As far as Oolite is an open ended game, and the main purpose of the game for the player is to achieve Elite rank, that will take some time.
For a player who has discovered Oolite recently, the first aim is to equip their ship so that they can start to kill other ships. So they have to learn docking manually first, and then try to find an easy trade run to earn a lot of credits. Flying a standard Cobra III with a 20t cargo hold, that will take some time, but after a while you buy a cargo bay extension and start to earn more credits. You learn to avoid the space lanes at times, and slowly the player earns enough money to buy a better laser, fuel scoops, docking computers, navigation upgrades and better shields, then military lasers and finally make their ship iron-assed.
That is the time to start to go hunting other ships, or not, according to the career chosen by the player. Then there will be the native missions, and the player will be out of his routine for a while. Depending on which OXPs are installed, you may have more missions and jump to other galaxies.
The challenging part of Oolite is the missions, because most of the time you are dragged out of your character and forced to do something else. There are a lot of very good mission OXPs, but as a player who has done those missions, then what?
So that is my work... to provide an interesting mission to the commoonity, based on an excellent tale by El Viejo. With his help from day one, I decided to author that OXP, and many other people have helped during the developement stages.
Here is the readme!
The Mission OXP can be downloaded from hereCoyote’s Run OXP by Okti
Introduction:
This OXP is based on the Oolite fiction short story Coyote, by El Viejo.
The mission will commence when the player jumps into Laquused in G5, with a Cloaking Device. The mission uses comms messages extensively, and the player can check the current instructions by accessing the F5F5 screen. Also, all previous mission screens can be viewed by pressing F7 when docked to view System Information. The normal System Information can be displayed by a second F7 when mission screens are exited.
Most of the actions are scripted according to the tale and only slightly changed or extended. It would be handy to have read the tale, or to read it during the mission play, but the OXP can be enjoyed even if you haven’t read the tale.
The short story Coyote, can be downloaded here.
Installation:
Inside the .zip there are two OXPs… move the Coyote’s Run.oxp into your AddOns folder. If you use Griff’s all-in-one shipset in your game, then you should also install the Coyote’s Run for Griff.oxp into your AddOns folder… this will ensure that all the ships in the OXP are Griff ships.
Credits:
El Viejo (Screenplay Consultant): for allowing me to script his intellectual property, correcting the mission texts, giving ideas, test running the mission, motivating me during the WIP period... in short, for directing the OXP.
Smivs: for providing textures and test playing the mission, and invaluable insights and advice.
Fatleaf (Chief Test-pilot): for testing, giving ideas, motivation and making me laugh at his comments, and his heroic efforts to ‘break’ the mission.
Mauiby de Fug: for testing, correcting typos and his kind PM’s and posts about the mission.
Svengali, Ironfist: for testing and giving ideas about placing objects in the right locations.
Wyvern: for modeling and quaternion help and also for suggestions for the mission.
Griff: for allowing me to write the overrides oxp for his shipset, and his help in providing a custom paintjob and decals for some ships.
Eric Walch: for testing the plist’s on his Mac.
PhantorGorth: for facilitating the development environment in the Oolite chatroom, and for his knowledge of JavaScript.
All the regulars at DS's Seedy Space Bar for the 'vibes'… thanks, guys and gals!
All OXP authors, from whose work I learnt so much, and the Oolite development team, without which many missions would not be possible.
Copyright:
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
Enjoy.
Edit:
A plist error for Coyote's Run for Griff has been corrected.