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.

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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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))

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).

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)

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External Expansions Manager ("Oolite Starter")

Hiran is currently developing the Oolite Starter - it marries up each of your various Jamesons with the various AddOns folder OXPs and the ManagedAddOns folder OXZs needed to run that particular game.

See v0.1.14 (6th July '23) on his GitHub page here.

Reference: Thread with posts starts here (May 2023)

The AppleMac version is not yet fully functional - one cannot start up the savegame of choice, but includes an automatically updated list of every OXZ on the oolite.space website as well as managing the OXPs in your AddOns folder.