caracal's earlier teaser, each house has a lodge in deep space where the basic skills of hunting are taught. As well as trying some target practice, visitors can try their skills against resident nobles in ship-to-ship combat, with moderate cash prizes on offer. This is really just a bit of fun for players who don't want to join a house.
The Royal Tournament
- Every so often one of the houses hosts a tournament where nobles from around the galaxy are invited to compete. Once a player has attained a suitable rank they can join in the fun and make some big money. One of the big events I'm planning will be the 'Battle Royale', a simulation of a space battle where a large number of randomly-generated nobles fight it out until a certain number are left standing. I've already got the basic scripting for this part sorted.
(2009 - from early in the planning, a year before the first version came out).
3) Disenchantment : To be honest one of the reasons I'm not quite as active on the boards these days is because doing Oolite work has become more of a hardcore programming exercise than a fun way to experiment with simple yet effective gameplay ideas. I admit I've never got to grips with javascript, so I can't really follow a lot of the current discussion, and not knowing the inner-workings of the code all I can do is use trial and error to see what works best. I know progress is good but it gets a bit frustrating when a perfectly good solution to a problem is rendered ineffective in each release because a particular function gets deprecated. (2008: Note: This "continuous revolution" carried on until Oolite v.1.82 in 2015)
