User talk:Murgh

User talk:Murgh/Archive

Cholmondeley's edit (2020)

Added in a list of oxp's culled from the OXPList. Unsure how many were actually Murgh's.

Almost all, I think. Murgh (talk) 19:39, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Cholmondelian comment

Overjoyed to see that you are willing dip your toes back into editing our wiki - even if you ultimately decide to never venture beyond your own user:page!

I've never worked on one before, but have done a literally horrendous amount of work on ours over the past year. I hope I've improved things and hope that I've made it a bit more readable, but as a native English speaker with the traditional English incomprehension of foreign languages, worry if it is as helpful as it might be. What makes sense as a new page heading to me might very well not to others. I've also been trying to slip some humour in, here and there. An experienced eye is more than welcome, even if all you wish to do is offer suggestions or pointers.

Very luckily, Montana05 has been working on the ships.oxp pages and has an understanding of how they all fit together. Personally, I feel that the Category:Oolite scripting pages are a bit of a disaster - I have found it almost impossible to learn anything worthwhile from them. Hence my continual additions of bits and bobs culled from the BB (but I lack the context to do anything more than just add).

Montana05, as mentioned above, has been vital in updating the ships pages. Hiran was a star - he got the bit between his teeth and created a computerised contraption which filleted the oxz's, identifying the ships and the equipment. We then worked together on putting all the OXZ names listed on the in-games expansions manager on the wiki, together with all the equipment.

I've also been trying (slowly) to ensure that there are pages for all the people who have added significantly to Oolite, whether as Developers or OXP writers.

Our wiki currently has just over 6000 pages. I've created a thousand of those (probably mostly redirects). Around 2,000 are taken up by Treczoks's Sector/System listings. The last great spurt of wiki work (judging merely by page creation) seems to me to have been c. 2012 (Maik et al). There was some sustained work on categorisation back c.2016 (Debresser).

As I say, I've never worked on a wiki before. Merely taught a little philosophy & history, a little philosophy of history & history of philosophy, and some philosophy of the history of philosophy... and history of the philosophy of history...

Current major project is trying to dig up "lost oxp's" and link them in the wiki.

Yes, I wasn't sure if I still knew my p/w, wasn't sure if I had the same mail back then –it didn't work for the BB. Especially as there isn't a "Did you forget your p/w?" function, I was pleased to see I remembered correctly.

–I think it's a fascinating wiki. An enormous body of work, a lot of fun pages, and some very informative ones. The ambition of Treczoks to list all bodies of the known galaxies takes one's breath away, and you also seemed to have touched up something everywhere I've looked.

That is the thing, I don't yet know how much work I should commit to. It's a bit sad to start a big project and not manage to see it completed, much like the way I stepped back from my previous round of Oolite immersion. I think the next "big project" then was to design racing ships, construct tracks and leagues with teams, but that got abandoned at an unsatisfying stage. I made some half-finished ships that strike me as disappointing now, and thought of a lot of team names with logos, which now seem amusing enough, but it wasn't the right time for Giles to do the needed coding so that the rest of us less skilled could run around in carefree play. And then another phase of life called and that was that.

I did do quite bit of work on Jimbo wikipedia, especially in conjunction with my wine studies, which was helpful, but it can get consuming and take a lot of the spare time that might be used elsewhere. I hope during some quiet xmas break moments I'll decide what seems most fun to get into, If I have a go at touching up some of the old models or other old OXP stuff can be brought into the modern times, or something on this wiki beckons me. For now, touching up my own userspace here seemed a good place to get a toe in the water. Just do a little dusting, hang up a few old pictures, see where the mood takes me. OLDMURGH ^talk 23:58, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

More gubbins

Just stumbled across this: Murgh - Obnoxicorp Inc. (2010-14). Cholmondeley 08:44, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

And: you are credited in Hotrods OXP

It's fascinating reading. Svengali did a great job. He seemed to have a skilled touch at everything he did, and also an eminently respectful curator of the old work. I was sad to realise I came back too late to ever interact with him.

