YouTube playthroughs

[arquebus]

Upon docking, someone will point out this damage to you and urge you to have emergency repairs made at the Ship Outfitters (F3).
Here you will find 'Emergency Hull Repairs' offered for 75Cr. These repairs are fairly basic and consist of new Duralium plates welded over the damaged areas to ensure structural integrity and airtightness where needed. Repairs will take around six to eight hours of game time, after which your ship will be spaceworthy again.

I think there's a glitch in that OXP, because the "emergency repairs" purchase option stayed available even after I'd bought it once. But when I saved and reloaded, it went away. I wasn't sure at first, though, which is why I kept buying it - I thought perhaps the OXP was designed such that you'd take a number of repairs to equal the amount of damage.

[arquebus]

Also I have an OXP installed that distinguishes damage to ship equipment. It's possible that there's interference between the two.

[Cholmondely]

It's the sort of thing which I think that your latest.log might have picked up on... (if you had LogEvents.oxp loaded)... of course, you have to act snappily to save that latest.log since it gets overwritten...

Other stuff you might wish to sneak a peek at:

Vimana HUD has a key to what is what on the Vimana HUD

WildShips OXP & OrbitalStations: you have both of these loaded and each provides a "K" marker on your ASC/Advanced Space Compass



Deep Space Dredger: you keep on running into these out in the middle of nowhere! They were mentioned in the original Elite game manual, and were created for Oolite, just as the Generation Ships were.

The Tionisla Orbital Graveyard, on the other hand, was mentioned in the the original novella, The Dark Wheel.

You can get at both from Ian Bell's website.

[tsoj]

Oh and someone made a comment on ep 1 that for some reason isn't showing up on YouTube, so I can't reply there. He suggested that he could check the log file and possibly find which OXP is causing the stutter in my game. Is that a reasonable thought? Is there something I could look for in the log file?

Hi, that was my comment. I didn't think of something specific, but maybe some OXP is throwing lots of errors, or even timeouts, which would show up in the logfile. For example, if you see lots of "JavaScript exception" then trying to disable the according OXP might be worth a try. You could also post the last part of the log file here, formatted as code (click on the "</>" button).

If that doesn't help, the solution would be to manually find the OXP which causes the stuttering (if it's a single OXP and not just the accumulation of many). Though this would take a while, even when using some kind of binary search (first disabling one half of all OXPs, then you know in which half the culprit is, then you can disable the half of that half, and so forth).

[arquebus]

WildShips OXP & OrbitalStations: you have both of these loaded and each provides a "K" marker on your ASC/Advanced Space Compass

Once you mentioned Kiota I knew it had to be those two OXPs putting all those K markers up!

[arquebus]

I didn't think of something specific, but maybe some OXP is throwing lots of errors, or even timeouts, which would show up in the logfile. For example, if you see lots of "JavaScript exception" then trying to disable the according OXP might be worth a try. You could also post the last part of the log file here, formatted as code (click on the "</>" button).

I'll give that a shot tonight!

If it doesn't pop up easily I'm not going to worry about it too much, as the stutter is barely noticeable to me unless I'm letting the autopilot fly (like when I'm about to go into witchspace).

[Griff]

I'm really enjoying these, thank you for making them your commentary is a lot of fun and it's making me realise how much i've missed out on by not experimenting with many OXP's - seeing them showcased in your vids is fantastic, you even managed to explain the primable equipment MFD's, a concept i've never been able to grasp since they first got implemented into Oolite (my brain's fault, not Oolite's)

[another_commander]

Some feedback on Episode 9, since it seems I'm on a slow day at work:

Good to finally see some fighting. It was intense and you did pretty well. Definitely you made progress from the first to the second battle and the more you practice the better you will get.

Having said that, by blindly loading 400 OXPs in the game in one go, you have disproportionally increased its intended difficulty. I see you have installed Custom Shields, amongst others. You need to know that this OXP alone will make combat REALLY hard. It is very nice from a visuals point of view, but it also unbalances the game heavily against the player by offering shields, or in other words, additional strength, to NPCs. It is possible to return the balance back to normal but it will require manual (and thankfully simple) modification of one of the OXP's script files. But as it stands, and with the weapons you currently have, I don't expect you will have much luck with combat.

Secondly, I think you should try to get at least a beam laser. The pulse is just not good enough, unless one of the 400 OXPs has adjusted the default laser stats. You also have multiple lasers installed, which means that you need to absolutely make sure that every shot you fire counts due to heat concerns. The multiple laser is also the reason why prices for forward mounts on the Cobra Mk3 cost triple than the rest of the available mounts. It looks that most NPCs in the game have acquired multiple lasers as well, which is another reason for the difficulty of combat.

Finally, consider yourself lucky if one of your OXPs has not increased the AI levels of NPC opponents. In the standard game the NPC AI is set to something close to Mostly Harmless or Poor, but you can make it much more advanced by altering a single ship property by script. In the brief moments of combat seen in Episode 9, I could not spot any of the advanced behaviours scheduled for NPCs at the higher levels (which is good, because otherwise it would be simply impossible to fight), but I would not be surprised if I do see them popping up in the future.

Bottom line: Good stuff overall, but it would probably be better if you had added OXPs with full awareness of what each one of them does. That normally translates to adding them one at a time and familiarizing yourself with the changes each one brings to the game.

