Furball OXP

You know how it is ... you're sitting at the bar enjoying an icy cold lethal lager when the lobstoid next to you spills his mug of fuming nitric acid in your lap. You jump back, and knock over the blue frog who's been standing behind you chatting up a lady frog. Before you can sneeze, fist and paws and claws are flying, the brawl spills out into the docking bays, and people are threatening to launch and settle it with lasers. Then the cops show up and suddenly most of the merrymakers realize they should really be somewhere else, so the festivities move out the docking bay to the front of the station.

That is the Furball OXP in a nutshell: A barroom brawl that's gotten out of hand. A batch of furious fugitives fleeing from a batch of pissed off police, all on the station's doorstep. You might be ignored, or you might get caught up in it, or you could put your knife between your teeth and dive right in.

[ASIDE] Well, that is the original synopsis by Caracal, who is no longer maintaining this OXP. As the unelected "custodian" of its proud legacy I hope that I am sticking to the original brief despite the implementation changing beyond all recognition.

Configuration

There is preliminary support for OXPConfig, but the main script is meant to be easy to alter using your favourite non-Notepad editor and that is currently the recommended approach.

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Furball is not suited for total beginners, but it can be a good way for new commanders to start getting live fire combat experience. The bad guys in a furball will shoot at you, especially if you shoot at them, but

• They also shoot at each other, and the cops, and any other nearby ships. It's a brawl, remember?
• They don't show up all at once, but must launch one at a time from the station. This limits their ability to gang up on you.
• They're not a coherent group, just some random angry ships, so if you attack one, the rest won't instantly turn on you.
• There might (eventually) be an equal number of cops joining the fray, which helps distract some of the brawlers.

The brawl has the added complication of occurring directly in front of whatever station you just launched from or approached, so you must aim and manoeuvre carefully!

Version History & Download

• [Versions 1.0 onwards] by m4r35n357
• Version 1.8
• Version 1.7
• Version 1.6
• Older version 1.0a1 by Caracal

Version 1.8 - Changed activation conditions, should be much rarer at higher TL systems - Brawlers now have escape pods, and will bail out if they can ;) - Accuracy set to 5, not yet sure how much effect this has on the way I use the AI

Version 1.7 - Supporting version 1.6+ of Cabal_Common_Library, no other changes

Version 1.6 - From latest trunk onwards (v1.77), will replace large ships (eg. Rogue Frigate) that fail to launch - Experimental OXPConfig support, YMMV ;)

Version 1.5 - slighlty reduce frequency of ubers - 50-50 chance of either cloaking device or military jammer for each uber

Version 1.4 - tweak activation conditions - slash bounties

Version 1.3 - no user-visible changes, some higher-tech brawlers

Version 1.2 - Switch off debug (oops!)

Version 1.1 - use js filtered entities to select targets instead of storing an array

Version 1.0 - modded world script Make appearance of brawl depend on system government (Disabled by default) brawls now possible at some other station types - modded AI Don't involve the police directly, they already know what to do Tuned probability of attacking innocent bystanders - added a ship script Bring any escorts in/out of intercept AI in line with mother ship Each ship keeps track of the other brawlers, no AI scanning

Discuss this OXP and report bugs on the BB in the Furball thread.

Licensing

Furball OXP by m4r35n357/Caracal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.