As a non-native English speaker, you have me at a loss with the term "gubbins". Is there an intrigue? Who is this Ark who suggests I did not work myself into tears while trying to solve the torus conundrum? It's a shame the Internet Wayback isn't a little better, only small glimpses into Oosat2 are possible, that's where the versions with tweaks and fleshed out ReadMes were. That old Oosat still stands nicely is amazing and ironic.

I should fix that. Arexack did all his own artwork, he just tended to squeeze me for doing his plists. OLDMURGH ^talk 09:37, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Bumped into your Interstellar Explorer (what on earth?) in here

I can't tell if anything ever came of it, despite the early enthusiasm (Selezen seemed extremely thrilled), and whether there was a cameo by the Leviathan or he just picked the name for a while, before it was coined a 'Navy Kitten'. In the end, Lestradae didn't release it? OLDMURGH ^talk 06:55, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

There are enough references to it scattered across the wiki - one presumes it was part of the larger (and later) versions of RS. I presume that the arguments with Lestradae combined with the updating of the Vanilla game code by Cim consigned RS (and thus Interstellar Explorer) to oblivion.

A lot of battles seem to have been fought over the years, much blood shed on the field. I am content to have missed the intrigue that seem to have taken place in my absence. I do regret not having been a part of the second wave of model/texture development, I got left behind a great canyon on that one. OLDMURGH ^talk 13:04, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

Snippets of possible use

This: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=162557#p162557 - Griff on shaders etc. (2012)

Thank you, looks like a thorough explanation. Jeez he had spent 2 years diving in then. OLDMURGH ^talk 00:01, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Disambiguation pages

So back in the dim and murky days before you rematerialised (when I was mucking about on my tod with nobody around to pester), I wrote a disambiguation section for the top of the Library page. And copied it to the top of the other relevant pages. I'm not sure how well it works, but feel it was better than nothing.

Did the same for History. I also had a stab at a disambiguation page for the Cobra.

Opinions would be welcomed!

Winston is hoping to transfer the wiki this week and boost the download. He sounded amenable to granting you Supertrumble powers on this wiki!

Mm. It's useful but I think it's somewhat overwhelming for a hatnote and would do it a little bit differently with History and Library. The Cobra one is fun.

So Winston got back to you, that's cool. OLDMURGH ^talk 18:03, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

–ed. So that's my take on those splitting choices. Maybe you could make sure I didn't miss anything.

Thank you! It all seems fine.

Just looking at the wiki generally, I have two concerns only at the moment.
1) Need for short synopses for the Arquebuses of this world who will merely glance at best.
2) The dismal state of the programming pages. I presume that they are fine for the likes of developers and professional programmers. But in terms of fulfilling Aegidian's hopes that Oolite would teach programming, I find that they are virtually a dead loss.

I find watching Arquebus infuriating (all those mistakes based on ignorance), but vital in terms of realising how few players will really read the wiki seriously. At least he's enjoying the game! And when he started the other games and adding them to his video list, he of course had less time to spend mastering Oolite.

I do wonder how many players there actually are out there, how many throw the towel in before they work out what's what, and how many go down the various career routes - combat, trade, cargo contracts, piracy etc.

(I do hope that all oxp's are now listed somewhere on one of the wiki's lists).

Cholmondeley 09:48, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree absolutely, many articles I come over could use a structural rework that us mostly a nice tight precap introduction. The problem with the programming pages is that these ought to be written by someone with a good grasp of the material presented. Since so much of these developments happened after my departure, I feel so many gaps in my ability to usefully comprehend. That, and not being of a programmer mind. Maybe as I get deeper into my re-education I will get bolder on the less complex articles, but I hate writing about stuff I don't really know much anything about. But yes, this is a good priority.

