Personalities OXP

Adds Oolite community personalities to your game

Overview

This OXP adds characters we all know and love from the Oolite Bulletin Boards to the Ooniverse. Each personality has some specific behaviour and communication patterns.

Notable Features

There is a 65% chance that you will meet one well-known personality when you either jump into a new system or launch from a main station. Some of them are traders or engage in asteroid mining, some of them are bounty hunters and will protect you in case a pirate attacks you—or attack you in case you are the pirate. Some will only engage Thargoids. And some greet you friendly first, but may try to make you one more step on their ELITE ladder if nobody else is looking. Their behaviour in combat varies, but expect all of them to be a little tougher than your average adversary.

A list of the personalities contained in the basic OXP can be found at the very bottom of its ReadMe, separated by enough whitespace. If you like to be surprised, don't scroll down.

Notes on Alnivel's update version 0.91 (2022)

Update of the original 10 personalities to work with newer versions of Oolite. Adds more options.

Notes on original version 0.9 (2009)

DISCLAIMER

Personalities.oxp is a work in progress, and this version 0.9 is meant as a sneak preview, to give you a feeling what it looks like. It works as it is, but the final release may be different. Please help improving it by reporting bugs and strange or unexpected behaviour in its thread on the Oolite Bulletin Boards. Thanks very much!

---

Tales from the spacelanes...

I'd stopped off at a Space Bar for a quick beverage and perhaps news of a tempting contract in the vicinity and was rather pleased to find a valuable bounty target en route to my next destination. A few jumps later and I was sharing a system with potentially 8000 buckshee credits.

As the system was an Anarchy I had to splash a couple of pirate groups as I torused towards the station and just as I'd finished off the second group I received word that my target had been liquidated by someone else. Foul language may have been employed at this point.

Making the best of the situation I headed for the station to refuel and offload cargo. I dropped out of Torus a few seconds later when I encountered of all things Commander Wyvern in his Caddy Omega heading towards the witchpoint. Suddenly I had my suspicions of exactly who had snaffled my 8000Cr.

These suspicions were confirmed when shortly after passing Wyvern I encountered the remnants of my targets escorts. Clearly the meagre bounties on these peons had been beneath the notice of the mighty Caddy.

The moral of the story? No matter your combat rating or how high you might stand in the bounty hunters' guild, there's always someone in the eight charts with a sharper killer instinct than you. Travel safely friends and watch your six. Loxley (2011)

---

Instructions

How do I add myself as a character?

Note: Take this instruction not as a “do it all yourself”, but rather as a reference in case you want to tweak something for yourself (or, well, do everything all yourself). You can always ask for help in the BB thread or even just leave a request there to be added.

You can do this either by modifying this OXP or by creating a separate one, but in any case, you will need at least basic knowledge of how to work on them. It is still preferable to be separate, but still choose as you like or can! A good starting point and reference would be OXP howto.

Make an entry about your ship in shipdata.plist

1. As a base you can take a entry from the game files or OXP or, if your ship is from OXP, from its files.
2. Adjust the parameters so that they correspond to the specs of your ship in the game. Pay special attention to:
   • max_flight_speed,
   • max_flight_pitch,
   • max_flight_roll,
   • thrust,
   • max_energy,
   • energy_recharge_rate,
   • laser types (only forward and aft laser available),
   • laser_color,
   • the number of missiles you carry and their main type,
   • frangibility of your ship (if applicable),
   • installed equipment extras:
     • ECM,
     • Escape Capsule,
     • Fuel Injectors,
     • Fuel Scoops,
     • Shield Boosters,
     • Shield Enhancers,
     • an Extra Energy Unit or Naval Energy Unit (will influence the max_energy),
     • Heat Shields,
     • Cloaking Device,
     • Q-bomb

Make sure that models, textures and shaders used be ship will be available not only for you

1. Copy them to the appropriate folder of OXP.
2. (Optional) It would be great if you change resource names, both filenames and references inside the models (.dat) and shipdata.plist, as this will help avoid conflicts.

Model files are just regular text files, same as shipdata.plist, so they can be opened in a any decent text editor. It might be a good idea to use search and replace - one Griff's Cobra model has more than 800 lines with the name of the texture.

(Optional) Add a character entry in characters.plist

If you're carrying an escape capsule with you, you should create this entry, or one day a complete stranger will escape the ship instead of you!

Example of such a entry:

"personalities-hesperus" = {
    bounty = 150; 
    name = "Captain Jack Hesperus"; 
    "random_seed" = "0 0 0 0 0 0"; 
    "short_description" = "a notorious, feline trumble dealer from Orrira"; 
}; 

Give your ship a personality (shipdata.plist)

• name - shipname: charactername.
• pilot - key of entry in characters.plist, for example,personalities-hesperus.
• roles:

general role: personalities

occupation: personalities_cruiser (trader), personalities_privateer (pirate) or personalities_hunter (bounty hunter)

spawn options (several or even none may be specified):

personalities_galaxy_any - can appear in space or near main station in any galaxy

personalities_launcher_galaxy_any - can apear launching from main station in any galaxy (some ships are too big for that)

personalities_galaxy_0, personalities_launcher_galaxy_0 - similar to 'any' variant but limited only to the Galaxy One.

