Expansions Manager

In-game Expansions Manager (Surround is from XenonUI)

The Expansion Pack Manager was devised by Cim for Oolite v.1.80 (2014), and ushered in the move from OXPs to OXZs.

Expansion Packs and Catalog

• Note that there are many Expansions (OXPs/OXZs) which are not listed in the Manager. See Guide to Unlisted OXPs
• Note that the Expansions Manager depends on this wiki - if this wiki is down (and you are - for example - looking at a backup of this page), you will need a workaround.

Oolite allows to be extended via Addons and OXPs. Expansion packs that are registered to the Expansions Catalog and it's browsable version can be downloaded and installed automatically.

Using the builtin Expansion Pack Manager (EPM)

This is about the expansion manager that is available within Oolite.

The arrow keys ← & → skip between pages - and the arrow keys ↓ & ↑ move up and down within a page.

Press i for more information on your chosen expansion pack: The URL for even more information is copied to your clipboard automatically when you do this (unless your computer runs Unix and you are playing Oolite v.1.90 or older).

Press f to filter the selection of 700-odd listed expansion packs. (eg Search for keyword, Search for author, list only uninstalled packs etc)

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Important Note Oolite.org is currently down. Try http://oolite.space/ instead. To rejig your in-game Expansions Manager to the new address, see here and a_c's following post. (Cholmondeley 13:40, 29 March 2023 (BST)) Or use Hiran's Oolite Starter instead

Important Note The current Windows Pre-releases/"nightlies" now allow you to directly skip to the OXP category (eg .Ambience, Ships, Weapons etc.), rather than scroll through dozens of pages to get there! They can be downloaded from the very bottom of the Downloads page or directly from GitHub, here.

The XenonUI OXP now provides all this information on your screen!
On the left (Sub-Commands): filter/information/extract contents
On the right: guide to colours

Guide to Expansions Manager list colours

Yellow Ready to download and install.

White Installed and at the current version.

Cyan Installed; updated pack available for download.

Orange Ready to download, but Oolite will also download extra packs to make it work.

Brown Conflicts with an already installed pack.

Gray Incompatible with this version of Oolite.

Red Manually installed: cannot also be installed automatically (eg. a tweaked oxp in the AddOns folder)

Blue Installed but no longer available for download.

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Downloading and Unzipping an Expansion for Tweaking

or for extracting information - for example, Ramirez's oxz's contain glorious .pdf's stashed full of information!

• Go to the Expansion Pack Manager in game.
• Select List installed expansion packs (the second choice at the bottom of the screen).
• It will now show you the list of OXZ files in your ManagedAddOns folder.
• Highlight the one you want to fiddle with and press x.

• Oolite will then extract the OZX to your AddOns folder and add .off to the end of the expanded (was .oxz but is now .oxp) folder.
• Change this .off to .oxp or .txt and tweak away to your heart's delight!

• Oolite will now ignore the original version and will run the newly-expanded OXP version in AddOns (with any changes you now make to it).

If you make a mess of it, deleting the .oxp version (in the AddOns folder) will cause Oolite to go back to using the OXZ version (in the Managed AddOns folder).

Out-game Expansions Manager ("Oolite Starter")

The Oolite Starter allows easy switching between bnuches of Oolite versions, OXPs and savegames. Mr. Gimlet guides novice users (and does not hold back advising experienced ones). See v0.1.35 (Mar '26) at this Github repository. There are installers for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Reference: Thread with posts starts here (May 2023)

Tweaking OXPs

(adapted from LittleBear's BB post)

• The Windows text editor sneaks in invisible bits of code which muck up the OXPs: Avoid it like the plague!
• To edit I'd recommend Edit Pad Lite 8. It's free, won't mess up the file format and is colour coded (so will highlight code typos).
• Eg. If you have missed a , or a " in a text string, it will show up as white rather than yellow, so you can quickly see the mistake. ;-)

• Been a bit of a blessing when I've been C&Ping long lists of procedurally generated text from my latest.log to my array file.

• See discussion here for AppleMac suggestions.
• See How to tweak OXZ's for more tweakish details.

Scenario OXP's

These OXP's create a scenario and force all other oxp's out of the game (unless you tweak the scenario to let one or two back in!). The only examples so far are the SOTL oxp's. There is an issue with the Expansions Manager:

But ... one reason I didn't put SOTL in the manager is that SOTL Exploration depends on Loader, so if you install Exploration, you get the Loader OXP too (ie: Song_of_the_Labyrinth_Startup_1.1). Loader can't depend on Exploration, because if it did, Exploration won't load in the core scenario, and then Loader won't load because Exploration isn't there, and then you can't actually start the scenario game. But that means when you're installing from the manager, if you install Loader it can't then auto-install Exploration ... and then if you try to run Loader it'll probably go wrong with an entirely unhelpful error message.

The manager ideally needs a new relationship type adding to handle that sort of "install-time but not run-time" dependency, but I never got round to that. (Cim 2021).

Links

• Expansion Manager Pack Suggestions for change (2020).
• copy information_url to clipboard (2016-21).
• User tags for expansions (2014)
• Are OXZ's an improvement ... over OXP's (2014).
• OXZ and balance What should go on the Expansions Manager? (2014)
• Cim's announcement of the concept (2013)

• Oolite's interaction with Expansion Packs (2021)

Download Counter for oxp's

• Suggestions for fixing it (2022)