I find it hard to gauge how the young, non-nostalgic player enters this game. Any person's patience varies, but on the whole this may be less predominant in the younger gamer. But efforts like your "Education via Overheard Bar Chatter" project should be helpful, it's a really good direction, maybe it will grow to sneak in from several directions. –And what we could do with Missionaries.OXP.. I think highlighting and expanding the unique aspects of the Ooniverse, its particular creatures and style of humour is our USP (Unique Sales Proposition for those who haven't worked in advertising) and will substantiate Oolites very own niche, more than any details of the wider Lore. This is why I think Elite was much more interesting than its successors. Where is that Lobster in distress.OXP? OLDMURGH ^talk 16:26, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Cholmondelian comment (reprise)

Am a bit bemused at all these new Cat/Cougar pages. Why? I would guess that unlike most of our newer members, I actually played Elite for a couple of months back in the day. But on the BBC, not the more fancy versions. So I've absolutely no idea what any of these ships are or what they do. Personally speaking, I'd much rather have a page just explaining all these extra-to-the-vanilla-game ships. Not so much which version they come from (...pretty meaningless to me), more what they do. And with relevant bits of lore chucked in.

I'd thought there might be an argument to keep the number of redirects down so that when one types in "Cat" one actually sees different pages, rather than just a zillion redirects to the same thing. And one has a chance of recognising a typo in one's typing! Or do people no longer bother looking at the selection of 10 options which comes up when starting to type in the "search box" on the left?

PS: Any suggestions for amplifying the To Do list on the Exploration page?

PPS: Have you visited Thargoid's version of Aqualina yet? Well worth the effort. You might find the Jump Planner in Okti's Long Range Scanner useful. You'd need a lot of dosh for the Scanner, Jump Planner and any Galactic Hyperdrives needed to get there. Approach from the witchpoint. And be in awe!

PPPS: As regards the grump above - whatever my geriatric and groan-laden grumbles, I remain heartily relieved that somebody who actually understands this side of the game is trying to make some sort of sense of it all!

PPPPS: Any news from Finland/Sweden? Are they finally taking joining NATO seriously, or are they still in denial?

Cholmondeley 00:25, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Well, not much concerned about keeping redirects down, on the contrary, it's for the ease of the search ("Cat or Cougar", is admittedly overkill, but the redlink was there). The whole point of a disambiguation is arriving there after a simple search and then making the informed choice at the fork in the road, hopefully bypassing the search page that simply list every occurrence of the word. (Yes, for some types of searches I for one would rather avoid it.)

I'd very much like to write fascinating stories in great detail about these ships, but there are just such few morsels of sources to be found after a lot of fruitless searching (BTW, avoid googling "elite cougar"!). Pointing out what little that is verifiable about game appearances and alluding to the name confusion is all that is written that has survived, and to begin with a stub is better than nothing. The rest will have to be invented, but that will happen eventually. The riveting saga behind the Cougar is in the works.

No, no additional ideas ATM for the Explorations page. It already looks rich and it's pleasing how much discovery I still have to look forward to.

Not yet seen the Aquatics, but I gather from all the reports that it must be quite something. Another thing to look forward to.

I just think of it as a bit of librarian foundation that makes it better to build the imaginative things on top of. There must be structure! ;)

And no, I'm not up to date with the current state of fins and swedes. Most everybody would have in common the feeling of having a nasty neighbour is very unpleasant. All I know is that Sweden is already practically NATO (or so Russia thinks) and the Finish premier is considered one of the more skilled Putin-whisperers. OLDMURGH ^talk 01:20, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Cholmondelistic comment

Thank you for adding pages for the early community members.

1) Here are some possibly relevant categories:

• [[Category:Authors]]- mostly of Oolite fiction
• [[Category:Developers]]
• [[Category:Non-fictional people]] - master category
• [[Category:Real People]] - contains Jonny Cuba & NoSleep
• [[Category:OXP authors‏‎]]

2) Capnhack‎ - these are on the wiki:

• 
• 

3) And the old OXP listing pages are still here despite deletion requests... [[Category:OXP Lists]]

4) Darkbee: File:OoliteRS.zip, File:OoliteRS rev1.8.zip, 2008 Oolite Manual

Thanks for the encouragement. Yes I thought I'd follow up on at least some of these. Very helpful, I shall apply where I think it makes sense. OLDMURGH ^talk 18:54, 9 December 2025 (UTC)

Sadly, I can't unzip these zips :(

Cholmondificatory comment

I just stumbled across these: Special:UnusedFiles - uploaded gubbins which was mothballed when the old links were updated.

