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.
Contents
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)
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.
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)