personalities_yourCharacterName - opional but useful for testing

Examples:

1. personalities personalities_privateer personalities_galaxy_any personalities_launcher_galaxy_any personalities_aodhan - pirate by name "Aodhan" that can appear in any galaxy both in space and via launch from main station,
2. personalities personalities_hunter personalities_galaxy_7 personalities_launcher_galaxy_7 personalities_cwydion - bounty hunter by name "Gwydion" that can appear only in Galaxy Eight both in space and via launch from main station,
3. personalities personalities_cruiser personalities_galaxy_0 ppersonalities_galaxy_1 personalities_galaxy_2 personalities_jameson - trader by name "Jameson" that can appear only in Galaxy One, Two and Three and only in space

• ai_type and script - there are two options here: plist AI or priority AI

Plist AI - relatively obsolete, but more straightforward for making your own tweaks:

ai_type - personalitiesCruiserAI.plist, personalitiesHunterAI.plist or personalitiesPrivateerAI.plist

script - personalities-ship-script.js

Priority AI - available more communications and slightly better interaction with the environment:

ai_type - personalities-cruiserAI.js, personalities-hunterAI.js or personalities-privateerAI.js

script - personalities-priorityai-ship-script.js

You can also put in your own AI scripts, but then OXP will only decide when to add your personality, and you have to implement everything else yourself.

Customize behavior via script_info (shipdata.plist)

Plist AI

Key	Key meaning / commentary	Value	Value meaning / commentary
name	internal identifier, required
displayName	the character's human readable name
attacked	what to do when attacked	"flee"	lets the ship flee with injectors immediatly if attacked
attackProbability	chance of finding the ship's prey (see below) with each scan	number in range [0; 1]
cargoType	special cargo carried by the ship (e.g. "missilepod")	role
energyDown	what to do in combat when energy is less than 1/2 (shield down)	"flee"	lets the ship flee with injectors
		"jump"	lets the ship jump out
		"cloak"	lets the ship only use its cloak if its shields depleted
energyLow	what to do in combat when energy is less than 1/4	"flee"	lets the ship flee with injectors
		"jump"	lets the ship jump out
launch	what to do after launch from the main station	"jump"	jump to another system
		"stay"	keep in this system
maxCargo	the maximum number of cargopods spawned if the ship dies	integer
miningProbability	chance of finding asteroids with each scan (only if no prey found) and mining them	number in range [0; 1]
fuelstationProbability	chance of using the fuel station (if any), if spawned at witchpoint
sunskimProbability	chance of going to the sun first, if spawned at witchpoint
prey	who to hunt	"traders"	(privateers only) will only attack ships which are victims
		"everybody"	(privateers only) will attack any ship
		"offenders"	(hunters only) will attack any ship with a bounty above a certain treshold
		"thargoids"	(hunters only) will only attack Thargoids, not pirates
preyLimit	(hunters only) bounty treshold for offenders (or fugitives) to be attacked	integer

Priority AI

Key	Key meaning / commentary	Value	Value meaning / commentary
name	internal identifier, required
displayName	the character's human readable name, required
attacked	what to do when attacked	"flee"	flee away from the fight
		"destroy"	destroy the attacker, even if they no longer wants to fight
		"repel"	repel the attacker
energyDown	what to do in combat when energy is less than 1/2 (shield down)	"flee"	flee away from the fight
		"jump"	try to witchspace out from the combat
		"continue"	keep fighting (default)
energyLow	what to do in combat when energy is less than 1/4	"flee"	flee away from the fight (default)
		"jump"	try to witchspace out from the combat
		"continue"	keep fighting (default)
launch	what to do after launch from the main station	"jump"	jump to another system
		"stay"	keep in this system
		"random"	50 / 50 (default)
prey	who to hunt	"everybody"	(privateer only) any clean or not ship (but not police)
		"loneVictim"	(privateer only) lone pirate victims
		"traders"	(privateer only) pirate victim ships
		"offenders"	(hunter only) any offender with sufficient bounty
		"thargoids"	(hunter only) only thargoids
		"nobody"	(default) but logicale suitable only for cruisers
preyLimit	the minimum bounty that is worth attacking prey	positive number	if not specified, the standard fine threshold / 2 is used
preyCombatOdds	what combat odds are sufficient to attack, "good" is default	"none"	Note that the standard oolite hunters are happy with the (not) bad outcome: "if we require bounty hunters to have actual *good* odds they'll never shoot anything" (from oolite-bountyHunterAI.js)
		"excelent"
		"good"
		"bad"
		"terrible"
		"any"
distressCallReaction	what to do if you hear a distress call if combat odds good enough	"ignore"	(default) do distressCallInsufficientOddsReaction
		"help"	intervene on the side of the victim (this is not necessarily who sent the call)
		"finishOff"	attack the sender of the call
distressCallCombatOdds	what combat odds are sufficient to intervene		same as for preyCombatOdds
distressCallInsufficientOddsReaction	what to do if it's too dangerous to intervene	"ignore"	(default) do nothing, just fly by
		"leaveVicinity"	leave vicinity of the sender of distress call
		"jumpOut"	preventively try to witchspace out
miningProbability	chance to start mining if nothing to do more and it posible	number in range [0; 1]
fuelstationProbability	chance to to refuel at fuelstation after witchspace jump if posible and need
sunskimProbability	chance to sunskim after witchspace jump if posible and need

