Oolite essay: game lore, features and mechanics

[Cody]

... and I don't mean pulling a Braben with some halfassed solution...

Right on, Commander!

[Cmdr Wyvern]

...among which there is a chart with the planet ASSHOLE...

...Which is noted for it's inhabitant's exceptionally unpleasant temperament.

[Cody]

I suspect there'd be some splendid planet names if Oolite had the full alphabet to play with.

[Cmdr Wyvern]

I suspect there'd be some splendid planet names if Oolite had the full alphabet to play with.

Which of course would be the source of no end of sophomoric tongue-in-cheek jokes.

...And no-one would want to claim planet Ass for their homeword.

[stranger]

...the most fundamental annoyance. There is no multiplayer and it is not planned.

For me, multiplayer IS a "fundamental annoyance"; I'm playing for fun, and being a target for idiot psychopaths before I even begin to pump up my ship, IS NOT fun.

Exactly my reasons to stay outside ANY multiplayers games!

[szaumix]

So at what point do we all officially admit the irreconcilable disparity between Elite lore and Elite mechanics? I'm not talking about "a few acknowledgments" of inconsistencies "here and there", which I know have been made over the years. No I mean a wholesale rejection of the notion of "strict deference to original Elite lore wherever possible"*. I've watched you all address game mechanics vs supposed lore on the wiki/board for as long as I've known about Oolite, and I've always thought they were varying attempts to shoe-horn the right foot into the left shoe. A lot of things are debated and worked out in a way that seems completely rational, and the consensus becomes the unspoken rule -- fine -- but a not insignificant amount of lore and manual specs simply can not be accepted on face value. In fact, some of it has to be straight up divorced from semblance to reality.

Acknowledgement: there was a good attempt at what basically amounts to a cool story. But Acornsoft was no J.R.Tolkien, and the Elite game was no middle earth. You can't even say it was just limited by 80s tech -- it was also limited by the fact that games just weren't that serious a thing back then. Games were a casual hobby for kids and nerds and Elite was already pushing the boundaries of both of those with its story and scope.

Tolkien spent the rest of his life answering fan mail and completing his world to ridiculous levels of detail, consistency and lore -- attempting to answer every conceivable complaint in a realistic and practical matter. Much like Oolite players do. The Dark Wheel was an original idea for a game and a cool attempt at generating interest in an 'open world' game, but it plus the manual were never intended to become the strict bible the way we try to make it today. There are any amount of game elements that simply must be considered mechanics-limited representatives of the true nature of the world (ie: population, ship types, and game ultra-simplicity). Then there's the manual, which I consider the most lazy thing the developers did. Then there's large body scale (planets/suns/distance etc), and (separately) ship-to-ship scale (which I find 100x more annoying than planetary/stellar scale. Anaconda = 'nuff said.)

Conclusion: At some point we have to say, "it was what it was, it was cool for the 80s, and now it's time to move on." Move on means evolve. My secret opinion for a long time has been: Elite was the original and it deserves respect. Strict Mode Oolite is essentially a visual + programming upgrade of the same basic thing, so Strict Mode Oolite is that legacy and that respect. But now, we are grown men taking this seriously -- I have watched many of you crunch data, math, and logic, and I myself have put a silly amount of man hours into troubleshooting and reconciling the Ooniverse for realism. Since we can not square the circle, and since large scale mods are now possible and many have become de facto standards due to their undeniable improvements, it is my opinion that we are allowed to gradually move on from strict faith in Elite lore and we have the right to move on.

I'm not telling you anything you don't already know and I am well aware I'm beating a horse long ago pummelled.

*In my view, the Dark Wheel and the Elite manual's specs were written by a juvenile fat horned orange lizard from some planet who was accounting for the universe the way greek historians accounted for Persia's army at the hot gates, or the way greeks used to dramatize (semi)true stories generally. You believe the general story but you take the historians with a bucket of salt!

