[Release] Addons for Beginners

[cim]

Oh, and just discovered, if I pause the game while coming here to read or write, when I come back and unpause, the situation is _not_ as I left it.
Just now I was to near no roll and no pitch, paused, ordered food online, unpaused, and I was once more spinning wildly.

That sounds like you have mouse control turned on. This sets up a turn rate relative to the mouse's position from its centre position, which would often give a rapid spin. When you pause the game, do other stuff, and resume, the mouse will be in a different place and so your spin will change.

Things to try:
- press mouse button 2 to recentre the mouse. This should stop the spin until you touch it again.
- press Shift-M to disable the mouse. Then the keyboard controls should work better, and they automatically shut down when you stop pressing them.

With keyboard control, pressing a turning key tells your ship to start spinning. When you release the key, counter-thrust will automatically be applied to slowly bring you back to a halt. Lightly tapping the opposite rotational key will bring you back to a halt much faster.

[Cody]

There's a precision option for KB too - hold Ctrl down.

[Mazur]

There's a precision option for KB too - hold Ctrl down.

Which _is_ mentioned in the Tutorial, unlike the mouse control possibility.

Thank you for trying to help, though, but precision pitch and roll correction is little use if I can't dampen the extreme pitch and roll effects.

The Mouse control is also not mentioned in Game Options, so I can't see whether its on or off, nor is it mentioned in the config file GNUstep/defaults/.GNUstepDefaults. Its existence can be deduced from the mention of it in the keyboard controls, but that does not explain how it effects the ship control. Not that I want it, it'd be a nuisance and counterintuitive to have to center the mouse exactly to achieve a prefect course.

So, if anyone understands how ship controls work:
1. How do I find out whether Mouse control is on or off, as I don;t see the difference clearly,
2. How do I counter extreme pitch and roll with the Up/Down (Pitch) and Left/Right (Roll) arrow keys, preferably explaining what happens in physics terms, as well.

Because right now I'm just a Newtonian body of mass (mess?) spinning every which way and I've not enough clues how to get myself stable.

[Mazur]

Ahem.

What I totally overlooked and therefore neglected to say is, that I'm playing on a laptop with a touchpad. Resetting the Joystick1 controls all to nothing bound to them had me return to a ship sitting perfectly still with not a speck of dust stirring.

Doesn't explain to me why I could not achieve this before, not using the touchpad, but as long as I get things working so i can comprehend them, fine.

[Layne]

First, welcome to the board, Mazur. I feel your pain regarding the steep learning curve of the game.

Some of the purists here will boo and throw sour grape tomatoes, but I'd like to point out that if you're having trouble with the standard Elite-style Roll/Pitch controls, you can swap the keyboard and use a more familiar Yaw/Pitch style like many flight simulations and other games use. Instead of the view spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise, you'll just yaw left and right. If you swap the controls like that I suggest binding the 'roll' to the default 'yaw' controls (the '<' and '>' symbols) to keep them handy, because you /will/ find them very useful to match station roll when docking at the very least.

[Mazur]

First, welcome to the board, Mazur. I feel your pain regarding the steep learning curve of the game.

Some of the purists here will boo and throw sour grape tomatoes, but I'd like to point out that if you're having trouble with the standard Elite-style Roll/Pitch controls, you can swap the keyboard and use a more familiar Yaw/Pitch style like many flight simulations and other games use. Instead of the view spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise, you'll just yaw left and right. If you swap the controls like that I suggest binding the 'roll' to the default 'yaw' controls (the '<' and '>' symbols) to keep them handy, because you /will/ find them very useful to match station roll when docking at the very least.

Your compassion is a nice warm bath to relieve the aches in my mental muscles after the strenuous exercise they got trying to encompass the idiosyncracies of Oolite ship manœvers. Just now I finally managed to get to a complete stop near the beacon without getting hit by an asteroid immediately for the next segment of flight control. (The first time I managed to come to a complete stop I could not even read the instructions for the segment, as an Asteroid must have hit me immediately! Nice. Not. The second time, just now, I just had time to read the instructions, notice the asteroid coming and fail to achieve a controlled escape.)

