Thoughts on Elite Dangerous with relevance to Oolite

[Redspear]

Maybe this belongs in 'Outworld', maybe it doesn't...

Having recently given Elite Dangerous a try there were a few things that struck me and may be of interest to others.

Please note that the following is based on limited playtime of ED and of course represents my own point of view FWIW rather than anything authoritative. As such it may in fact be a load of bunk but here goes...


It really plays like a simulator

The Bad:

Simulators can be games too of course but there is a level of not only realism but also detail (not necessarily the same thing) that is immediately apparent. For example, flying any considerable distance within a system feels like a logistical exercise or some sort of (fairly dull) mini-game.

When you finally arrive at your destination it often 'pops' into existence at fairly short range. Imagine not just suddenly arriving at the station aegis in oolite but rather at the station buoy. Maybe it saves time after the rather tedious travel in the first place but my frst impression was that it was rather unsatisfying.

The Good:

Each to their own of course but where I will commend it is for it's consistency. Personally I think a lack of consistency is much more of an immesion-breaker than a lack of realism; furthermore, it's also harder to fake than realism is.

So yeah, flying is logistical but then so is ship outfitting and so is planetary mechanics (or at least, as far as I could tell). The consistency means I can potentially warm to the idea, or at least not be frustrated when I'm in the mood for an exercise in detail and parts of the game aren't detailed at all (or vice versa).

Relevance to Oolite:

While oxp allows the individual to head in whichever direction they like in this regard, oolite is poorly positioned to compete or even represent in terms of realism. Personally, I think a 'lower resolution' suits oolite much better and despite the confusingly diverse number of options available re oxp choice there is increasingly the option for well curated selections of complimentary oxps.

Perhaps I'll take up Cholmondely's suggestion to put together an oxp selection of complimentary themed oxps rather than just recommended ones. I'm under no illusion that such a thing would be to everyone's taste of course but rather that such a thing could be useful and might be an idea for more authors to do similar.


The progression path is potentially huge

The Good:

You start in a lowly ship, poorly equipped and not much good for anything in particular but then it really is easy to start making credits. Danger ratings for missions and even a little choice in the nature of your rewards for completing them.

A safe path to some basic quipment upgrades (or even a ship upgrade) is soon within reach and the game doesn't seem to suffer for it as there is still so much on offer in both options and challenge.

The Bad:

There are so many stepping stones that unless you deliberately miss some of them then they don't seem very significant. Upgrade your power plant in ED and stuff works a bit more often but buy an extra energy unit in oolite and your ship seems revitalised.

I suppose engineering might exist to address this issue (that most upgrades are relatively uneventful) but then it does rather encourage a race to get to what many youtube commentators consider to be one of the most frustrating parts of the game.

Relevance to Oolite:

If oolite wasn't so tough for beginners then we could perhaps recommend starting in a much weaker ship than the mk III. A word of caution here would be that perhaps doesn't suit a situation where an adder can equip itself as well as the aforementioned cobra. Whilst there are already some rather complex (ED like) solutions to this issue, I think simple is best, certainly in terms of anything that is to be considered 'core' or even 'reccommended'.

OXPs are generally well placed to add complexity rather than to remove it IMHO. By which I mean generally keep the complexity optional and away from the default game.


A genuinely massive MMO

The Bad:

Being an MMO, it has community events rather than special missions. In some ways it's nce to feel like you're a small part of a much bigger world but then it's also nice to feel that you have the chance to play the hero. In oolite you can do that, you can be the savior, just once in a while but in ED it's more like you're contributing to the background simulation. More realistic no doubt but also, I would argue, less fun.

Because you're nothing special (no offence commander) then regular players (i.e. the ones you're most likely to meet) often tend to have the better ships. So early on you can expect to find multiple fleet carriers in systems, lots of powerful ships flying around and fewer weak ones. This is where it really breaks down for me as that doesn't seem very intuitive at all.

Shouldn't a non-player-centic universe with challenge be full of weak or even average ships, struggling to survive, with just a few able to make it to the very top? Realistic but not much fun in an MMO unless you're one of those willing to put you're whole life into it (not recommended).

I would aspire to be one of the 'elite', to feel in someway either special or blessed to have reached my eventual lofty status but this is an MMO, soon enough nearly everyone is 'elite'. You can either make it genuinely special and therefore extremely tough, or, not so special and therefore relatively easy. With a single player game it doesn't have to be tough to be special: the solitary player is already special and is the only one truly scrambling to get to the top of the mountain, so the ascent feels genuinely special rather than just like a race.

