YouTube playthroughs

[Cody]

I'd have thought that the improved SOTL steering would make more sense as a new oxp, no?

No! I'd like the BGS tunnel, with enhanced SOTL steering incorporated (progress and steering bars curved), added to the core game.


Any willing graphics wizards please apply below!

[cbr]

Option 3 please, original bgs with steering

[Cholmondely]

I think I can live with it!

Just to let you know: key to missile icons on HUD is now available here!

[arquebus]

Just to let you know: key to missile icons on HUD is now available here!

Oh that's lovely!

I do still wish there were text in the (vanilla) game, or a mod that could be layered on top to name them regardless of which mod they come from (maybe in an MFD? maybe that's already a thing?), but this is a good second best.

[Starhopper]

Option 3 please, original bgs with steering

I concur, #3 is lovely.

@Arquebus I've watched nearly all of your vids now, thanks for making such an entertaining series, it's been awesome!

P.S your voice reminds me somewhat of Bruce Campbell.

[Cholmondely]

Option 3 please, original bgs with steering

I concur, #3 is lovely.

@Arquebus I've watched nearly all of your vids now, thanks for making such an entertaining series, it's been awesome!

P.S your voice reminds me somewhat of Bruce Campbell.

1) Starhopper, have you tried out Arquebus's music .oxp? It needs Library.oxp (not Cabal Common Library)...

Link: https://app.box.com/s/453g1khs7a9uephfjglsq6zu4kd2grsu

2) Chupacabra HUD lists which missiles/bombs you have loaded...

3) Original spiderweb from BGS is now available thanks to Tsoj: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=21187 - you need to tweak it via Config for AddOns - placed on your F4 screen by Library.oxp

[Cmdr Wyvern]

Arqubus is saying that this charm does not exist for new players who never encountered Elite. They compare Oolite with E:D and all the other modern games, and Oolite loses out, despite being free. The vanilla game is not a modern game and does not compare.

I would probably nuance my argument here, as I've had some time to think about it, because there is a valid critique to be made that "Oolite is supposed to be what it is, the audience knows that."

I'd argue that there are two types of players of Oolite (or of any retro or retro-adjacent game, really):

1) The ones who remember the original, want the original experience, want the feel of the original experience and enjoy living in an environment that gives them the feeling they had when they were kids/younger.

2) Everyone else.

And I put #2 that way quite deliberately. The number of people in the #1 bucket is tiny. Not just for Oolite - for any game of any size that is meant as a callback to an earlier/original game. *Everyone else* is literally *everyone else* who might want to play a game of this sort. And they do not have that experience of nostalgia, they do not feel the "charm" of the style of the interface, and so on.

If Oolite exists to serve the interests and needs of #1, great! Let's leave it as it is. We've got our audience, we have our player base, that's what we're after and we've got it solid.

But here's my thing: Oolite is *too good* of a game to limit ourselves to #1. But #2 is just *not* going to tolerate some of the base game quirks. If we have any interest in expanding the player base outside the #1 bucket (and perhaps a few #2 bucket people who are just really, really tenacious), then we need to think seriously about how the game presents itself to new NEW new new players, not just new-but-used-to-play-it-as-a-kid players.

Oolite is a great game not just for the sake of nostalgia, but for many other reasons.

If the nonsense and gobblygook that plagues most modern games (multiplayer and the idiot psychos that haunt multiplayer, micro-transaction bs, resource grinding bs, et al) royally p*sses you off, then we got you covered. I wouldn't touch ED with your ten foot pole because of all that crap, regardless of how pretty it looks.

It absolutely doesn't take a monster of a computer to run Oolite.

It's not overpriced! Free is a hell of a sweet deal, no?

If tweaking, tinkering, hacking and modding a game is as much of a blast as playing it, then buddy, you've landed in nerd heaven. We got ya covered in spades! Tinker it 9 million ways to Sunday, make it YOUR game!

And last but totally not the least, the awesome community.

Welcome aboard, Commander, enjoy your stay.

[arquebus]

Oolite is a great game not just for the sake of nostalgia, but for many other reasons.

I agree, but I am convinced that the inaccessibility tolerance threshold (for any game) is lower for people who aren't motivated by nostalgia. There are so many affordances that more modern games provide that have become standard not just because they're new but because they're obvious improvements. Something as simple as providing more data in the trade screen - no modern game, no matter how bare-bones, is going to convince players it's fine to not show the differential from average price. We exist in the age of the Internet. If the game doesn't let us do something as trivial as this, which we as regular human beings living in a digitally interconnected world can do for real world prices with about 3 seconds of searching across two or three tabs in Chrome, non-nostalgia-driven players are going to be annoyed.

My critique isn't about whether or not Oolite is a great game. That's not at issue. My critique is about whether its greatness is masked to new, non-nostalgia-driven players by the game's adherence to a 1980s design.

As I said above, if the central goal of ongoing development is to maintain that adherence to the game's forerunner, then nothing needs to change in that regard. But that being the central goal isn't a given; it isn't predestined. It can change. Others have suggested creating Oolite install packages that include (rather than just point to) the "modernization"-style OXPs. That seems to me a decent compromise.

[Cmdr Wyvern]

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is a modern, spiritual successor to WC Privateer. It runs a modern game engine (modified OGRE), yet keeps a rather simplified, easy to grasp interface, not too far over Privateer.
And like Privateer, you're stuck with one player alias. (forced to play as Juno Markev, a spicy pepper of a hotshot pilot with anger issues)
The shipset and equipment set is fixed and limited. (RGO to date, doesn't have any way to mod the game content, though it lets you repaint the fighter you're flying)
There's a bit of resource grinding, but it's not a tiresome affair. At least none of that micro-transaction and multiplayer malarky in it.
Apart from having to confront angry space cats, they've managed to keep a lot of what made Privateer special in RGO.

