PDF of Infopedia?

[johnlondon]

It seems this is more or less the manual, and I would love to be able to read this when not playing the game - Is there a PDF of this anywhere? I think it would also make it easier to learn how to play this amazing game

[Leigh]

We BADLY want to do a manual, but don’t have one specifically written, no. The Infopedia is probably the closest thing we do have. I can just chuck them all in a PDF when I get time and post it on here as a helpful guide. The key thing there is when I have time, but yeah good idea.

Leigh

[johnlondon]

Awesome! Thanks Leigh!

[nic]

I second the idea of a PDF! It would be great for somebody like me who doesn’t have beta access and want to have some info about game mechanics and game universe (yes, I’ve already read all the background story on the website!) till EA. I know you guys have higher priorities, but if you find the time…

[elissa]

PDF sounds like a great idea! Not a huge amount of work for a very useful resource.

[johndalton]

Here’s a one liner for Mac users to produce a(n extremely rough) Markdown version of the Infopedia, which should be pretty easy to turn into a PDF. I made a PDF out of it using Macdown by turning on “Render newline literally” and exporting it.

(echo "# Infopedia"; for f in ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/Objects\ in\ Space/Objects\ in\ Space.app/Contents/Resources/info_*; do title=$( head -1 "$f" | cut -c10-); echo -e "\n## $title"; tail +4 "$f"; done) > ~/Downloads/OIS_Infopedia.md

[embero]

Based on @johndalton answer I created a quick html page + table of contents and a PDF.
Infopedia Page
Infopedia PDF

[mixolyde]

Awesome job! I purchased the game last night, and enjoyed reading this during work.

Running through the entries, the only missing item that stood out for me was IFF, what it is and the difference between on and off. It gets a brief mention in the entry about the screen it’s on, but no detail. Is there a good place to post info pedia suggestions?

[embero]

As far as I know, IFF means Identification Friend or Foe, it’s an identification system. On means probably okay-ish and off means o_O better run fly away.

[mixolyde]

I figured it out eventually with some help from Google, but I think it should be added to the Infopedia for non-military/pilot folks. Something like:

IFF - Identification Friend or Foe - A broadcast signal stating the identity of your ship. It will generally soothe law-abiding ship pilots as long as your reputation is clean, but will also loudly signal your position to less-than-savory pilots.

[falconhoof]

Hello eveyone. This is my absolute first post so I apologise if I’ve missed this suggestion brought up elsewhere: Is there any opposition to starting a wiki for OiS? There seems to be no shortage of these for other games and I think it would be fun to be the first people to break ground. The infopedia page created above is a step in that direction, but it appears to be privately hosted on a personal server, as well as not being user editable. Is there a hosting cost associated with some of these public wikis? If so, perhaps FEG could set up one of the many FOSS wiki applications on the same host as this forum.

[stibbons]

Welcome!

There’s already an unofficial OiS wiki, at https://oiswiki.sysadninjas.net/wiki/Main_Page . Definitely needs some more useful updates though.

[falconhoof]

Oh, thank you very much!

[aurora_rising]

IFF - Identification Friend or Foe - A broadcast signal stating the identity of your ship. It will generally soothe law-abiding ship pilots as long as your reputation is clean, but will also loudly signal your position to less-than-savory pilots.

that’s a good description, would be great to add it to the help; i’d seen the term IFF used before in other games, but had kind of forgotten
(there’s some more three-letter identifiers, for example SCH SYN ACK TTN BOM… in the “LR Comms Array” room, for which it would be useful to have some kind of glossary, they look like TCP packet flags but not quite?)

[falconhoof]

I wondered that too, but I’d wager those are there for fun and to add ambiance, unless someone can share a time a synchronization failed explicitly during one of those phases. (SYN/ACK are certainly parts of the TCP handshake though).

But for fun, here’s a screen cap of it if anyone wants to try to figure it out:

[aurora_rising]

I wondered that too, but I’d wager those are there for fun and to add ambiance, unless someone can share a time a synchronization failed explicitly during one of those phases.

yes, that, or if it was possible to disable individual phases we could maybe reverse-engineer what they do^^

i think you’re right though, it looked convincing enough to me at first glance, but it’s unlikely that they developed the space-packet-radio to such a degree