That's interesting and useful. I'm sure quite a few of those could find a home (again). OLDMURGH ^talk 12:30, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

Cholmondelarian comment

And now I've stumbled across your NuVipers.

Why the new ships? (ditto for the newer IronAss equivalents). And, are they for specific circumstances? And, how do you envision the police in Oolite?

Cholmondeley 09:40, 18 December 2025 (UTC)

Hm. The way I remember, first motivation was to experiment with some new Giles tech revelation (the usual inspiration), in this case the plasma cannon that he demonstrated with the Behemoth, and I wanted to see how it performed on a regular ship, and yes, I placed this power in the hands of the law.

"Nu Ships" because it came after the "Old ships" where I had plotted the models from the (more obscure) original Elite versions, and this one jumped forward in time as I tried to replicate one of the few ships I fancied from the Frontier games, that later generation Viper that breaks with geometric harmony with its weird curvy wings.

But yes, I did think Oolite gameplay was most fun with a fearsome police. In rich, high TL systems with a strong law it should certainly be quite difficult to be lawless, and putting up a good fight when outnumbered. This could be fine tuned down a bit with a limited and "controlled" OXP pool, but when filling the AddOns with all sorts of diverse ideas, I thought that semi-supercops was a fun molotov cocktail to throw into the mix.

OLDMURGH ^talk 00:26, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Cholmondelistificatory comment

Presuming that your current burst of activity is connected to your mission ideas at the year end...

Some years ago I stumbled across Xeptatl's Sword - an 8-Galaxy spanning mission OXP by Smivs. His website was still up at the time, so I was able to copy his background material onto this wiki. There's a lot of it.

Any ideas as to how it might be better organised? Perhaps a "Xeptatl's Sword category"? Or is this needless?

Cholmondeley 11:03, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Yes, this last burst is very much connected to the mission idea I mentioned, and the mission that became «needed» to come before that again. And then the imagining became a lot of fun, so much that under the influence of the extasy of grandeur, I started to believe I was laying the foundations for a a fourth school!

But um, Xeptatl's Sword.. I think the only thing I’d change is take most of those XS content links currently tucked under «links» at the bottom, and move them up and make a little «Background» (or similar) section around them underneath Overview. Seems too hidden where it is now.

OLDMURGH ^talk 11:44, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Cholmondelistificatory comment (reprise)

I will confess to being quite bemused by the growth of Lore for your new OXP - and especially with your rooting of it in the older wiki analysis of Lore!

1) I'm just wondering... what would one of the original planet descriptions have looked like, and what effects would the GalCoppian descriptive dumbing down have had on that specific planet? There is nothing that springs to my mind at the moment, but I find it all rather intriguing!

2) And will your radical take on the Ooniverse still fit in with Disembodied's Lore on the Ooniverse which the new player finds himself in?

3) And how is your OXP coming along? Any progress?

4) Your GalCop interpretation seems to calls for a new approach to "criminals" - if some of these are merely absurdists/nullists who have been labelled as such, then they would not be aggressive as the pirates are. And there would presumably be other non-Mnemonics who have also been labelled as such by GalCop despite their inoffensiveness to normal ships for offending GalCop in some fashion.

And then this would feed into Bounty Hunting as a career. Bounty Hunters who are driven by a sense of ethics would try and avoid fighting them, while those driven by the profit motive would prefer going after them as they might be less difficult prey.

This might then call for more sophisticated AIs for those roles.

Cholmondeley 12:01, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Bemusement would be a successful audience reaction, but some of the results from the "mission reward" text generator have made me laugh.

Yes, the root is very much in the simplest 8-bit lore.

1) I imagine that the original GalCop descriptions were fairly dry & dull "CIA Fact book"-like: stats and facts with a veneer of censorship.

Sometimes uninteresting, sometimes intentionally untrue, selective reporting.

2) I think it would work almost as well as "the original Elite" starting point, though this Disembodied text has an air of taking place later after all of that..

It takes a blank slate-OXP narrative off in a weird direction. I hope it will work as a refreshing vacation in a crazy parallel dimension, however brief. For the full IronAss version I hope it will be an appealing permanent moody setting.