The Good:

Although there is much gnashing of teeth by some re 'the grind' that is often required to achieve something within the game, in some ways this is dependant upon approach. It seems that many are encouragesd to think something like, 'right, I want a corvette', or, 'I want a grade X thingamy-jig' and go for that rather than anything along the way. So when you get the drop ship but you wanted the corvette you're stil busy grinding rather than enjoying the drop ship.

This relates in part to the stepping stone issue that I mentioned above I think, especially if the player has (understandably) already upgraded their ship to something superior to the drop ship that likely wasn't locked behind a naval ranking system in the first place.

There's lots of gameplay to be had but the tendency to 'achievement hunt' is perhaps not the way I'd recommend to enjoy it.

Relevance to Oolite:

Despite the wishes of some oolite isn't an MMO and I would argue that the current state of affairs has its advantages. I think it's nice to feel special in a universe that doesn't appear to treat you as such because then there is both a real sense of acheivement and also of danger.

This is however a game. If I were required to spend an amount of time approaching what might be considered realistic in order to acheive anything significant then it might be well worth asking , 'just what the hell am I doing with my life?' I don't want that for myself and what's more dear reader, I don't want it for you either, whoever you are.

By all means fake non-player-centricity but I don't think we need to demonise player-centricity in order to do that. I've justified the torus drive before and even the energy bomb. No one has to agree with me but there are arguments to be made for both of those things that aren't easily dismissed (or at least no one on these boards has as yet done so to the best of my knowledge). That's not a boast, rather it's a point and just maybe, I might actually have one.

IIRC David Braben opined back in ED's kickstarter days that playability needn't be at the expense of realism. It can be though and I think that oolite currently has some inbuilt restrictions with regards to the latter. I'd be wary of increasing realism too far in any one regard so as not to risk appearing inconsistent (as explained above).

Oolite is, at least partially, player-centric and that's nothing to be ashamed of IMHO. Maybe if it was even embraced a little more as such then it could even be to our advantage.

[arquebus]

All very good points!

I've finally gotten into a groove with Elite Dangerous, but I'm still not that deep into it. And the one thing I continually notice as the primary distinction between E:D and Oolite is that Oolite is "faster." The time between events/actions is always shorter, because the space between things is shorter, and Oolite isn't trying to simulate to the same level that E:D is.

I think you're absolutely correct about the value of a set of complementary OXPs. Consistency is the key. My current set is absolutely bonkers and I should probably trim it...

There aren't too many things that Oolite "needs" under the hood that it doesn't currently have over against Elite Dangerous. The two biggest ones are:

1) slightly more complex/deeper/consistent/dynamic trade/market system
2) more prominently displayed/more easily accessible/less scattershot mission interface

One of the things I find annoying about Elite Dangerous is that it's so focused on being a sandbox that new players simply have no idea what to do. They have to go outside the game to learn what's possible, and where they should start. My eternal nemesis is the external wiki. I hate them, especially when they're crucial for playing adequately. They're a sign of poor game design. (I forgive Oolite because of its dev history and what it's trying to do, and its focus on extensibility that the game itself obviously doesn't know about, but if it were any other game, I'd have dropped it after an hour and warned everyone else off.)

If wishes were horses, Oolite's trade/market system would be thrown out and built anew from the ground up, and all of the various methods of mission generation and acceptance would be consolidated into a single interface. To be sure, this is an impossibility given the nature of OXPs. But it sure would be nice.

[Redspear]

I've finally gotten into a groove with Elite Dangerous

I think that's key. If you can get into the groove with a game then it's a good game. The rest is mostly taste.

There aren't too many things that Oolite "needs" under the hood that it doesn't currently have over against Elite Dangerous. The two biggest ones are:

1) slightly more complex/deeper/consistent/dynamic trade/market system

Kinda tricky to pin all those down at once isn't it?

A few of us have had a go and I suppose I just went for 'deeper' in that I wanted all of the existing goods to be relevant in some way.
I note you put 'slightly' in there and that's perhaps the most important word of the lot. As I've opined before, compexity is often the cost of an improvement, not the benefit itself. Perhaps we essentially agree here.

Dynamic would be nice but potentially frustrating (not that my objection is any way related to my inability to code it ).

2) more prominently displayed/more easily accessible/less scattershot mission interface

That's an interesting second choice. I suppose that as an elite vet I'm coming from a place of expecting to dig around for stuff anywhere along the function/number row.

