are ganks fair, 'ore?

Unrelated diversion Wally. Nice try though.

Just sayin' you aren't the poster boy for "fair". And you already diverted this thread to talk about plugins. So there.

I did hijack this thread, thanks for noticing Wally. The reasoning being that this stupid suggestion to have the PK stats removed is because its being abused by players with little cocks and lots of spare time to code themselves a prosthetic one. Actually, if you look at many of the complaints in the game, you'd see that they are based around nefarious lua coding. And it will continue providing headaches for Incarnate and crew for years to come.

Would anybody like to address the issue around lua in iOS? Does anyone care to talk about a level playing field? I kinda fucking doubt it.

We do like to talk about it and have. Make a new thread and lets DO IT.

I have made threads and they were shot down by the same people who are defending their clandestine code here.

"its being abused by players with little cocks and lots of spare time to code themselves a prosthetic one."

Actually, it wouldn't take much time at all to program a pair of plugins to automate PK farming. What Sieger is doing is impressive only in its pathetic-ness. And no matter how much you keep saying that altering the plugin system would stop this kind of thing... it would not. Automating PK farming is very easy to do with out-of-game tools as well.

"Would anybody like to address the issue around lua in iOS? Does anyone care to talk about a level playing field? I kinda fucking doubt it."

Would you complain that VO isn't fair because it doesn't play as well when you have a defective keyboard? iToys are defective by design -- Apple goes out of their way to restrict how you can use your own hardware. If you don't like that, don't buy their products. Simple.

Macs are better than PCs!

"its being abused by players with little cocks and lots of spare time to code themselves a prosthetic one.
Actually, it wouldn't take much time at all to program a pair of plugins to automate PK farming..."

Great, why don't you get started on a plugin for the rest of us and put your dick back in your pants.

"What Sieger is doing is impressive only in its pathetic-ness. And no matter how much you keep saying that altering the plugin system would stop this kind of thingdotdotdot.. it would not."

Great, I'm sure Incarnate will be glad to learn his game has been overrun by a pack of pathetic cats that want to hump his leg.

"Automating PK farming is very easy to do with out-of-game tools as well."

"Would anybody like to address the issue around lua in iOS? Does anyone care to talk about a level playing field? I kinda fucking doubt it."

"Would you complain that VO isn't fair because it doesn't play as well when you have a defective keyboard? iToys are defective by design -- Apple goes out of their way to restrict how you can use your own hardware. If you don't like that, don't buy their products. Simple."

Apple trolling is grade school to me Rin. You have a problem with Apple you should take it up with Guild Software as they are apparently spending their remaining dollars supporting the iPhone to no avail. You seem like a smart guy, wise the fuck up.

Errm, plugins work fine on iOS now, it just hasn't been made very public. You do not need to jailbreak or anything either. I think the devs are worried that Apple will find out and cry though.

The only thing I would add to the Lua argument is that 1) not everyone has the mental aptitude for programming that makes doing things in Lua easy for people who code for a living and 2) while most other people can indeed learn Lua, is that really something that should be expected of people who just want to play a silly game on level playing field?

I know for myself, I want to learn Lua and start doing things with it towards improving the game for myself and potentially others if I come up with something useful. But after 10 hr's at work doing other things in my personal life, the meager slice of time that I allocate to VO anymore because it has long ceased to be the sum of what I live for, it is a choice of actually playing the game or trying to figure out not just Lua, but what Lua can do in VO. Keep in mind that just because there is that nice documentation list, that not everyone gets what those fuctions and variables and tables represent. So I don't really think it's fair to assert that people can or should just level the playing field for themselves by writing their own scripts.

Fair enough, but it also doesn't mean that those who can have to share.

I'm not saying that everything should be shared. I think that there has been a lot of generosity from various individuals in the publicly available plugins that do enhance the game for the people that use them. I probably wouldn't play without plugins like targetless and toastercrush.

Whether or not there are plugins that give certain players combat advantage, I cannot speak to, because I have no information or observation that substantiates the accusations in my mind.

Sure, some plugins make things easier but I wouldn't call them unfair, nor would I suggest that they give an advantage to people not using plugins (in the same skill set of course). I only use a couple of features of TCS, and nothing else when I play. Makefriends is probably the only plugin that I would find it hard to live without, and really stuff like that should be part of the UI anyway.

"Great, why don't you get started on a plugin for the rest of us and put your dick back in your pants."

No. I am opposed to PK farming, so why would I help you do it? If you want to copy Sieger and give us all yet another reason to make fun of you, you'll have to figure it out yourself.


"Apple trolling is grade school to me Rin. You have a problem with Apple you should take it up with Guild Software as they are apparently spending their remaining dollars supporting the iPhone to no avail. You seem like a smart guy, wise the fuck up."

I don't need to take anything up with GS. I don't buy Apple products, so the problems inherent in Apple products do not impact me. You are the one complaining about them. And if Apple's restrictions bother you, Apple is the one you should complain to, not Guild Software. Guild supporting iOS is no different from Guild supporting a cheap crappy mouse or trackpad. Maybe they should only support high-end joysticks and gaming mice, or alternately they should disable the additional axes and buttons that such devices provide. Because fairnesssss. (That was sarcasm. GS should do no such thing. Having options is great.)

