Oolite Bulletins

Maybe he should have a "screw that idea, somebody else can do it" list?

I used to be a RISC OS programmer - was a big fan way back in the day. There were some great things about it. I still miss not having a back button on my windows. In retrospect RISC OS was a pretty poor, and very primative operating system. Yes, RISC OS was fast, responsive, and pretty stable most o...

Interesting snippit - maybe... I went to the same school with the bloke that wrote pcBBC - he was several years ahead of me, maybe as many as 5. He's a smart guy - there wasn't much that he couldn't get a BBC Micro to do if he put his mind to it. One of the things he did was disassemble Acorn's Econ...

We've discussed before the possibilities of having hidden systems in Oolite - a long time ago now in the dim and distant past. I'd proposed that we should have a whole overlaid map of invisible stuff. These hidden things could be uncharted planets, rogue planets, hidden pirate/military/research/Thar...

And it seems there's a Mac OS X port too... Just downloading the two or three CD images of data needed right now...

Actually the screenshots link I gave didn't seem to show any of the in-ship graphics. If you check out another galery linked to on the left of that page, like Derelict, you'll see some in-ship stuff.

Their UI does look pretty cool...

Just checked out the screenshots for Freespace 2 at http://fs2source.warpcore.org/wmcscreenies/ Their graphics engine looks really cool - the space nebula are particularly good, as is the ship lighting. We'd had another discussion here about ambient lighting levels, with the complaint being put forw...

Genuine dark-sides is a great idea and it would indeed add to the realism. Darker dark-sides would give you a nice additional visual clue as to which direction the sun is. However the current lightness of dark sides in Oolite could be explained by your ship's visual sensors providing some dark side ...

Actually a few more thoughts... You could undertake multiple random missions of different types - if the variables storing mission details were prefixed with their type, like "ASSASINATE_", "FETCH_", "KILL_". Those three types should be do-able with the scripting system...

Now my brain isn't working quite right today (damn cold), but isn't essentially all that would be required to support the scripting of random missions a random number generator in the scripting system? I'm thinking randomly generate a mission definition and keep the details if the player accepts. On...

In classic Elite the docking computer would only ever work when you were inside the station's safety zone, and the S had popped up on your console. This happens quite a while after the space compass picks up the station IIRC. Until then it did nothing. Old Elite versions would indeed kill you with t...

Given that airplanes have had instrument landing systems for well over 30 years that can land all sorts of planes reliably without the pilot interfering in all but extreme weather conditions it really is quite incredulous that a space ship should have trouble docking using its docking computer. It s...

As I said, there would indeed be the problem of increasing the complexity of the simulation... However the question has to be asked about how accurate simulation of distant objects should be, since objects at a sufficient distance (about 2x scanner range) are essentially invisible to the player. Bey...

Right now in Oolite we generally don't encounter ships off-lane because it's essentially impossible to find anyone, or anything off-lane. There's a simple solution to this - long-range scanners. Equip all cops with them, most pirates, and a few traders by default. That would allow for ships to be sc...

I was...

Then I pointed out it was too easy to get to Elite - too few kills required, and Giles upped the required number.