WE ARE DESTROYING OUR FUTURE!!

[Cholmondely]

We are destroying our future as a community by turning away new members.


The strength of Oolite is the modifications/OXPs/OXZs. There will not be many out there who salivate over the joys of Classic Elite from 40 years ago and wish only to play strict Oolite.

It is now 6 months - SIX MONTHS - since the in-game Expansions Manager lost the ability to download OXZs.



We have come up with three fixes.

1) The nightly version 1.91 which hides at the bottom of Oolite.cloud's download page.

2) Hiran's Oolite Starter which is not even mentioned on Oolite.cloud.

(Both are almost invisible for new players unless they are willing to spend time & effort looking for them.)

3) And a complicated fix for the Expansion Manager which one needs to be a programmer to be able to implement.



WAKE UP!!

[hiran]

You are right. Looking at traffic graphs from Github, within the last two weeks 22 users downloaded Oolite 1.90.
Since that version has been out for three years I assume it is newcomers, rather than 'us' downloading one release time and again.



These newcomers would download a game that looks and feels like 30+ years old. Only a few of them will find information that Oolite can be heavily customized using expansions. Yet if they do try to install any they will fail miserably, as pointed out in the previous post. With that, they may close the game, uninstall and not even bother to come here asking for help or a workaround.

The consequence must be as Cholmondely put it. So let's act.

What exactly can we do?

1) Take the effort and release Oolite 1.92, which would contain the fix so the in-game expansion manager works again
2) Take the effort and publish information about OoliteStarter on the new web page
3) this option is asking too much from a user and cannot be dealt with - a fix would have come from one of the other two options.

[arquebus]

I vote for option #2.

The fastest stopgap was always going to be putting a disclaimer right by the 1.90 download pointing to a simple page describing the solution. Option #2 is better, but probably takes a similar amount of work. As long as a naive player can easily get to the Oolite Starter download on its own page, it's the fastest way to patch the problem until 1.91 final comes along.

At the very least we need info in Latest News mentioning the problem! The last Latest News is 3 years old.

On the Downloads page, the following could be added in the Current Version section:

"Currently, the Expansion Manager within Oolite 1.90 does not correctly download the list of expansions (mods). This can be fixed with a simple edit to a configuration file (linked), or by using the Oolite Starter program (linked) instead to manage your expansions."

[hiran]

I vote for option #2.

The fastest stopgap was always going to be putting a disclaimer right by the 1.90 download pointing to a simple page describing the solution. Option #2 is better, but probably takes a similar amount of work. As long as a naive player can easily get to the Oolite Starter download on its own page, it's the fastest way to patch the problem until 1.91 final comes along.

It has happened. Check the Downloads page on https://oolite.site/

At the very least we need info in Latest News mentioning the problem! The last Latest News is 3 years old.

It has happened. Check the What's New? page on https://oolite.site/

What is pending is to move this to the currently official site https://oolite.space.
Check https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f= ... 39#p290439

On the Downloads page, the following could be added in the Current Version section:

"Currently, the Expansion Manager within Oolite 1.90 does not correctly download the list of expansions (mods). This can be fixed with a simple edit to a configuration file (linked), or by using the Oolite Starter program (linked) instead to manage your expansions."

We have a similar text on the wiki already. I do not feel confident to implement that patch on my system. Cholmondely does not feel confident implementing it either. What about you? What about newcomers? That's why we (including you) envisioned OoliteStarter in first place.

[Redspear]

At the very least we need info in Latest News mentioning the problem! The last Latest News is 3 years old.

That's the easy one, to the extent that almost any of us could write it and have it be a simple addition for anyone with permission to include.
Other options appear to be asking a lot of either the devs or the prospective player in terms of time/effort.

On the Downloads page, the following could be added in the Current Version section:

"Currently, the Expansion Manager within Oolite 1.90 does not correctly download the list of expansions (mods). This can be fixed with a simple edit to a configuration file (linked), or by using the Oolite Starter program (linked) instead to manage your expansions."

And maybe mention the wiki in the same instance: arguably easier to navigate than the manager; more inspiring (it has pics!); more informative; and more likely to send you down a rabbit hole of anything and everything that may be of interest (be it lore or random silliness).

IMHO, the oolite site should have a page showcasing all of the core ships.

• Why?
  • Because almost universally it is agreed that they look really good.
  • Because they're showing the player both 'who' they can be (e.g. trader, fighter-pilot) and who they might face (police, thargoids).
  • Because ye olde worlde elite came with a ship ID chart knowing damn well that such a thing would be cool.
  • Becasue it would show folks we're not (completely) stuck in the past.

WAKE UP!!

I expect most people recognise where you're coming from on this, and to my mind you absolutely have a point, but it's not just the player base that has shrunk in recent years and the devs have a laundry list of things to do. What you suggest might just be more important that it is urgent...

1) Take the effort and release Oolite 1.92, which would contain the fix so the in-game expansion manager works again

That might be the best long term fix but it's also likely to be the one requiring the most patience.
The sooner the better but if rushed it could be a mess, so...

[cbr]

WAKE UP!!

Is it dead Jim?

IMHO, the oolite site should have a page showcasing all of the core ships.

• Why?
  • Because almost universally it is agreed that they look really good.
  • Because they're showing the player both 'who' they can be (e.g. trader, fighter-pilot) and who they might face (police, thargoids).
  • Because ye olde worlde elite came with a ship ID chart knowing damn well that such a thing would be cool.
  • Becasue it would show folks we're not (completely) stuck in the past.

Yes, show the ships, now the core gets the shadered ones?



