Newb journal and question about play balance

PsychotropicDog · Post by **PsychotropicDog** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 8:15 pm

I am happy I stumbled across Oolite.

***possible newb spoilers***

Day one
So I spend way too much time on early missions.
I eavesdrop on some pilots and discover the must haves for sanity, such as avoiding the heavy traffic lanes.

I am much happier, and download a bunch of oxp's.
I promptly get killed a ton, and eventually figure out eagle2's are too much, so out they go.

On a fed-ex mission I get attacked by an xwing. I spend an hour fighting it, only to have it charge me and send a missile. I hit the ecm and dodge, he dissappears - and no kill for me - I am still harmless(0). grrr. Did he run into his own missile?

Day two
I trade down for a longshot, but I then get to add a bunch of goodies to it.

Day three
I discover that a joystick can be used!

Day four
I want to trade the longshot for something faster.
I find I have to alter a file to make falcons buyable. So I cheat and check one out. Ooh, cool, now I have to de-cheat and try and earn one.

Day five
I start a new pilot, and trade down to an adder mk II.
Hmm... this seems a bit too good.
I fear nothing in space. My last encounter with pirates -
A cobra Mk III
two other ships that died quickly
A sledbelly
two falcon-s 's ( one got away while I was scooping loot, because I needed something to do while my laser cools )

I figure if I get the military shield I will not need another ship until I can afford the falcon.
The ship is slightly faster then a B-wing, and maybe has some qualities that make it less effective, but it should easily cost 400k!

I grabbed the fsr.oxp ( the rickshaw) but sadly, it is NPC only.

I suppose I should try and figure out how to make my own version of a space taxi that does not immediately suck all sense of accomplishment from a player.

The question...
- is there a list of 'recommended changes' for custom ships ? - not to knock anybody's work, but uber ships irritate me. Maybe there is a formula for determining the relevant restictions, costs etc, and it could retroactively be applied to custom ships. If there isn't maybe there should be so anybody making a new ship can have it fit into Oolite space without becoming the easy path.

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 9:18 pm

Most OXP writers are pretty careful. Price is determined by variables in shipdata.plist and the equipment added, so better ships will be more expensive than weaker ships, although some ships may be higher priced due to their rare nature.

There are some Uber Ships out there. Bear in mind though that any ship available to the player is available to NPCs Many OXPs only make Uber ships available to NPCs, so there is a balance to the game. Personally, I'd reckomend playing from the start with all OXPs installed. Ships are like cards in the deck. Oolite will deal a certain number of them into systems and shipyards. If you play with no OXPs in there are about 20 cards in the deck. If you play with all OXPs in there are 200 odd. Remember that if you can buy a Tiger Mk1, then so can pirates!

TGHC · Post by **TGHC** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 9:56 pm

Hi PsychotropicDog, you've certainly crammed a lot in in your first few days, and picked things up very quickly, my guess is that you were an elte commander in a former time, if not, then very impressive. As far as uber ships are concerned, you need to trade to upgrade and get yourself a mean machine so you can play with the big boys. In the early days of equiping your ship you need to know when to fight and when to run, so buy them thar fuel injectors. one of the great things about Oolite that it gives you more choices for srategy and combat than traditional elite used to. Have fun.

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 11:05 pm

Hi, PsychotropicDog! Welcome to the boards and to this great game!

I agree with TGHC: You have come quite far in the first few days! (Just a question: how many hours did you spend not playing during these first five days?

)

Anyway: Very impressive record for a newbie indeed. Keep playing and discovering (and reporting?)!

Right on, Commander!

PsychotropicDog · Post by **PsychotropicDog** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 12:11 am

heh heh
I've played a lot of games, but oddly enough, never the original ELITE.

a short list:
tachyon
StarControl (3 and 2)
Vegastrike
StarFlight
Xwing
Freelancer

etc.

Anyhoot..
I followed your advice LittleBear, and I have 79 oxp's.

I think I really need to defrag.

Seems every new pilot gets the same stuff now, but maybe I just did not try long enough.

Anyhow, I even put the eagle2 back in, figuring, what the heck, I'll see what my jameson with the adder mkII comes up against - too funny, I got jumped by 15 of them ( roughly) in Zaonce,

{ waiting 2 days and 5 posts for images }

and then came an hour of fighting - with a lot of me running away and shooting my rear plasma cannons (which made pretty explosions when they hit, but I never saw a kill notice from them) I even took out the old instamatic and got some snapshots.

{ insert pic here }

I wished I had a Q-bomb. Well I got credit for 8 kills, the rest must have crashed into each other or ran away, but not before they set me back a bit - they even wrecked my scoop, so I could not even capture the 3 escape pods I saw. Since I was out of fuel, I barely made it to the station ahead of the junk, and was not able to get the excape pods.