As for purism, that's for those as want it, I'll play as I like best, which is with as much aids as possible and the least degree of difficulty. If I needed a challenge, I'd have another go at getting an employer to accept me as I am, but since they are quite set in their ways, and I don't ask for much, I'd rather pass, thankyouverymuch. The puritans can go dance a Sarabande in the nude in a poison ivy field, for all I care, they have their preferences, I have mine.

I'd already found and used the yaw controls, (. and ,), which are indeed more useful than roll in approaching an object, since the first goal is to get the destination in the crosshairs. Roll is at any rate unnatural in space flight, speaking of purity, as it's an atmospheric manœvre. In space it'd only apply to docking, to achieve relative immobility to a rotating destination.

[Layne]

I'd already found and used the yaw controls, (. and ,), which are indeed more useful than roll in approaching an object, since the first goal is to get the destination in the crosshairs. Roll is at any rate unnatural in space flight, speaking of purity, as it's an atmospheric manœvre. In space it'd only apply to docking, to achieve relative immobility to a rotating destination.

Since the keyboard controls are completely customizable by editing the keyconfig.plist (It's in the oolite.app/resources/config directory, and can be edited with any good text editor-- using notepad is not suggested as it tends to mess up the line formatting and break plists, but Wordpad should be fine; Notepad++ is even better if you have it installed.) you can re-bind the yaw to the left/right arrow keys and have all your flight controls on the arrow keys on the laptop. Just change the bindings as follows:

Code: Select all

   key_roll_left				= ",";		
	key_roll_right				= ".";		
	key_pitch_forward			= 255;		// up arrow
	key_pitch_back				= 254;		// down arrow
	key_yaw_left				= 253;          // left arrow
	key_yaw_right				= 252;          // right arrow

Now roll will be where yaw currently is, for your use in docking.

[Mazur]

I might do that, eventually, but I've not been in combat, yet, and even though I plan to keep combat as rare as possible, I have a stinking feeling I'll not get to be a big trader without any combat at all. And perhaps there roll does make sense, I don't know yet.

But I'll use vi for editing the config file. I'm a Unix man, through and through. My first PCs ran Slackware from floppies, I think I started around Slackware 0.8x or something. 25 years ago, or more.

But I'm drifting off course here towards memory lane, and this is not the place.

[Layne]

But I'll use vi for editing the config file. I'm a Unix man, through and through. My first PCs ran Slackware from floppies, I think I started around Slackware 0.8x or something. 25 years ago, or more.

But I'm drifting off course here towards memory lane, and this is not the place.

Boop! My fault for presuming your OS without asking. Much and many and gooey apologies.

And, yes, you will have combat as a trader; even the safest of systems has pirates and raiders, alas. Various strategies for dealing with them would (and has) taken up many other threads on this board.

[Commander_X]

KB+Mouse, never got a thingy, well, I have/had one, but never got to play a game using it.

Quick question: is your "thingy" by any chance plugged in your computer (regardless if you use it or not)?[*]
Having it plugged in and not calibrated leads quite clearly to what you're describing.
You'd have 3 solutions to get rid of the inconvenience in this case:
1. unplug the thingy (best before you start the game) (as a Linux user you can also unload the joystick module; you might keep a ps3 controller plugged in, for charging, and it maps to the joystick driver as well)
2. calibrate the thingy (which shouldn't make too much sense if you don't want to use it)
3. remove all the controls mapped in the thingy (there is a "Joystick Configuration" option just above the "View Keyboard Configuration" after you click "Game Options...") Select each assigned function in the 3 screens of options and press u to unset.
[*] In case cim's advice regarding mouse control didn't work.

[Smivs]

But I'm drifting off course here towards memory lane, and this is not the place.