One of the things that's cool about these (that elite didn't have) is that they can encourage the player to leave their cosy milk-run ferry run.

I think this is often one of the main concerns with the market model but there are other ways to encourage it.  Weapon Laws was my main way of addressing that, along with preventing the ability to 'power up' entirely in the safest systems.

Design talk on the boards often seems to be realism based, whether intentionally or otherwise. Hardly the worst consideration but considering what would be fun sometimes seems to get sidelined to a surprising degree. Maybe it's me...

One of the things I find annoying about Elite Dangerous is that it's so focused on being a sandbox that new players simply have no idea what to do. They have to go outside the game to learn what's possible, and where they should start. My eternal nemesis is the external wiki.

Don't tell Cholmondely!

Yeah, I sort of went into ED knowing this would be the case. Again I had 'legacy' experience and so I only needed to look up where to find the docking request control but still...

• Was ED's trade model much better?
  • More goods (but perhaps not too many)
  • Specialist goods (but as and when they were available rather than cluttering the options)
  • Nearby market prices revealed! (super easy to make a profit)

Superficially at least, I didn't notice much difference (the third point above being the most obvious).

Oolite's model is unrealistic, it is samey and after a few runs it isn't very satisfying. I'd still be wary of changing it too much though.

Danger ratings for missions and even a little choice in the nature of your rewards for completing them.

Oolite used to have the former of these (in a reliable sense) but then things were complicated to make them 'better'. I'm not having a dig at the devs here (thank goodness for all they do) just highlighting how convoluted such things can get.

Adding complexity is really easy, making things more fun however is sometimes harder than might be expected.
Interestingly (to me at least) your two main 'needs' for oolite seem to relate to both of these concerns.

Good to have your thoughts.

[Cholmondely]

My eternal nemesis is the external wiki.

Don't tell Cholmondely!

Seriously, the problem is getting the right sort of information to our new players.

Whether through the Expansions Manager, the wiki, Arquebus's videos, the long and rambling BB "[Release]" threads, or some other method. An "other method" is probably the best.

Thanks to following Arquebus, I have now have no illusions that all players read the wiki entries. But, Redspear, he's hardly going to spend the time to work his way through your Weapon Laws thread either!

Too much information. (1,100 OXPs and all that accompanying information!).

I think that Hiran's suggestion is the best. Three or four buttons in his Oolite Starter which download the OXPs for ambience, or for Stranger's World, or Murgh's Iron Asses or whatever.

When I started adding in OXPs, I did so with Norby's collections. They are now out of date!

[Redspear]

I have now have no illusions that all players read the wiki entries. But, Redspear, he's hardly going to spend the time to work his way through your Weapon Laws thread either!

I made no comment about the wiki...

I don't think arquebus was having a go at either yourself or the wiki (perhaps at the requirement for it) and I know that I wasn't having a go at either of those things. I was just making fun that it could have been interpreted in a humerous way.

Unfortunately one of the reasons for my verbosity is that whenever I try to be brief (and even sometimes when I don't), folks tend to misunderstand me (numerous, even recent, examples here, possibly including this one).

So yeah, I really wish I could get the hang of expressing my ideas in a way they could be easily understood.

[phkb]

I'm wondering whether it would be worth creating a mod that will do two things:
(1) Give mod developers somewhere in game to put helpful information about their mod.
(2) Give players somewhere to go for information in game to help them understand something (eg how to use an MFD, prime-able equipment, etc).

If the list could be categorised effectively, so the player can drill down to the bit they want easily, and have a search function that help uncover information when they don't know where to look, then it might alleviate some of the issue with using external wikis.

I don't think it's a complete answer, because there will be some information that is not able to be displayed in game due to its complexity, but it's at least *something*.

[hiran]

I'm wondering whether it would be worth creating a mod that will do two things:
(1) Give mod developers somewhere in game to put helpful information about their mod.
(2) Give players somewhere to go for information in game to help them understand something (eg how to use an MFD, prime-able equipment, etc).

If the list could be categorised effectively, so the player can drill down to the bit they want easily, and have a search function that help uncover information when they don't know where to look, then it might alleviate some of the issue with using external wikis.

I don't think it's a complete answer, because there will be some information that is not able to be displayed in game due to its complexity, but it's at least *something*.

Sounds great for me!
While we have the bar in the stations, maybe there could be a specific station (or kind of stations) that contains an academy. Whether this materializes as text to be read in-game, or a URL to a wiki page, or even a video tutorial or whatever would still have to be worked out.