PsychotropicDog · Post by **PsychotropicDog** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 12:25 am

@TGHC
I confess to eavesdropping on you vet pilots ( search works

)

@ Commander McLane
I found this on a day I did not want to think about something in particular, now I think the addiction has taken root. I did spend quite a few hours researching ship specs, studying trade routes, and advice on pest control. ( funny how I knew I should not have bought one, but I did it anyway, and then there were seven ... )

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 1:39 am

I hope you got rid of them then. If not, complain with Captain Hesperus (not that it would lead somewhere...)

Just in case you haven't found out: You can take screenshots anytime in-game by hitting the '*'-key. They are saved automatically in the same folder as Oolite. Certainly easier than "the old instamatic".

PsychotropicDog · Post by **PsychotropicDog** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 1:57 am

Yep, they are getting developped right now

On another note...
Something is giving me a stuttery performance hit, I guess trial and error to determine which oxp it is (unless it is the whole wack of them, thus defrag might help).

And I better search about 'fullscreen' mode, and see if I can find out how to change the refresh rate.

Captain Hesperus · Post by **Captain Hesperus** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 9:39 am

Commander McLane wrote:
I hope you got rid of them then. If not, complain with Captain Hesperus (not that it would lead somewhere...)

I refer you to the sales docket: "All transactions are final, except where you didn't pay up the full total. In this case, expect a visit from a number of Black Bony Lobstoids who enjoy the sound of fractured knees."

P.S. Welcome to the boards, Psychotropic.....erm, Dog.

Captain Hesperus

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 11:38 am

Commander McLane wrote:
I hope you got rid of them then. If not, complain with Captain Hesperus (not that it would lead somewhere...)

It was late at night, so I forgot to link that sentence. Here it is.

PsychotropicDog wrote:
On another note...
Something is giving me a stuttery performance hit, I guess trial and error to determine which oxp it is (unless it is the whole wack of them, thus defrag might help).

In case you haven't found out: if you hit SHIFT-F, the current framerate, the number of objects in the system, the number of collisions currently occuring and your position in space are displayed in the top-left corner of your screen, as seen here:

A large increase of objects and especially collisions will invariably result in a decrease of the framerate. The former occur regularly when a large object, like a carrier ship, is...ahem...transformed into a group of very small objects.

In Oolite this happens even without the player being present, as all NPCs have a life of their own and are fighting with each other without you being involved.

PsychotropicDog · Post by **PsychotropicDog** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 4:40 pm

They were kind of tasty once the fur was burnt off of them.

I noticed though, that if I start a new pilot and trade my ship in, I get the offer immediately ... I swear Captain Hesperus can smell credits.
I am also wondering if that is a complete oxp yet, it would be interesting to take the captain to the same place as his goods

anyhow, I usually see ~60 FPS apart from the stuttering. I tried versions 1.68, and 1.69 with the same results.

I've got about seven oxp's isolated, and am dropping them in one by one to see which one does it. It may also be a case of having a certain number of them, which maybe I can figure out by taking some that did not cause stuttering before once I actually get it to stutter again. I am using 1.68 for this wee test. The stuttering will be noticeable right at the view ships screen with a new pilot trading in, so I have my doubts that it is collision related. I will post my inept findings when I , err, find them.

LittleBear · Post by **LittleBear** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 5:39 pm

You might as well take out Assassins until you get to galaxy 7 as it won't do anything until you get there (So your loading 10 Megs of textures into memory for ships you won't see in G1). Same goes for Ionics (G2), Thargoid Wars (2+) LoveCats (G4) etc. To some extent it is just the number of OXPs. Oolite has to load more textures into memory (normaly 10Megs with all the OXPs in about 200M!), so you do get some performance knock. The scripts for all the OXPs also get read even if the OXP isn't active. Only put in Mission OXPs when your in the Galaxy to trigger them.

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 5:51 pm

PsychotropicDog wrote:
I noticed though, that if I start a new pilot and trade my ship in, I get the offer immediately

One of the triggers for the trumble-offer is related to your credits. So if you trade your ship in, you will have enough credits to trigger the mission.

TGHC · Post by **TGHC** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 6:17 pm

LB's advice is spot on, just be careful with Galaxy 4, missions can clash with each other so only load missions after you have completed Nova which is a built in mission, not an OXP. There is a fix for this problem being worked on now as we speak, but you are cracking on at a rate of knots so most likely you'll get there before the fix does.

Captain Hesperus · Post by **Captain Hesperus** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 6:46 pm

PsychotropicDog wrote:
I noticed though, that if I start a new pilot and trade my ship in, I get the offer immediately ... I swear Captain Hesperus can smell credits.
I am also wondering if that is a complete oxp yet, it would be interesting to take the captain to the same place as his goods

As for the OXP, A_H is (amongst his many, many, many projects) throwing this together.

I must admit, I am not amused.....

Captain Hesperus