Keep it up, you are really good at this and I find these videos very enjoyable to watch. Hey, for the first 8 of them it was just jumping from place to place and it was still very enjoyable, thanks to your commentary. Looking forward to the upcoming ones.

Edit to add: You wished for music during combat at one point. It is already possible to add dynamic music in the game, which is exactly what Svengali did with his Orchestral Demo OXP, which I see is currently unlisted. I could maybe dig out a copy from one of my old HDDs if you are interested.

[Griff]

I noticed some really fast NPC's docking in one of the vids, they were racing into the station! is there new docking AI for the ships in the more modern Oolite? i remember NPC's used to just slowly inch their way towards the station then sometimes panic and abort their run over and over - would be fun to still keep that behaviour around Lave with all the new pilots trying to get their driving license

edit: actually, thinking about it, this might have been when i was making ships that were too big to fit into the mail slot

[Cholmondely]

Bottom line: Good stuff overall, but it would probably be better if you had added OXPs with full awareness of what each one of them does. That normally translates to adding them one at a time and familiarizing yourself with the changes each one brings to the game.

Who is going to bother to do this for 1,100 oxz's & oxp's? Or even just the 700 on the Expansions Manager? It is similar to your point, a_c, about too many key-button commands. Some of us will research, but probably most won't. Who wants to invest the time when you can be playing the game...

Edit to add: You wished for music during combat at one point. It is already possible to add dynamic music in the game, which is exactly what Svengali did with his Orchestral Demo OXP, which I see is currently unlisted. I could maybe dig out a copy from one of my old HDDs if you are interested.

Orchestral Demo (needs BGS which you already have, Arquebus): https://app.box.com/s/xd9hnscxrjlb0p5suz8t00e7m5qo743d
As you probably know, the unzipped .oxp goes in your "AddOns" folder.

By the way, Arquebus, why "Arquebus"? Are you descended from a long line of Arqubusiers? Or is it due to a deep-seated and enduring admiration of match-lock military machinery?

[Cholmondely]

I noticed some really fast NPC's docking in one of the vids, they were racing into the station! is there new docking AI for the ships in the more modern Oolite? i remember NPC's used to just slowly inch their way towards the station then sometimes panic and abort their run over and over - would be fun to still keep that behaviour around Lave with all the new pilots trying to get their driving license

If there is ever an update of the Lave.oxp, that AI should be included there, at the very least.

[another_commander]

Who is going to bother to do this for 1,100 oxz's & oxp's? Or even just the 700 on the Expansions Manager? It is similar to your point, a_c, about too many key-button commands. Some of us will research, but probably most won't. Who wants to invest the time when you can be playing the game...

My comment was just a best practice suggestion. One can certainly load 1100 OXPs in one go and start playing, as long as they are aware of the risk that they may end up with a game that is nearly unplayable, or impossibly difficult, or sub-performant, or not representative of the original design and that fixing issues with 1100 expansions installed is way harder than fixing issues with 20-30 expansions installed.

And I will leave it at that, because this is a discussion for another thread.

[Griff]

I noticed some really fast NPC's docking in one of the vids, they were racing into the station! is there new docking AI for the ships in the more modern Oolite? i remember NPC's used to just slowly inch their way towards the station then sometimes panic and abort their run over and over - would be fun to still keep that behaviour around Lave with all the new pilots trying to get their driving license

If there is ever an update of the Lave.oxp, that AI should be included there, at the very least.

We should give Lave a custom station model with a couple of crashed anacondas sticking out of it like darts in a dartboard around the mail slot

[Cholmondely]

I noticed some really fast NPC's docking in one of the vids, they were racing into the station! is there new docking AI for the ships in the more modern Oolite? i remember NPC's used to just slowly inch their way towards the station then sometimes panic and abort their run over and over

That is the effect of Norby's ILS - and if you look closely you will see the moving white dot which the NPC is lining up with, and which guides their way into the station/rock hermit etc. When you load ILS and allow it to dock for you, you follow an identical white dot...

[arquebus]

Who is going to bother to do this for 1,100 oxz's & oxp's? Or even just the 700 on the Expansions Manager? It is similar to your point, a_c, about too many key-button commands. Some of us will research, but probably most won't. Who wants to invest the time when you can be playing the game...

My comment was just a best practice suggestion. One can certainly load 1100 OXPs in one go and start playing, as long as they are aware of the risk that they may end up with a game that is nearly unplayable, or impossibly difficult, or sub-performant, or not representative of the original design and that fixing issues with 1100 expansions installed is way harder than fixing issues with 20-30 expansions installed.

Oh yes, I'm definitely aware that I've added things that may not be to my advantage! And I've already noted some places where there are conflicts. But I don't worry too much about that. Mostly because I'm *already* a suboptimal player. The difference, for me, is between playing Dark Souls in easy mode vs hard mode. I will suck at both, I won't even notice.

If at some point I end up painting myself into a corner I will probably play through again with no (or very few) OXPs installed.

However I do take the unstated point that my videos may give people a skewed perception of the base game. So I will make a point to mention this in episode 10 (and I'll point out the custom shields thing).

Bottom line: Good stuff overall, but it would probably be better if you had added OXPs with full awareness of what each one of them does. That normally translates to adding them one at a time and familiarizing yourself with the changes each one brings to the game.

I did that with Skyrim. Ended up not playing for more than a few minutes for almost a month.

I enjoy my way better.