Expansions Manager

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

Using the Expansion Pack Manager (EPM)

• 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.

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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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

• 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).

Tweaking OXPs

• 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 (adapted from LittleBear's BB post).

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

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)