[szaumix]

And the TL;DR of that is that we have got to be "allowed" to straight up disagree with and/or rewrite Elite lore and or the claims of the manual, and upgrade the state and our understanding of the Ooniverse to non-canon; at the very least by rational consensus, but other justifications might include unimpeachable reason or fundamental realities. Also a mod that becomes de facto accepted by the supermajority has got to be at least half way to a lore overwrite.
[/TLDR]

I dunno I'm not making decisions and I'm not God, I'm just trying to say some reasonable words on the internet because I have charts and data in front of me and mods to tweak and I suddenly realized that I am once again taking a video game extremely seriously lol.

EDIT: and incidentally, you guys are the veterans and I am relatively new to Oolite and also a casual until recently. This was not a preemptive justification of some future attempt at a personal rewrite, nor a carte blanche for tweakers to "go crazy" and start making up stupid crap in your mods. I get my Oolite the way I like it for me so I can fire it up here and there. I just feel the Oolite modding community would be slightly less restricted if they conformed to presumable realities rather than Elite lore, so that's why I said a lot of words on the internet.

[Cholmondely]

Yes, ... but ...

I feel that it's really all down to three things:

1) Our Lead Developers. Giles seems to have wanted to replicate Elite for the AppleMac - and make it modifiable. Ahruman updated the game, unifying the three ports and adding shaders and javascript. Cim updated things further (but many of his innovations were never used: his work on scenarios, or the ability to completely rewrite the trade). We've had nobody wanting to be lead developer since 2015.

I suspect that this means that there are unlikely to be any controversial changes to the Vanilla game (I understand the changes since cim have focused on improving graphics and on more opening out of oxp possibilities, allowing them to tweak more and more inside the Vanilla game).

2) The game architecture, allowing modification: we all get the same Vanilla game and then modify it to individual taste. With well over 1,000 modifications, the possibilities are endless, especially when we can tweak them too (my adding to the list of weapons in Weapon Laws, for a minor example).

Some of these modifications modernise in one way or another - so we can each choose the extent to which we move away from Elite.

3) But this also means that there is no consensus. We all choose what we want and do not need to agree.

Stranger writes oxp's which introduce scientific realism, Redspear writes some oxp's which more closely recreate Elite in some ways, cim & Phkb have written some oxp's which draw on Frontier... Some of these oxp's are compatible, others not.

And as long as I can find what I want, or write what I want, or even manage to bamboozle others into writing what I want, why bother changing the status quo?

Those who wish to replicate Elite can do so, ...those who want something else can find the oxp's and create it - as long as everybody can put in loooong hours into working out which oxp does what!


Appendix:
Massive change oxp's.
*Both of cim's SOTL oxp's - transcending Elite
*Stranger's World - more realism in physics/astronomy
*Phkb has a number of oxp's each of which which massively changes one area of the game: Ship Configuration, Smugglers, Bounty System, Hermitage...
*Redspear has the same: Weapon Laws, Hyperdrives, Additional Planets, Demand Driven Economy...
*Day's Diplomancy
*Reval's Elite Trader - a significant rejig of the game into a trading-based one.
*And of course Svengali's BGS and Library: alas, few other OXPs really use the functionality he built into them

I understand that a number of the mission oxp's also massively change things (or show how they could be changed), but I'm more ignorant there.

[szaumix]

why bother changing the status quo?

Answering instinctively; even just some consolidation would lead to higher quality mods and more mod compatibility. The known or believed de facto standard, or the most popular mods and setups, become the basis for future mods, not as a "rule" but just because that's the tendency of creators and modders generally. We assume the general basis and upon that we build the mod, and we compute the values for a presumed balance effect accordingly. It is always far riskier to release a bold mod with release notes that say "WARNING, this will heavily impact game balance and mechanics as you know it!". But if that's where almost everyone already kind of is, that risk is greatly diminished.

And any consolidation necessarily entails the heretofore heretical policy change in my TLDR as a minimum precursor.

The other answer is that consistency is an inherently good thing, as are -- what did I say.. "unimpeachable reason" and "fundamental realities". Any of those that could be found and agreed on could more or less only possibly lead to improvements per se. Consistency is impossible except on a commander-by-commander basis because as you said, right now it's "every commander for himself", but that's like the tree of evolution branching out; common ancestor becomes a few progenitors becomes many unrelated descendants and a decade later tweaker chaos ensues.

