I was playing frontier and ffe for long times, so when I read about oolite, I was really curious.... now I am a little puzzled about it.
What's the target of this project? To make exact copy of old elite? Elite was great, but everybody can play that in dosbox today... and we live in 21th century.
I am sometimes playing vegastrike and I think that VS is good attempt for Elite or Frontier successor.
Of course I know that writing good open source game is a looooong time. But I would like to know if you want to make something new or just rewrite elite using objective c and opengl
1. Recreate Elite as closely as possible without having recourse to the original code, including elements from all the variations of the original game, and at the same time to use modern computer resources like OOP and OpenGL.
2. Allow this game to be data-driven and make it easy to expand and add value to, in the form of expansion packs, etc. And, so as not to conflict with 1. provide a 'strict' mode for Elite die-hards.
I boiled this down into a four word pitch once: Oolite is like "Elite one point five".
Don't mistake this for VegaStrike, Parsec, Homeworld, Freespace, or X. This is NOT even a successor to Frontier and FFE. It's a modern interpretation of Elite, and what Elite did next.
"The planet Rear is scourged by well-intentioned OXZs."
I've always seen Oolite as being what Elite would have been if it had been designed today. The same simple game structure but with far more expandability for the player and nicer graphics.
The thing is that Giles has obeyed the first rule of programming a game: make it simple to play. The interface is clean and uncluttered, and the keyboard commands are simple and easy to remember, as is the concept.
OK, the concept is borrowed from the game it is based on, but Oolite doesn't try to do anything fancy with it. The beauty of the OXP system is that the game can be as simple or as complex as the PLAYER likes!
Amiga Elite made one simple error over the earlier versions. It put those stupid garish surrounds all over the screen and made it ugly to look at. Oolite takes a step back from that and makes the WHOLE screen devoted to the game, including the HUD area, which is overlaid on the action!
Elite 1.5 indeed. A far worthier successor to Elite than Frontier ever was.
In my opinion, Vegastrike is more of a Privateer-style game. The similarities between all these games hinges upon the fact that Privateer, and it's successors, originally borrowed their basic concepts very heavily from Elite (right down to the types of items traded).
Vegastrike itself spawned the fork called "Privateer Gemini Gold", of course, which its maintainer, 'John' and co, have done wonders with. John started Gemini Gold because the original Privateer remake (also based on Vegastrike) was diverging too far from the original story and setting (too many 'Bandersnatch-makers', for John's liking, perhaps!) He wants to recreate the original game with modern graphics (which is fair enough) and he and his colleagues are willing to put in the effort to actually do so.
However, they have reached that crucial point, which the original Vegastrike hasn't, IMO, where the game can, essentially, be played - even while improvements continue to be made to its basic systems. This is the important point, in a game's development, and I continue to watch that project with great interest.
All these games take a very different approach to what Oolite is about, IMO, however. Oolite has not only always been a playable game (no matter how many changes were made to the subsystems) - ever since I first discovered it, in the summer of two years ago - but it has also always welcomed addons, changes, and modifications which the basic game has proven modular enough not to break at a later date, even while core elements of the game have been improved (You can still run OXPs written over a year ago, by authors whom we haven't heard from, on these forums, t least, for months, and the addons still basically adhere to the design intentions the author had for them, all that time ago.)
So, Oolite is a good example of a well designed, object-oriented project that exposes a scriptable 'API' that is simple enough to grasp for non-hardcore programmers (certainly non-Coacoa programmers - and even a good few people who wouldn't normally consider themselves programmers, at all) to make quite serious modifications to the game logic without breaking it, or breaking other modifications that may be running in parallel.
And so I gave myself to God. There was a pregnant pause before He said "OK"
And you know why? it's changeable!
It's growing as we speak! er.. chat! er... as you read this!
We can add our own ships, music, missions, addons, updates, new ideas, old ideas, and even for the Cheaters, (There are always some)
you can edit the savegame file!
Now if you would excuse me, i have Oolite to play!
I am not worthy of thy presence! Now get out of here!
In the Marvel Comics world they have (a few years ago) launched the Ultimate Universe. Basically retelling and redoing the old Marvel universe from scratch, with modernisations and generally making it all accessible to new readers. A really good idea as the "normal" Marvel universe has characters who have gone through 40 years of plots.
In the Elite world we now have Oolite - taking the best bits of all 3 Elite games and retelling things from the start. Oolite has been modernised, brought up to date, been made accessible to all and generally become a game that new players will enjoy. I know some people are put off by Classic Elite's graphics or any of the FEU games for that matter. Oolite corrects this and makes the game expandable in ways that mean it should never get old.
(copied from my EBBS post)
I LOVE OOLITE!
The act of talking b*ll*cks whilst waving one's arms about wildly is referred to as testiculation.
I agree it is Elite and then some.
My early impressions of Oolite, were the fantastic adherence to the properties of light (and shdow).
It is truely great coming in low over a planet's curvature and seeing the sun glistening off a low orbiting station.
Add to this excellent touches like cabin temp increase through atmospheric friction and a encroaching sky as you enter planetary atmoshphere.. Cool no?
Finally, the decision to use the original Elite hud/scanner was a master stroke in it's own right. To date, it still hasn't been bettered (imo).
OOLITE RULES 