Oolite tries to be the spiritual successor of Elite, but gets rid of the technical limitations of Elite, plus adding all the nifty features we've grown to love. It may look a tiny bit aged, but so what? As you say, we can fix that.

[Cholmondely]

Just to point out

1) Arquebus has now had 2700 views of this first Oolite 1.90 - Let's Play Poorly - Episode 1 - the video that started it all !
It was posted in Nov 28, 2021



2) His comments here:

savmass: 4 months ago

Interesting video thanks for the detailed explanations. I'm wondering though, why would you opt to play this over Elite Dangerous, it seems pretty old graphics and playability wise (I tried it last year for a bit and uninstalled)? Is it the freedom of mods? Also, you mentioned in the video that if you increase the asteroid density to high, that it would slow it down. Is this a game engine limitation or your hardware?


Arquebus X: 4 months ago

Regarding the asteroid density - it's mostly a game engine or mod limitation; my hardware is a few years old but Oolite is designed to work with some pretty low end machines. I think the mod just taxes the game in a way that it wasn't meant to be taxed.

As for Elite Dangerous... well, I have played ED, for about 80 hours, and I found it incredibly dull. Yes, it's graphically superior and the flight model is better (though not as good as Evochron Legacy), but travel times are ridiculously long, trading is tedious (with an unnecessarily complex UI) and the grind is more annoying. Most of the gameplay loops in Oolite are the same as in ED, but they're compressed into shorter scales of time and distance. (The first time I ran into a 20 minute real world travel time between stars in ED was the last time I really tried to play the game.) And the availability of hundreds of mods in Oolite is also a plus, since it means the variety of things I can see, do and buy in the game are considerably greater than in ED.


savmass
4 months ago
@Arquebus X Thanks for the reply . Elite's notorious grind is also what turned me off of it. One more question (sorry), do any of the mods give some sort or a storyline/campaign or is it totally sandbox?


Arquebus X
4 months ago
@savmass I'd say it's 95% sandbox. But there are some mods that create long mission chains that do have story elements to them. I can't speak to how detailed they are (I haven't encountered the mission starts yet) but you can see what's available in the Expansion Manager under the Missions category. They should all have descriptions about what they involve (or they point you to the wiki entry about the mod).


savmass
4 months ago
@Arquebus X will do. Thanks again

I wonder what savmass's comments "Oolite seems pretty old graphics and playability wise" actually refer to?

[szaumix]

I wonder what savmass's comments "Oolite seems pretty old graphics and playability wise" actually refer to?

Who cares?
I went on a 10 year campaign to find video games that were a mix of fun, interesting, challenging -- but not elitist or WCG level challenging -- well balanced and (frankly) not "stupid". I had a wallet full of cash I was ready to throw at any company who could offer me what I was looking for, and in the end I only paid for a few games and I hated every one of them. Then I went back to DOS games and back to modding old 90s games until they fit and was right at home.

The current generation of gamers have very different values than those I grew up with. Oolite is what it is and if the zoomers don't like it they're missing out.

[Cholmondely]

I wonder what savmass's comments "Oolite seems pretty old graphics and playability wise" actually refer to?

Who cares?
I went on a 10 year campaign to find video games that were a mix of fun, interesting, challenging -- but not elitist or WCG level challenging -- well balanced and (frankly) not "stupid". I had a wallet full of cash I was ready to throw at any company who could offer me what I was looking for, and in the end I only paid for a few games and I hated every one of them. Then I went back to DOS games and back to modding old 90s games until they fit and was right at home.

The current generation of gamers have very different values than those I grew up with. Oolite is what it is and if the zoomers don't like it they're missing out.

I care.

I'm curious whether it is an old grumble about something which a_c_ has already fixed (my guess), something irrelevant, something I've not noticed which could be improved (maybe even easily!)...

[szaumix]

I'm curious whether it is an old grumble about something which a_c_ has already fixed (my guess), something irrelevant, something I've not noticed which could be improved (maybe even easily!)...

Well that I get. I lost all the years between finding Oolite (thinking it was just Elite with an engine polish) and realizing it was actually super cool when it's decked out with mods... because I was unaware of the fact. Like most games with a heavy mod community, Oolite does have an abundance of information that is difficult to parse.

Who cares?

I care.

I walked right into that, didn't I?

[Cholmondely]

Well that I get. I lost all the years between finding Oolite (thinking it was just Elite with an engine polish) and realizing it was actually super cool when it's decked out with mods... because I was unaware of the fact. Like most games with a heavy mod community, Oolite does have an abundance of information that is difficult to parse.

Hence my work on the wiki. The amount of information is wonderful! But it needs categorization to give newcomers half a chance of working out what's what. What I found truly fascinating about Arquebus was that he couldn't be bothered. That probably says more about me than it does about him!

[cbr]

I'm curious whether it is an old grumble about something which a_c_ has already fixed (my guess), something irrelevant, something I've not noticed which could be improved (maybe even easily!)...

Which old grumble?


If your looking for newer, ahem youngling players:
-must be new game not old
-must be ubershiny or be blocky miney ( yikes! )
-must be autoaim ( probably wantey a thargoid laser on four sides )
-must be unlimited restarts with benefits.
-must be autogaining resources when offline.