Quote of the week!

[Cody]

IT predictions for 2024:

It is revealed that Windows 12 is actually just a re-release of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and the last 30 years were all a cheese-induced dream.

[Nite Owl]

"You can scoop some of the stuff all of the time, and all of the stuff some of the time, but you can not scoop all of the stuff all of the time."

Abraham 'The Lobster' Lincoln

[Cody]

The Premier League is to bring in a new owners' charter to stop future attempts to join a breakaway Super League.

Wasn't the Premier League itself a breakaway league?

Uefa and Fifa are "abusing a dominant position" and their rules banning clubs joining breakaway competitions like the European Super League are unlawful, the European Court of Justice has said.

Right on, ECJ!

[cbr]

when people highlight your efforts as "crap".

Like an obese food critic accustomed to gettin(g) free meals...

[Cody]

There's an interesting thing about Elite, and I expect you'll find this in the comment section on your article. People will absolutely swear blind they've encountered things in Elite that simply aren't in the code at all. People go on about how they remember finding generation ships, or being boarded by the police. Which doesn't happen either.

[Cholmondely]

There's an interesting thing about Elite, and I expect you'll find this in the comment section on your article. People will absolutely swear blind they've encountered things in Elite that simply aren't in the code at all. People go on about how they remember finding generation ships, or being boarded by the police. Which doesn't happen either.

Interesting article!



I remember finding this fascinating when I first stumbled across it:

From: Why is Oolite so addictive?

I think a lot of it is due to the imagination factor.

Whether you play Oolite in "strict mode" vanilla or with a half ton of OXPs, there's a tendency to presume there's this vast Ooniverse that is culturally and technologically diverse. Elite tended to do that as well.

Years ago (in the early 90s) the topic of Elite came up at a party. We'd been talking about computer games and etc, and a few people had played Elite. But some of the things they remembered were odd, in that I'm fairly sure they didn't actually exist in any form of Elite. They'd all played it before, but I was making my first runs at that time. I'm not one of the people who played Elite when it first came out, I couldn't afford a computer then. I was playing the DOS version on a Radio Shack computer that was not quite as good as a 286. LOL

Anyway, one of them talked about how he'd often been boarded by "the vipers" and inspected for contraband. Some others agreed it sucked when that happened. One recalled, in some detail, a mission where he was carrying some special sort of missile and it malfunctioned while onboard his ship and had to be defused, which involved figuring out some sort of numeric code. Another recalled having gotten her engines and shields upgraded as a result of an encounter with friendly aliens. Alien ships flying in large geometric formations before they'd break to attack. An alien homeworld or secret base. Having a wingman/partner that flew along and occasionally advised. Emergency missions running a special load of vaccine to worlds having plagues. Struggling to avoid falling into a black hole. Intercepting messages that had to be decoded in some way. Seeing the wreckage of your own ship if you restarted and then later found exactly the same spot where you'd been shot down.

At the time, I wasn't far into the game, so all this sounded plausible enough. I just nodded and figured it was out there somewhere and I'd find it eventually. One thing they agreed on was that Elite was the greatest spacegame of all time, far better than others I'd played at that time, like Starflight or Wing Commander. Oh, the graphics and etc were "old school", but there was agreement that it was by far the best game.

While there might have been some alcohol-inspired exaggeration in some cases, I don't think they were trying to intentionally BS me so much as that they actually *did* remember the game that way. In some cases, I think it likely they mis-remembered features of other games as being somewhere in Elite. In other cases, I think that the universe and adventures that they imagined, the "game in the head", superseded reality and they recalled the game as being much more than it actually was.

That's one of the qualities of a legend though, isn't it? When a thing is remembered as perhaps greater and more wonderful than it actually was. Not many other games result in as many "tall tales" as Elite.

One thing they agreed on, though, was that it wasn't like most other games. You could just get in your ship and go.. and keep going. There was nothing you *had* to do or accomplish, and you could just go forever, bumming along through space and seeing what wonders you could find. Kind of a "Holy Grail" of games, the game that never had to end. So I'm pretty sure they actually played it and weren't just BS-ing. For all the odd things that aren't in the game that some of them were sure they remembered, not a one of them ever claimed to see a "game over" other than in the personal sense of "press space".

But anyway, Oolite has some of that same odd quality, where it always feels like the systems and worlds stretch on into infinity. Oolite also has the OXPs. While they maybe aren't a required part of the game, they open up even more possibilities one can explore.

So what makes Oolite addicting? I would call it an imagination factor.. Or maybe dementia. LOL In any case, Elite had it, and Oolite has it maybe to an even greater degree. In Oolite, even if that wild/crazy/cool thing that one imagines might be out there doesn't actually exist in the game, someone may write an OXP to put it there.

[Cody]

Thanks Cholly - I forgot to include a link to the article.

An El Reg article about Elite usually brings forth mention of Oolite by the Commentards. Good to see a link to oolite.space from one of them.

[RockDoctor]

Thanks Cholly - I forgot to include a link to the article.

An El Reg article about Elite usually brings forth mention of Oolite by the Commentards. Good to see a link to oolite.space from one of them.

It has been ... ages - best part of a year - since I went to El Reg. But now is probably a good time to do it. I wonder what sort of a rig the BOFH and PFY have invested in for their Elite multi-player sessions.
(There was that time the Company hired Bell & Braben as "consultants", resulting in a private version ... )

[RockDoctor]

Interesting article!

Quoth El Bell FTFA :

"I think the notion of low-level programming on extremely finite resources may come back in terms of nanotech, but we're not really there yet."

Interesting. I'd make a joke about being able to play Elite on the circular screen in your washing machine, but having just read (disinterestedly) a report of an LG washing machine clocking up 3.7 GB of data transfer per day ...

[Cody]

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended

R.I.P. Vernor Vinge - El Reg obit here.

[RockDoctor]

"The higher the average IQ in a community, the more likely it is that chaos will ensue".

Hmm... which says what about this mostly chaos-free forum that we frequent here?

Well, I don't know about you, but my routine fishing for the worm-eaten windfalls instead of the hanging fruit (low- or otherwise) in the SF Trivia game is a conscious effort at disruptive chaos generation.
I've got a DENSA story - and I doubt I'm alone.

So, one day the paper was shoved under my nose at the breakfast table, folded to show an advert from DENSA. "Try that." So I did. Then I worked through the answers, calculated the score, and looked up the instructions :
Drop everything and write (ink, dead tree, stamp, 3 day delivery ; remember that?) to DENSA for a membership form."
- "Do you want to try?" asked Dad, retrieving his Grauniad nad preparing to cut the advert out. This would have sliced up the crossword on the other side of the page, which he was already several clues into.
- "No, I don't think so." quoth I. Then I headed off to walk to junior school.

DENSA somehow never appealed to me. Somewhat on the lines of the Groucho Club, whose members would never be members of a club which would accept them as members.
Has anyone here ever met someone who admitted to being a member of DENSA?