Anyway, it sounds like we're talking about a problem that no longer exists. So, yay equality!



"1) not everyone has the mental aptitude for programming that makes doing things in Lua easy for people who code for a living"

Sure, Fluffy. And not everyone has the mental fortitude for mining and trade that makes building a trident easy for people who watch paint dry for a living.

Plugins are just another part of the game. It might not fit some people's definition of "online space fighter", but that doesn't change the fact that plugins are a part of the game, just like piracy, station conquest, mining, trade, manufacturing, politics, etc. You don't have to be good at it. You don't even have to bother with it at all. I do not mine or manufacture. I ignore that aspect of the game. You are free to ignore plugin development. Doing so may come at a cost, but oh well. You don't see me putting around in a Trident -- that is the consequence of my ignoring manufacturing.


"while most other people can indeed learn Lua, is that really something that should be expected of people who just want to play a silly game on level playing field? "

They don't need to program to play on a level playing field. People like oRe like to rant and rave about secret private plugins that make a huge difference, but that's a load of bull. (If you haven't noticed, oRe is very paranoid and stupid.) I just counted my plugins. I currently have 54 installed. Of those, 22 are plugins other people made that are publicly available via the forum or voupr. Another 15 are plugins that I made and have published on the forum or voupr. The remaining 17 are plugins I made that I have not published, for a number of reasons. Mainly laziness or uselessness. But let's go through those 17 right now, in alphabetical order:

* BattleCruiser was a ship control plugin I started to write back when I was considering building a Trident. I figured it would be nice if I could run the Trident on a separate account (this was before we could step away from the pilot's seat) and have a plugin to tell it to activate turbo and then jump when it hit 3km. That way I could just steer it toward empty space, then go back to playing Rin. And if I needed to summon it into my current sector, I'd be able to tell it to come hither and it would jump in (I'd still have to steer it toward whatever position I wanted it to hold, but I could avoid the nav-plotting). Anyway, that was the goal. But I never got very far because I quickly decided that manufacturing sucks and abandoned the project. :P So I haven't published it, because it's unfinished and mostly useless. And now it's becoming obsolete, since the devs are adding auto-pilot features to Tridents. Yay!

* Cryp is just a simple cipher program. You give it a cipher key (the 26 letters of the alphabet in scrambled order) and it will then let you automatically encipher and decipher text using that key. I've never actually gotten around to using it, and so it hasn't felt useful enough to bother polishing up and publishing. I mean, we've got /msg and /group and /guild, so there isn't much point. Mostly I was just bored, though I also was thinking maybe I'd someday run an event involving ciphers (like what Obsidian did).

* Cyclegroup is a plugin that targets a member of my group, and each time I run it, it cycles to the next member of the group. This is mainly intended to make it easier to quickly scan the convoy I'm escorting when surrounded by many non-grouped ships. I haven't published it yet because it is still buggy and I haven't gotten around to figuring out why.

* Ferryman is the plugin that sends the people I kill one credit and PMs them, "A penny for the ferryman..." I have not and will not publish this one, because that's just useless flavor text. Also, it's a callback to my time in Kharon's Shores -- my first guild and the one I felt most at home in. It would be strange to have people not from CHRN using it.

* Jettall is truly amazing, probably the most impressive private plugin ever. It adds a /jetall command that jettisons all of my cargo. Stunning, I know. :D I'm not even sure why I made that; normally I just push the 'j' key and then the 'a' key. I think it might be from when I had my keys bound differently and that combination wasn't convenient so I wanted to bind it to a single button. (I mean I had my literal keyboard keys reassigned, not just the in-game binds, so the 'j' and 'a' keys may have been awkward to reach.) I don't have anything against publishing it, I just don't see why anybody would want this so I haven't bothered.

* JumpPointDistance is another impressive one. It prints out how far away the jump point is, or the wormhole. It can also cycle through all the targets and print out their names, distances, etc. I think this plugin was just a test of how the radar system worked that I forgot to delete.

* KOS just lets me add people to a personal kill-on-sight list, and if I target them, it reminds me that I'm supposed to kill them. I don't use it much because I mostly just kill everybody. It is mainly useful for tracking the people I really don't want to show any mercy to -- people who have previously pretended they were using /givemoney and instead logged out, for example. It's not very polished, so I haven't bothered publishing it.

* Newton was a plugin that automated some experiments I was conducting. I wanted to try to come up with the equations that govern ship movement. It has some functions to log my speed over time and maybe distance, and it automatically flipped on turbo at the start of a data collection session and turned on the brakes at the end. I didn't get very far on that project before I got distracted by other stuff.

