Will Oolite survive with the release of Elite Dangerous?

[ClymAngus]

Will Oolite survive the release of Zork: Dangerous?

It is now official. Rolling Stone has confirmed: Oolite is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Oolite community when IBD confirmed that Oolite market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all players. Coming on the heels of a recent Rolling Stone survey which plainly states that Oolite has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Oolite is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent BBC comprehensive gaming test.

etc etc

Funny. Oolite will die (as a thing on the internet) when the legal eagles decide we are drastically impacting on market share, using copyrighted material that is keeping a valued revenue stream away from frontier games. For that to happen the benefit of getting the C.A.D. order written and implemented has to sizably outweigh the revenue generated from oolites commercial channelling capacity of new players into elite: dangerous. In a nut shell we're useful, as long as we are financially useful killing us serves no financial purpose.

We are not costing them money by existing.

In any case the structure is completely different:

Elite:dangerous competitive play = teenagers blowing the shit out of each other in some god forsaken corner of the digital universe.

Oolite competitive play = I take your mod sir and I improve it!! Ha Ha!

There is no comparison, because you can't compare quality to quantity.

The day I see Frontier take out oolite is the day a caduceus is seen gracing the space-ways of dangerous. It's not going to happen.

[cim]

Oolite will die (as a thing on the internet) when the legal eagles decide we are drastically impacting on market share, using copyrighted material that is keeping a valued revenue stream away from frontier games.

It would take about a week to remove everything that's even vaguely arguably a direct copy from Elite from the current Oolite source/data files and replace it with an unarguably original version. (And it's not those bits which are potentially competing for market share, either [1]; Elite for Emacs contains the same things - and more)

[1] In practice I don't think Oolite and Elite: Dangerous even compete for market share at all, given the direction ED has gone in. If Frontier had gone for "single player and heavily moddable" for ED, I might be more worried.

[ClymAngus]

I am in total agreement master cim. I can be somewhat flamboyant at times with the nature of my pros and this can lead to misunderstandings; but when boiled down, it is but a simple message: (and to quote a misquotation)

“Reports of oolites death have been greatly exaggerated”

[fronclynne]

I am in total agreement master cim. I can be somewhat flamboyant at times with the nature of my pros and this can lead to misunderstandings; but when boiled down, it is but a simple message: (and to quote a misquotation)

“Reports of oolites death have been greatly exaggerated”

Just waggishly paraphrasing the old "*BSD is dying" spam nonsense from the days when Malda was still at slashdot (1999?).

[Bugbear]

My 2c / 2p here.

I don't have a lot of time for gaming, so when I do, I like to get stuck in to the action (I actually like the exploration role in E:D, so I guess my interpretation of 'action' is a bit odd).

Here's my experience from the past week.

Wednesday night. Great! I've got an hour or so up my sleeve. I think I'll jump onto ED and continue my quest to get as far as possible from player populated space ('cause I also want to trade a market that is not being affected by players in their T9's). Logged in, splash screen pops up, but the 'Play now' has been replaced with the dreaded 'Upgrade now'. Clicked upgrade and pondered for a moment why FDEV don't see fit to let us know the size of the upgrade, or how long it's going to take. Screw it, I'm off to play Oolite. At least there's no waiting there...

Sunday morning. I love the smell of cooling laser banks in the morning. ED must have finished upgrading from Wednesday night. All right! Let's get back into the black. 'Upgrade now'... Seriously? I see now why Microsoft went to monthly updates. This kind of behaviour is acceptable during Beta, but the beancounters at FDEV decreed that the game had to be released pre-Christmas 2014 so as far as I'm concerned, this game is in production. The frequency of updates is getting a little tiresome. At least I can control when Oolite is upgraded. Oh well, those packages in Chart 6 aren't going to deliver themselves...

A big thing I love about Oolite - time from clicking the shortcut to launching from the station, about 30s. ED - about 3 minutes (f**king pointless spinning sidewinder).

[Wildeblood]

A big thing I love about Oolite - time from clicking the shortcut to launching from the station, about 30s. ED - about 3 minutes.

I recently conducted an experiment: I installed all the OXZs available from the download manager. Time to start up Oolite afterwards: 243 seconds (four minutes). But that's a one time delay that doesn't recur until you alter the OXPs again. Much worse though is the at least 30 second pause when launching from the station. That's from all the OXP authors who assume that shipWillLaunchFromStation is the obvious best time to do their setting up.

[Lone_Wolf]

A big thing I love about Oolite - time from clicking the shortcut to launching from the station, about 30s. ED - about 3 minutes.

I recently conducted an experiment: I installed all the OXZs available from the download manager. Time to start up Oolite afterwards: 243 seconds (four minutes). But that's a one time delay that doesn't recur until you alter the OXPs again. Much worse though is the at least 30 second pause when launching from the station. That's from all the OXP authors who assume that shipWillLaunchFromStation is the obvious best time to do their setting up.

Would it help if OXPs changed to shipLaunchedFromStation instead ?

[cim]

Would it help if OXPs changed to shipLaunchedFromStation instead ?

startUp, or in 1.80 onwards systemWillPopulate or startUpComplete, are the best places for initialisation, depending on exactly what is being initialised - and startUp has more relaxed time limits on execution specifically to allow larger initialisation blocks to run. A lot of the initialisation in shipWillLaunchFromStation is adding initial ships and stations to the system, and should be done - in a slightly different way - in systemWillPopulate.

shipWillLaunchFromStation gets used for initialisation by a lot of older OXPs - and newer OXPs that have copied them - to deal with historical problems which were solved before 1.76

[Yodeebe]

Of course, there's another major difference between the two, too.
Oolite is FUN

[ClymAngus]

Of course, there's another major difference between the two, too.
Oolite is FUN

Well, not to be uncharitable it's a variation on a theme. As soon as you get people together they will try and do each other over. Someones got to win and someones got to loose yadda yadda yadda. I find this tiresome but some people really really get off on it. I feel most ooliters will fall within the middle category of "well it's ok and often good". Interdiction sounds like a pain in the ass.

[Imaginos]

Not having played ED, I'm ignorant about these things but is there any difference between "interdiction" and "mass lock"?

[Cody]

Not having played ED, I'm ignorant about these things but is there any difference between "interdiction" and "mass lock"?

Yeah, you can evade interdiction (an art which I've had to learn in the deep end)!

[Yah-Ta-Hey]

Mass lock is just like in Oolite... get to close to a large item and you cannot supercruise or do a jump.
interdiction is some dweeb's attempt to pull you out of supercruise into normal space so they can play the villian part.

Like Cody... avoiding interdiction is easy if you catch it early on... but if you cannot avoid it... a good set of engines, and shield generators backed by a B class Beam laser will often get you out of trouble.

Cody flies a a Cobra III but I fly a small trader that is a pushover for interdiction so I fly with the biggest baddest set of engines and shield generators that I can put into my little ship. My beam laser is a class B that puts out the most damage that my ship can handle. In general terms... my defenses cost me about 6 tonnes of cargo space out of 18 available but I haven't been shot out of space yet.

[Cody]

Like my esteemed sky brother, I have yet to be shot down, even while I was surveying that anarchy/feudal system for Clym. Plenty of interdictions, but only minimal damage to my explorer Cobra MkIII - so far! We still cannot name our ships, which is rather irksome - such a basic thing to implement. I need to name my ship!

[OneoftheLost]

Well it certainly SOUNDS fun, even if I can't play it. How do you guys feel about it for sheer fun factor? Are you getting your money out of it?


It will never beat Oolite for me. (I'll never give up all these delightful OXPs, and well... its offline. )