Is there a space sim game, freeware and opensource? with better looking ships?
The ancient astronaut theorists say NO

[Redspear]

There will not be many out there who salivate over the joys of Classic Elite from 40 years ago

Is there a space sim game, freeware and opensource? with better looking ships?
The ancient astronaut theorists say NO

Some of us are the 'ancient astronauts' in this case

[arquebus]

I expect most people recognise where you're coming from on this, and to my mind you absolutely have a point, but it's not just the player base that has shrunk in recent years and the devs have a laundry list of things to do. What you suggest might just be more important that it is urgent...

Is there no way to do a 1.90a? Does the 1.90 code not exist anymore? I am not a programmer so I could be wildly off base here but it feels like updating the program to write the starter config file correctly should be - I hate to say it and sound dumb, but anyway - trivial.

It's not an especially useful metric, but in my tiny YouTube channel, Oolie 1.90 episode 1 has been in my top 3 viewed videos for the past year, every month. And a fair number of people have remarked that they didn't know Oolite existed and are excited to try it out.

[Cholmondely]

Red Herring!

Found this on the Berlios site for downloads of old versions of Oolite

Note the buttons on the top right for daily/weekly/monthly statistics.

The versions are those from v.1.52 to v.1.77.1 (2005-2013)

And I'm unsure if the download statistics are just for the Linux versions!

[Redspear]

Is there no way to do a 1.90a? Does the 1.90 code not exist anymore? I am not a programmer so I could be wildly off base here but it feels like updating the program to write the starter config file correctly should be - I hate to say it and sound dumb, but anyway - trivial.

Not fully qualified to answer here but I believe that the convention for oolite is/was even fractions for stable releases, odd fractions for experimental/test features. That said, it doesn't sound like the biggest piece of work ever.

Meanwhile, on the subject of screenshots...

I recently trawled through all of the screenshots on the oolite.space site and I noticed a few things, especially with regards to the "Expansion Packs" selection.

Firstly, they all look good, but very few of them tell you anything about the game. IMHO there are too many 'cover shots' and not enough illustrations. Too much poetry and not enough explanation. Also they all look very 'composed', rather like following the rules to Victorian era landscape painting, all lovely but many look very similar and even illustrate the same oxps.

For example, "Heroes emerge from flames" is beautiful but it neither tells me which oxps it employs nor does it tell me what's going on. Some are titled a little less theatrically, such as "Match that stations rotation" but which part is the oxp? As a veteran player I can say that I think it's the ship but do we get a good look at it here? No.

"How to miss a sitting duck" is presumably about multiple lasers but which oxp is that and how would the beginner even know that is what the relevant element is here? There are exceptions e.g "Red Iguana" but they're rather too few and rather too brief in terms of explanation I would suggest.

Compare that lot to the screenshots for the 'Basic Game' from the very same website.

• No 'poetry'
• Text explains what you can see
• Also explains its relevance to the wider game

None of them would win out as a poster shot for oolite but they all do a job to tell you something useful about the game.
Can we say the same of the "Expansion Packs pictures"? I would suggest no. Can it be fixed? Instead of drawing from the screenshots thread, how about drawing from the wiki? Then the pics would actually show something desiged to explain the oxp rather than just be beautiful.

[hiran]

Found this on the Berlios site for downloads of old versions of Oolite

Note the buttons on the top right for daily/weekly/monthly statistics.

The versions are those from v.1.52 to v.1.77.1 (2005-2013)

And I'm unsure if the download statistics are just for the Linux versions!

It seems there were a number of Windows users downloading Oolite 1.90 on June 6th. Can we correlate that event with something, like a release of Arquaebus' videos? Or the mention of Oolite in a games magazine?

There are multiple versions for multiple operating systems available. All of them count for the statistics.

These versions are definitely unpatchable for us, and their expansions manager is broken for sure.
We should tear down that information to prevent users from downloading old or wrong stuff.

Which again brings us to:
- how do we tear down Oolite@SourceForge?
- how do we update our current website?
- how can we release the last three years of development effort?

[Cholmondely]

Red Herring (reprise)

Found this on the Berlios site for downloads of old versions of Oolite

Note the buttons on the top right for daily/weekly/monthly statistics.

The versions are those from v.1.52 to v.1.77.1 (2005-2013)

And I'm unsure if the download statistics are just for the Linux versions!

...
These versions are definitely unpatchable for us, and their expansions manager is broken for sure.
We should tear down that information to prevent users from downloading old or wrong stuff.
...

Should we? They predate the Expansions Manager/Tutorial, and this collection is presumably linked to our original development site (Berlios too?), from back before we moved to GitHub.

Might it not be better just to include (if we are allowed) a link to our new download page with a note on the improvements since? And a link to our wiki so they download the older oxps?

I wonder if all those French Berlios downloads were for some computer programming class?

[Cholmondely]

It seems there were a number of Windows users downloading Oolite 1.90 on June 6th. Can we correlate that event with something, like a release of Arquaebus' videos? Or the mention of Oolite in a games magazine?

Oolite (1.9) - Let's Play Poorly - 3.17 - Zadies or Bust was published on 3rd June
Oolite (1.9) - Let's Play Poorly - 3.18 - Well hello Zadies was published on 10th June

[Cholmondely]

Which again brings us to:
- how do we update our current website?
- how can we release the last three years of development effort?

[hiran]

Which again brings us to:
- how do we update our current website?
- how can we release the last three years of development effort?

I get the feeling there is not a single person who can answer these questions. Nobody will do the job for us. So it is us to make a difference.

We should try to find items that need to be looked at. Once we have that, we need to find out who can contribute what. Please be aware: The task is bigger than any of us. But if we collaborate we can club something together. And if it contains bugs or is wrong in some way, then let's fix it and learn.

How does that sound?