[Cholmondely]

I'm wondering whether it would be worth creating a mod that will do two things:
(1) Give mod developers somewhere in game to put helpful information about their mod.
(2) Give players somewhere to go for information in game to help them understand something (eg how to use an MFD, prime-able equipment, etc).

If the list could be categorised effectively, so the player can drill down to the bit they want easily, and have a search function that help uncover information when they don't know where to look, then it might alleviate some of the issue with using external wikis.

I don't think it's a complete answer, because there will be some information that is not able to be displayed in game due to its complexity, but it's at least *something*.

The second - (2) - already exists inside the Ship's Manual (in cim's Ship's Library).

But you either have to seriously poke about in your docked station F4 screen (as Arquebus doesn't) or already know how to handle MFDs to access it!

There must be a better method.

[arquebus]

Yes, my hatred of wikis doesn't *really* extend to Oolite, because it is an entirely different kind of game. The base version can be played without too much reference to the wiki, but OXPs don't really have a way of teaching what they do within the game itself. If Oolite had a mechanism for storing documentation and linking to that from OXPs, that would be the preferable mode. (I think there's a way to have "books" in the game? Maybe that should have been a best practices expectation way back when. Every OXP adds a book to the ship's library that functions as a manual or a detailed description.)

The market system as it currently exists is in pretty good shape. The OXP that adds price differentials is crucial, though. Without it, the market system is stuck in 1984: it assumes that the player has a pencil and paper at the ready. The mod that adds specialty goods is great but unfortunately it patches into the existing market goods, and it's too easy to confuse the two types of load. In an ideal world there would be trade routes that impact prices, rather than just the system categories. Even better if each system had a designated primary export (one or more), so that purchase prices there are much lower than anywhere else and sell prices are just awful. It would be absolutely brilliant if the OXPs that extend the politics/war stuff actively patched into the market system, and even better if there were a way to indicate inter-system political affiliations on the map.

This leads me to a different generalization. One of the things that Elite Dangerous has, sort of, is a cultural/economic "topography" at the macro level. Empires/influences reach across multiple systems; they aren't bound to a single one. Oolite has political types, but they're anonymous and localized. The politics OXP that adds wars and embassies and whatnot is an improvement, but it's still fairly anonymized and there's no way to see the affiliations on the map. And this topography doesn't extend to the markets or to the "security level" of whole regions of the galaxy. This is a function of Oolite's initial reproduction of *Elite's* exceptionally tiny database, which prevented the game from knowing anything about anything other than what was directly in front of the player. By way of example, functionally speaking, Tionisla doesn't know that Zaonce even exists.

As for the mission stuff, right now there are a lot of OXPs that handle missions and stories and quests in a lot of different ways. The bulletin board system(s) are kind of all over the place. There are OXPs that try to clean that up, but there are still stragglers. I would love to see a single screen with mission categories that OXPs can patch themselves into. Of course this means that all the older OXPs would be stuck using the old methods, and we end up with yet another method. So it's not really a solution this late in the game.

Perhaps something can be done with the way the F4 screen is laid out. Right now it just accumulates cruft from all the various OXPs that patch into it, and there is no categorization. I recall there's an OXP that lets you "walk around" the station in a manner similar to playing an old school MUD, and maybe something like that could do the trick. If the F4 screen had more categorization I think it would be less daunting to use. (The new OXP categorizing the F3 and F5 screens has been a revelation.)

[arquebus]

I'm wondering whether it would be worth creating a mod that will do two things:
(1) Give mod developers somewhere in game to put helpful information about their mod.
(2) Give players somewhere to go for information in game to help them understand something (eg how to use an MFD, prime-able equipment, etc).

If the list could be categorised effectively, so the player can drill down to the bit they want easily, and have a search function that help uncover information when they don't know where to look, then it might alleviate some of the issue with using external wikis.

I don't think it's a complete answer, because there will be some information that is not able to be displayed in game due to its complexity, but it's at least *something*.

I was thinking that Ship's Library OXP, or something like it, would do the trick. That OXP is already extensible - like the Mutabilis OXP that puts a new book in the library.

[arquebus]

But you either have to seriously poke about in your docked station F4 screen (as Arquebus doesn't)

I am the duly appointed representative of the Average Dumb Player.

One of my suggestions above was that finding a way to sort the F4 screen into categories would help tremendously.