I haven't managed much advanced OXP-combination testing yet, but only at "Famous Planets"-level it's less successful..

3) It's getting on like many OXP projects in the "final third" tend to go. The fun creativity and problem solving has fizzled out, and the remainder is mostly complex small detail hurdles with a lot of trial and error and repeat playtesting. I am counting on Gemini AI for the javascript coding, and sometimes it needs many tries to get it right.

I had a lot of spare time for a while, so I arrived at a bare bones "mostly working WIP"(if you want to try) for the non-IronAss-world version, but in the coming weeks there will be less time to finish it. Hope to get there it in end March, early April.

4) Yes, outed (Mnemonic Fraction/Nullists) would be tagged as criminals, but so far they can't be exposed by police scanning. Also it would be sad if Vipers cut the mission short before the player arrives.

But you're right, it opens for other less computer crafty "enemies of the state"/"political criminals" who are easy prey for both police and professional pirates, in a similar way to those poor refugees I played with a while ago. It would be very cool to be able to manage to create a different set of behaviour for this group. I'm not yet sure if Gemini is up to that level task, but it is useful experience for me to manage to somehow get this far within the unknown javascript world.

OLDMURGH ^talk 21:17, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

2) If Famous Planets is giving you headaches, you can probably include any elements from it which you might want inside your own OXP - and then list it (oolite.oxp.Pagroove.FamousPlanets ?) as a "conflict OXP" in your manifest.plist.

4) I'm not too sure where we stand regarding writing new behavioural AIs. The new system is more sophisticated but more difficult to master. I think that Littlebear and Phkb are our current experts in this area, but I'm unsure as to whether they have mastered all of its intricacies. I believe that Cim created our current system, but he's been mostly uninvolved for a decade or so. He does drop in to our forum from time to time.

And I'd have thought that there has to be a way of restraining the vipers from nobbling your needed mnemonics (Sallman Wiest/Gladous Masda etc.) - perhaps one can just have a mnemonic ship which then becomes a needed mnemonic at a particular stage in the mission - so if it is nobbled prematurely, it is nobbled as an unnecessary mnemonic? Or perhaps your needed mnemonics have managed to swap their marked ships for ones with a clean identity?

Cholmondeley 21:50, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

2) Yes, that is the thorough way to go, thorough testing and listing. Famous Planets just an example of what "won't play nice" due to the way this OXP works. Also, System Features:Rings (probably Sunspots too) uses a savegame dump that prevents my procedural fun from working 100%. After many due tests I'll know.

4) It would be interesting to have a go and see what is possible anyway, with this AI or maybe the one Wildeblood is experimenting with.

The one Mnemonic Courier ship in the WIPoxp is just an incognito clean-record vessel, which will be flying under the noses of police as long as there is no bounty.

OLDMURGH ^talk 00:36, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

2) I presume that Famous Planets is an issue due to the goat-soup-freeness of the F7 planet descriptions. This only affects something like 1/3 of the G1 systems, a smaller number of the G2 systems, and a sprinkling of others in G3-8. But other OXPs have a similar effect (but with fewer descriptions affected: Ionics (G2), The Assassins Guild (G7), Iron Raven (G8) - and there are also one-off rewrites including your Lave, Riredi, et cetera.

Even in G1 (the most affected), with all relevant OXPs loaded, less than 50% of systems have their F7 descriptions rewritten. And the rewriting is clearly to add Lore.

I wonder if it is possible to control the change-over between the vanilla descriptions and the rewrites. The swapping between the two could be controlled by a new equipment - or attributed to the on-going conflict between the Mnemonics and the programmers at GalCop Central Mainframe. I'll post the query on our Forum.

But there are other Lore-based OXPs too. Particularly Littlebear's The Galactic Almanac which has two-dozen GNN news broadcasts which you might wish to check for issues (tucked away in his descriptions.plist). There is also GNN itself. Not sure about this - but there might be two types of GNN broadcast - those which are purely randomly generated and those based on a template. GNN's missiontext.plist contains some 200 of these.

Cholmondeley 10:48, 5 March 2026 (UTC)