Oh, I don't know, many of us old-timers get quite nostalgic sometimes...
As one of the 'purists' I have followed this thread with interest, and you have raised a few points of interest. You see I come from the era of Elite. I was in my 30s when I discovered the game back in the 80s. Back then there were no expansions or tutorials, just the (fairly crude back then) game, and you just launched and started learning. And believe me, that could be soooo frustrating. But once you had learnt, you had skills for life and they are still serving me well now all these years later. So my beliefs on this subject are not just the opinionated high-and-mightiness of some arrogant little twat, rather the firm conviction of somebody who knows how beneficial the 'hard road' can be.
Having said that, I do fully understand your position, and your posts have been enlightening. You have made me think the unthinkable, namely that there might be a case for an 'Easy-start' OXP collection. Let's be honest, a player using these will never 'just use them while I'm learning the ropes' as you'd never really learn the ropes and would therefore have to use them permanently, but as has been said before, So What?! Many aspects of the game would still be fun even if most of the basic skills are replaced with technological aids, and if such an approach brings more people into the game I suppose that is a good thing.

[Redspear]

Let's be honest, a player using these will never 'just use them while I'm learning the ropes' as you'd never really learn the ropes and would therefore have to use them permanently, but as has been said before, So What?!

They might....

Like riding a bike with stabilisers, removing them might make a big difference but by then you already understand the pedals and, more importantly, the joy of cycling.

Many aspects of the game would still be fun even if most of the basic skills are replaced with technological aids, and if such an approach brings more people into the game I suppose that is a good thing.

We didn't have many back in the days of Elite perhaps because it was too much trouble to fit them on those old computers and their tiny memories Perhaps some such things are expected by some players from a 32nd(+) century spaceship? (never played freelancer, wing commander etc., so I don't know)... I seem to recall David B once saying that they probably should have started the player with a docking computer (but it wasn't so bad then as I explained earlier). Anyway, yes, I agree

In any case, welcome Mazur and I hope you get as much fun out of this game as most of us do here .

[Norby]

there might be a case for an 'Easy-start' OXP collection.

This can solve my dilemma about some OXPs: ambiences, activities and missions can stay in the basic package and the others can move into the easy collection.

[another_commander]

Mazur, one thing you might want to give a try with is setting the mouse to behave more FPS-like, with yaw assigned on x-axis. You may find control much easier like this. To do it, press Shift+Ctrl+M rather than just Shift+M when activating it. Hope it helps.

[Mazur]

KB+Mouse, never got a thingy, well, I have/had one, but never got to play a game using it.

Quick question: is your "thingy" by any chance plugged in your computer (regardless if you use it or not)?[*]
Having it plugged in and not calibrated leads quite clearly to what you're describing.
You'd have 3 solutions to get rid of the inconvenience in this case:
1. unplug the thingy (best before you start the game) (as a Linux user you can also unload the joystick module; you might keep a ps3 controller plugged in, for charging, and it maps to the joystick driver as well)
2. calibrate the thingy (which shouldn't make too much sense if you don't want to use it)
3. remove all the controls mapped in the thingy (there is a "Joystick Configuration" option just above the "View Keyboard Configuration" after you click "Game Options...") Select each assigned function in the 3 screens of options and press u to unset.
[*] In case cim's advice regarding mouse control didn't work.

Nope, it's not plugged in, as you might have inferred from my formulation, I barely remember where the rotten thing is.

But this is a laptop with a touchpad, and that was configured as joystick 1, and apparently somehow throwing my ship into a spin. Treating it to option 3 solved my spinning problem. So I'm currently back in piloting school, losing the bombardment bit, much to the enjoyment of all the young colleague pilots-in-training and teachers manning the bleachers to see the old guy (me) struggling to get out of the way of two handfuls of asteroids launched into my path.

Never played a FPS, either, by the time Linux got its first FPS, my dexterity was already so much lower than when one is in their teens, that I'd be only a casual victim in any multi-player FPS, and I don't enjoy destruction anyway, I play games like various Civilization, SimCity and Football Manager much more. And even then, mostly solo, I much prefer cooperative play to competetive play. and I appear to be an oddball in that. Oh, and I play MMORPGs, if they have an enjoyable social dimension.

But I'll give that mouse control a seeing to, perhaps that will make some things easier for an older recruit like myself.

Oh, and I wanted to say one more thing about purism: engines running at a fixed speed? In space?? Seriously??? Whoever wrote Elite clearly failed physics, as evidenced by the aft view at cruising speed. And by the direction of travel after turning the ship, or coming to a stop after killing the engines, stopping roll/pitch after releasing those controls. Doesn't bother me, but purism my arse!