[arquebus]

I think once I'm done with the extremely long Susan Calvain mission I've been on for months now, I'm going to spend some time recording episodes where I craft an OXP set that is internally consistent, rationally designed and absolutely not the total mess that my current one is.

[Redspear]

There must be a better method.

Snoopers style news flash upon docking?
e.g. weapon laws:

GalCop has just announced New Laws restricting the sale of Military Hardware.

If you've been ploughing the space-lanes recently, then you can't help but have noticed that piracy is at an all time high.
Sick of facing well armed pirates, GalCop has taken the unprecedented step of banning the sale of lasers, mines and even defensive measures.

Just what the planetary authorities will have to say about that remains to be seen.
Good luck enforcing that in some of the more dangerous systems guys!

As for the honest trader, if you want that new laser then you'd better be prepared to look a little further afield than you might be used to.
Maybe coprorarte states aren't always the best places to shop after all.

This is Chet Flanmuncher for Pilot's News...

Would work better for some oxps than for others (and you wouldn't want them all arriving at once) but it's in game, it's immersive and it could potentially work for lots of oxp types: equipment; ships; stations; missions; weapons; systems; HUDs etc.

Maybe a chance of appearing on each of the first ten dockings after installation. Once it appears the first time, the subsequent chance is zero and it remains accessible as an archived article in game (under the name of the oxz).

Annoying if overdone, but many oxps don't really need in-game explanation (YAH, Snoopers, Black Monks, Hoopy Casinos, Alien Systems, Random Ship Names, Commies etc. etc.)

Isn't this largely a manager related problem however?

When oxps were installed manually you had to get them from either the relevant thread or the wiki page; and so you were more likely to know both what you were installing and where to find more information.

[arquebus]

A question:

Has anyone here played Astrox Imperium? It's a single player simplified EVE-like and the way it lays out station activities/locations is great. (Yes, it's graphical rather than text, but the principle is the same.) The trade/market system is still rough around the edges but one thing it has that I think Oolite sorely needs is a Supply and Demand system, where each station has its own unique list of needs and products - and that information is directly presented to the player on the market screen. Also, it has an event generator that operates over the whole map and adds and tweaks things at some subset of stations/systems at regular intervals, which can create things like sudden boom economies or changes to the intensity of criminals/raiders in a system. (These events show up as news items as well so the player can exploit them.) And, lastly, its faction system is more macroscopic than what exists in Oolite, and is reflected on the map.

[phkb]

The second - (2) - already exists inside the Ship's Manual (in cim's Ship's Library).

Oh, yeah! I forgot. I blame lack of sleep, but who needs that, really?

I'm not sure the structure of Ship's Library is ideally suited for what I was envisaging. If every OXP was to add a "book", that would be a super long list of books to choose from, and (again) no structure to it. I'll have a bit of a think about it.

One of my suggestions above was that finding a way to sort the F4 screen into categories would help tremendously.

I mean, the F4 screen is already sorted into categories, it's just that the categories are on the right side of the screen, rather than as section headers, so it's a bit harder to make sense of. But I take your point that there are too many things stuffed on the F4 screen because they have nowhere else to go.

One of the features I added into the core Oolite code is the ability to add keypress notifications from any of the main game screens. This allows for an OXP to, say, use Ctrl-G on the F6 Chart screens to open it's mission screen. I've done this in Galactic Registry now. If you have 1.91 (sorry Cholly!) you can press Ctrl-G on the chart and it will take you straight to the Galactic Registry screen. Eventually I imagine I'll be able to remove the F4 entry entirely for Galactic Registry. In my local version of Damage Report MFD, you can press Ctrl-D on the F5 status screen to jump straight into the damage report.

But that doesn't help us with 1.90. If I were to come up with a fancy way of doing header-style categories on the F4 screen (as I did for the F3 and F5 screens), I'd need to do some fancy footwork to make sure all existing OXP's that use the screen continue to work flawlessly. I'll need to have a long think about that.

As for the mission stuff, right now there are a lot of OXPs that handle missions and stories and quests in a lot of different ways. The bulletin board system(s) are kind of all over the place. There are OXPs that try to clean that up, but there are still stragglers.

I'm curious. In my playtime, given I wrote the BB System OXP, then spent time converting every other mission board system to work with it instead (Escort Contracts, Rescue Stations, Random Hits, In-system Taxi, Mining Contracts and Taxi Galactica), the only missions I ever see either pop-up as a mission page as soon as I dock somewhere, or are on the Bulletin Board. What stragglers are you seeing?