How amenable is Oolite to TCs?

FredMSloniker · Post by **FredMSloniker** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 4:20 am

I've seen a fair number of Oolite expansions mentioned that add ships and missions to the game, but I'm wondering if it'd be possible for me to go deeper, using the Oolite engine for a total conversion space sim project. Can you remove ships from circulation? Replace the built-in starmaps? Add branching mission structures like good ol' Wing Commander? Or are you stuck launching a Cobra from Lave and navigating the standard Oolite galaxy with the occasional TIE fighter?

TGHC · Post by **TGHC** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 10:04 am

The source code is freely available on Ian Bells site, so I guess you can do you whtever you wish, providing it's not a commercial venture.

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 10:49 am

Branching Missions can be done. Each System can be completley changed (name, description, techlevel inhabits etc). Planets and moons can be added, stations can be removed or changed etc, suns can be set to go nova, AIs can be written to make a ship do whatever you want.

So a TC is possible using OXPs, but would be a pretty massive project!

Post by **dajt** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 11:08 am

The Oolite engine is very much based on Elite. You can't change the star maps or number of galaxies, for example. The maps are populated with the same algorithms as the original Elite games.

You can change the ships, you can add planets and moons, and you can do pretty complex missions as long as they only involve delivering things or destroying ships.

But you can't remove the Elite from Oolite - it is at the very heart of the code.

Post by **winston** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 1:40 pm

Well, you COULD remove the Elite from Oolite - it's just a matter of changing the code (which is available via SVN at berlios.de) to something else. You can't do the "total conversion" purely by OXPs (if you want to change galaxy structure), but there's nothing stopping someone making a non-Elite game with the Oolite engine...although given the pervasiveness of Eliteisms (such as the user interface), it'd still feel pretty Elite-ey however much you moved the instrument panel around. If you want to make it totally non-Elitey, then it's probably best writing a completely new engine!

Post by **winston** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 1:44 pm

TGHC wrote:
The source code is freely available on Ian Bells site, so I guess you can do you whtever you wish, providing it's not a commercial venture.

Well, not quite. I think the Elite Elites ('genetic' Elites if you like, ones directly based on the original code base) may be at Ian Bell's site, but Oolite isn't - the source code is all here:

svn://svn.berlios.de/oolite-linux/trunk

Source packages for 1.65 are also downloadable from http://oolite-linux.berlios.de

Note that 'oolite-linux' is just an accident of history: the source code is the grand unified source tree for all platforms.