* Next (that's its name) is a plugin that I use when grinding convoys. When I run it, it aborts any active mission (e.g. escorts I don't intend to complete), then if I'm docked it loops through all the cargo in my ship's hold and either sells it or stores it in the station inventory, depending on whether the item has a comment in the Catalog plugin's database. Basically that reduces the incidence of me forgetting that I have just looted a bunch of UCs and using "Sell All" on them by accident. Because I'm stupid like that.

* Paid is a plugin that keeps track of people who have paid me for safe passage and reminds me not to kill them when I target them. I haven't used it in a while, because FAMY have their own system for doing that. Now that I'm a free agent again, I'll be using this once more (assuming I bother to accept payment; I usually do not in the month of October). IIRC, it's pretty much just a copy/paste of my KOS plugin with a few minor changes for aesthetics and a timestamp to expire their entries after 24 hours. This is another "I've been too lazy to polish it up and publish" plugin.

* Percentleft runs whenever I die and it tells me how much health the last guy I damaged had left. I don't remember if I ever got around to fixing the bug that caused it to not always be accurate though. But basically, it's a "This is how much you suck, Rin" plugin. Because asking "How close did I get before you slaughtered me this time?" is embarrassing.

* Percuprof was my very first plugin ever. I wrote it back when I was still a good guy newbie with delusions of using trade to fund my pirate-hunting efforts. When I run /percuprof, it iterates through each item in my cargo hold, consults the best-price-in-system data, compares to the item's cost, and then tells me how much profit per cu I would get if I sold it to the best station in-system. And all of the text is orange. No color coding at all. It's just all orange. It is at least sorted so that the best profit-per-cu is listed last (to avoid having to scroll up). I haven't published this because I figure Trade Assist probably already does that, and is probably much prettier and more generally useful, although probably with the drawback of being less orange.

* PerspectiveWormhole changes how large the wormhole icon is based on how far away you are, making it shrink into the distance as you leave or loom larger as you approach. I didn't publish it because I didn't think anybody would care about this. It was just an idea I had, so I tried it out, thought "That's neat," and then forgot about it forever. I actually had to open it up and skim through the code to even remember what it was.

* Tele is a plugin that only works on the test server. On the test server, you can teleport by using a stupidly long and annoying command. The tele plugin just shortens it, and also has it assume the destination is the end of my nav-route if I don't otherwise specify target coordinates. I may actually have published this one on some ancient forum thread already, not sure. But anyway, this would only be relevant to PCC members testing stuff on the test server.

* TTS can communicate with an external python server I whipped up to pipe text into "festival" (a free text-to-speech program). I have it set up so that when it's enabled, it reads the "so-and-so entered" and "so-and-so left" reports that one of the other plugins I use generates. I haven't posted this because it's very crude and even I usually don't use it (albeit mainly because I tend to forget to turn on the external server).

* Wishbone is a pretty dumb plugin that I have no intention of publishing. It's basically just a way to auto-spam a story into chat. I can write a long multi-line block of text into it (hard-coded into the file, I mean), and then I can have it send that text into chat one line at a time, with a custom delay between messages. I made this back when I was a more annoying newb and haven't used it in ages (though I think I did re-purpose part of the code into my NationWar plugin, which I did publish).

* WTFBBQ is just a sort of scratch-pad of a plugin. That is, if I have some dumb idea I want to quickly test, I just overwrite wtfbbq/main.lua rather than creating a new plugin. If it seems like a worthwhile idea, I copy it into a fresh folder and develop it as its own plugin. Otherwise I just get back to whatever I was doing and overwrite it again the next time I want to quickly test something.

And that's all of my unpublished plugins. Real game-changers. :P

For reference, the rest of the plugins I currently have installed (which are all public) are as follows:
AnalogToDigital, AutoAcceptEULA, AutoJett, AutoRR, BountyHUD, calc, cargolist, catalog, ChanColors, !devkit, displayshippos, FactionColor, FlamboyanceHUD, gfx, honk, httplib, HUD_messages, HUM, kombattunes, legionhail, lsd, nationwar, plod, proxyhack, reload, ShipLoadoutsManager, snd, speedwarp, TabReply++, TapLockTurbo, TargetBinds, targetbutton, targetless, tcs-plugins, turrethop, TurretViewer, wg.

I don't actually use them all anymore (or ever, in the case of calc), but they're what I have installed.

lol

'oRe is many things, but he isn't stupid.

Yes he is.

the perspective wormhole one seems pretty cool, thats one thing that bugs me

I think I may not have been clear, my argument was not against plugins. I use a number of the public and guild proprietary ones myself. I was merely addressing the argument that players could or should write their own to 'level the field' against players who have written plugins that give them an advantage over other players and have not made those public.

Whether or not this is a real or imaginary problem, I don't know and don't really care. As far as my understanding of what can be done goes, Lua is fairly limited in what it can do with regards to improving combat performance for a given player. I could be wrong.

It cannot give you an advantage in combat at all. Maybe make you more aware, sure. Maybe make targeting easier, sure. Hell, you can even make a plugin and tote it as "just a trade guide" and let it spy on your enemies without honest users knowing (whether this is the right way to do things is for another thread), sure.

No combat advantages can be had. So you are correct.