[cim]

As Cholmondely mentions, the scenario support code was never really used. But it was exactly designed for this sort of modification which isn't just a tweak to the "a bit like Elite 84" game Oolite provides, without needing to go to the much greater effort of forking the entire core game code.

Use it to set up whatever "heresy" you want, both intrinsically in the scenario OXP and via the dependencies system by requiring the presence of particular existing OXPs that fit your vision, but also use it as a baseline by defining a scenario compatibility tag so that other OXP authors can then build further on.

Herein is the tricky bit - that sticking rigidly to 1984 hardware-enforced design decisions isn't giving the best possible game is certainly true. But there's no consensus on *which* way to go from there [1]. Back when I was working on Oolite, the most popular mods - which still had considerably fewer downloads than the game itself by an order of magnitude - were the least controversial ones: graphics tweaks, extra flavour text, minor UI fixups, etc. Anything changing actual game mechanics was considerably less downloaded. So you can't just put out a generic call for heresy and expect it to happen. You need to set out *and implement* a specific heresy in a scenario OXP and have it prove itself really popular.

[1] Well, not much; sometime there is. I implemented a fair bit of changes to weapon balance, NPC behaviour, and others which were definitely not part of the 1984 game. And I only regret about a third of them in retrospect.

[Cholmondely]

Herein is the tricky bit - that sticking rigidly to 1984 hardware-enforced design decisions isn't giving the best possible game is certainly true. But there's no consensus on *which* way to go from there [1].

[1] Well, not much; sometime there is. I implemented a fair bit of changes to weapon balance, NPC behaviour, and others which were definitely not part of the 1984 game. And I only regret about a third of them in retrospect.

So which changes did you regret - and why?

And which changes would you really like to have introduced, but found too much opposition?

[cim]

I think I got the encounter/combat balance fairly badly wrong - fewer cross-system raiders and/or perhaps a deliberate exception to make them even rarer for both the systems around Lave specifically and Galaxy 1 in general would have been sensible. They very much changed the balance of Diso and Leesti in particular, and not for the better, which made the early game far too tough for beginners. Similarly I should have compensated for the new AIs giving pirate packs better tactical coherence by toning down their weapons and numbers much sooner - far too many with beam lasers, though that was partially fixed in 1.82.

As I've said elsewhere the commodities rewrite didn't go down particularly well - I still think it's technically a lot more comprehensible than what it replaced, but it should have had an explicit compatibility mode, and I should have done more to ease the migration.

*Had* the commodities rewrite worked then I might have tried to get consensus around a more interesting economic model - at the moment once you're out of the really early game only Computers, Furs, Liquor and Narcotics are really worth considering pretty much regardless of where you trade from and to - that still had an Elite feel but made better use of the full commodity set. Obviously that was never going to get anywhere.

[szaumix]

So you can't just put out a generic call for heresy and expect it to happen. You need to set out *and implement* a specific heresy in a scenario OXP and have it prove itself really popular.

I knew as I was typing that this was the case. It goes for games with zealous or loyal-to-concept player bases generally.

EDIT: nevertheless, the only thing required for an increased general willingness among modders/modellers/et al to allow for probable or necessary realities to supersede Lore/Manual... is for the "heresy" to be said aloud (acknowledged) and encouraged, really.

[Cholmondely]

I knew as I was typing that this was the case. It goes for games with zealous or loyal-to-concept player bases generally.

EDIT: nevertheless, the only thing required for an increased general willingness among modders/modellers/et al to allow for probable or necessary realities to supersede Lore/Manual... is for the "heresy" to be said aloud (acknowledged) and encouraged, really.

I wonder if this is true for anybody other than Cody and Redspear - and I wonder to what extent Cody is loyal to Elite and to what extent he just prefers playing the core game with his mere handful of oxp's. After all, he's playing Oolite, not Elite. When you stop in Oolite, you don't drift. No energy bombs. And from his screen shots, he's not using the wireframe option. etc.

[Cholmondely]

TL;DR...[/TLDR]

Help? My expertise is in acronyms relating to medieval philosophy, not this, whatever it is!