Add communication messages into description.plist

1. Add entry of what types of messages are used, name below must be same as in script_info:

"personalities-name-messageTypes" = "attack attacked captured chatter dead flee jump kill launch witchspace"

1. Add the comms themselves:

"personalities-name-attack" = ("Phrase to be sent when attack");

"personalities-name-attacked" = ("Either this phrase will be sent..", "or this one when ship attacked");

"personalities-name-chatter" = ("Also you can add...{pause: 5} some dramatic pauses!");

List of available message types

Comms key	Full form (PriorityAI scripts)	Notes
attack	oolite_beginningAttack	Commencing an attack, repetitive
flee	oolite_startFleeing	Ship begins fleeing combat
jump	oolite_engageWitchspaceDriveFlee	Ship to escape from a fight via witchspace jump
kill	oolite_killedTarget	Current fight target destroyed
witchspace	oolite_engageWitchspaceDrive	Preparing to witchspace jump
greet	personalitiesOXP_greet	(Only with PriorityAI) First chatter
chatter	personalitiesOXP_chatter	Player nearby, repetitive
launch	personalitiesOXP_launch	Launched from a main station
attacked	personalitiesOXP_attacked	Someone hits the ship, repetitive
dead	personalitiesOXP_dead	Killed or ejected escape pod
captured	personalitiesOXP_captured	Escape pod unloaded at station

Note: With PriorityAI scripts you can also use any standart comms key with or without oolite_ prefix:

"personalities-name-messageTypes" = "dockingWait oolite_selectedStation"; // In messageTypes entry types must be writen same as in descriptions key!
"personalities-name-dockingWait" = ("Complaints about tedious waiting for docking");
"personalities-name-oolite_selectedStation" = ("Phrase about going to check local ConStore");

If you have any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to ask them in BB thread or send a PM to Alnivel.

---

• Alnivel's 2022 instructions & comments

• Post to Lestradae with some suggestions for updating his character

How do I remove my own character?

1. Open the shipdata.plist inside the "Config" folder.
2. Look for the entry "personalities-<yourname>".
3. Remove it completely OR Go to its "roles" key, and delete the roles with "personalities" and "personalities_launcher".

Minimum Requirements

Personalities 0.95 was updated for Oolite 1.90. The AI's are still in .plist form, but can now be located in a specific system/galaxy. Personalities 0.9 was written and tested on Oolite 1.73.4. It should run on Oolite 1.73 and above. Some of its features will only be available and enabled from Oolite 1.74 onwards.

Download Location

Personalities.oxp v 0.9.2 (2022)

Personalities.oxp v 0.9 (2009) is available for download via Box.com.

Installation

Move or copy the file Personalities.oxp from the main download folder into your AddOns folder. Where this resides, depends on your OS and your personal preferences. Restart Oolite.

Tweaking

This oxp is customisable through Library OXP - via the Config for AddOns option on the docked F4 screen

Version History

• version 0.9.2 (October, 2022)

new AI scripts, most personalities now use them

with new scripts standard communications keys can be used (however, it makes sense to use only those that are used by AI), old comms keys still works

fixed a bug in plistAI scripts that caused the ships themselves to never attack

pauses can be added to comms messages: "The message will be split{pause: 12}and the second half will be sent with specified delay"

appearance can be limited through the list of roles:

1) "personalities personalities_privateer personalities_galaxy_any personalities_launcher_galaxy_any personalities_aodhan" -

pirate by name "Aodhan" that can appear in any galaxy both in space and via launch from main station

2) "personalities personalities_cruiser personalities_galaxy_0 ppersonalities_galaxy_1 personalities_galaxy_2 personalities_jameson" -

trader by name "Jameson" that can appear only in Galaxy One, Two and Three and only in space

added methods for setting callbacks at escape pod scooping and unloading

added method to adjust spawn weight (for galaxies) in case if someone suddenly decides to use 100 ship variants with a weight of (0.01) each

• version 0.9.1 (September, 2022) by Alnivel

requires Oolite 1.90 (probably can work even on versions 1.82+, but not tested)

fixed several broken function calls

changed names of internal variables and resources to avoid conflicts

changed comms message using method, it now requires a description.plist entry to be defined in this format:

"personalities-<personality name>-messageTypes" = "<list of space separated message types>";

rewritten methods for the spawn of special ships, changing a probability of this spawns now easier

added method for adding role to appear on a specified condition, such as system id, after some event etc

• version 0.9 (November 5th, 2009) by Commander McLane

functional version for testing and feedback purposes

script may still get worked over

requires Oolite 1.73

Links

• Personalities.oxp (2009 - date)
• Forum Denizen OXPs This seems to be the fons et origo of this oxp (2009)
• How would you like to appear as a Cameo in OOLite? (2005)