Hi, cosurgi, Disembodied already pointed out the most important point, I'll just emphasize on it: Oolite is a remake of Elite, not of FFE or FE2. Those were completely different games. Some of us would even refuse to refer to Frontier as "Elite2", because the two are so little related.
Anyway, there are a couple of resemblances, and some things on your wishlist can be achieved easily in Oolite, or they are there anyway, but you just haven't yet stumbled across them.
One by one:
cosurgi wrote:1. all F1..F10 keys are onscreen with little icons
This is indeed no feature of Oolite, and I don't think it's going to be one. So at this point you will have to get used to the keyboard controls, I'm afraid.
cosurgi wrote:2. a bit different keyboard keybindings
This can be achieved easily, by editing a file named keyconfig.plist. A step-by-step info how to do this, depending on your OS, together with a complete list of all keyboard controls and their default values, is available in the Elite Wiki, on the page
Oolite Keyboard Controls (just click the link).
cosurgi wrote:3. station services have a bulletin board, where I can search announcements for possible missions (kill someone, cargo/passanger delivery, army assignments)
Station services in Oolite
do have a bulletin board of this kind. The difference is that it is called "Mission Screen", and it pops up automatically as soon as you dock,
but only if there is actually a mission to do. There are also the regular passenger- and cargo-contracts on the "Contract Market" mentioned by Disembodied (press F8 twice).
cosurgi wrote:4. the galaxy map is a little different, so it has a spiral shape, and contains sol systems coming from our real "milky way" (so you can find Sol&Earth&Mars, Beteleguese, Orion belt, etc...)
Yes. Oolite is a remake of Elite, therefore it is located in Elite's galaxy, not in Frontier's. And those were, as mentioned above, two completely different games.
cosurgi wrote:5. the ship steering controls have two options: roll/up-down (this oolite currently uses) or left-right/up-down (this one I prefer)
Although there are reasons why there was no left-right-movement (or yaw) in Elite, it was introduced to Oolite's flight controls as an experimental feature since version 1.68. The above-mentioned documentation of the keycontrols tells you what the default keys are. So you can actually have all three movements: pitch, yaw and roll. Note, however, that due to the experimental character of the yaw-support there is no guarantee that it will work in any future version. It could be removed again.
cosurgi wrote:6. the military missions are getting more and more interesting as you climb the ladder, eventually they may give you an assignment to kill a president of enemy imperial empire, which is kind of interesting
The same is true for Elite/Oolite, although you have to fly around for quite a while (and kill a lot of other ships) until you trigger the first of the built-in missions. Later missions will also become more difficult.
The particularly nice touch of Oolite, however, is that you are not depending on the built-in missions, because Oolite is a very open project and can be expanded in every thinkable way by Oolite eXpansion Packs (OXPs). A
list of those OXPs that offer missions, together with information on the starting points of the missions and prerequesits (like a specific number of kills), is available in the Wiki as well. There is also a
list of all available OXPs.
cosurgi wrote:7. less important: station services have human faces, it's nice, but I can live without it.
Another difference between Elite/Oolite and Frontier is that in Elite/Oolite space is populated with all sorts of weird species, not humans only. Disembodied already mentioned an example.
I hope you are satisfied with these answers. Have fun playing and discovering!
