Much of the original discussion can be found in this thread derailment, for those who want a refresher.
I meant to pick the discussion up again from where it was left off, but RealLife[tm] sort of put a damper on that plan.
Some of the more relevant bits, of which a few are shamelessly enough mine:
My very rough first suggestion for The Starter Package:
Ahruman's last words on the subject (That is, until this thread started):CheeseRedux wrote:Extra ships restricted to those that won't increase difficulty. Ie no turrets, multiple forward lasers etc.
Some useful extra equipment. Like Fuel Tank eg.
Eyecandy.
Galaxy 1 Missions.
Ahruman wrote:This is a real problem, and a general downside to flexibility. I think a “starter pack” of ships widely considered well-balanced and non-über, and perhaps some early missions, would be a Good Thing. As long as it was kept up-to-date, I’d be willing to push it through “official” channels (but not partake in the editorial decisions).CheeseRedux wrote:The Wiki lists a whooping 206 OXPs at the moment. For the veteran, it's a wonderful source of freedom and diversity. For the new guy (and that's me, a month and a half ago) it's a source of confusion and quite likely to overwhelm.
Here's the progression I'd like to see:
1) Discover & download Oolite
2) Discover the OXP concept
3) Download a StarterBundle or five
4) Start cherry picking OXPs
5) Start writing your own stuff
As it is right now, there's a big leap between 2 & 4. Something to bridge that gap could only help recruit more people. Myself, I will never go beyond 4, but it's a crying shame if we lose potential OXP writers at stage 2.
I am fully aware of the reluctance to "tell" people which OXPs to get because they're the "best". But as the number of OXPs continue to grow, the task of picking your first few ones will eventually become insurmountable to anyone but the most determined and dedicated. Can we really expect that from someone who discovered Oolite half an hour ago?
Making it a single “meta-OXP” would have almost no benefit and cause several problems. It would be much simpler to just provide a zip archive with the original OXPs, a read me with summaries of the project and the selected OXPs, and a folder with the original documentation.
Ideally, this would be managed by a group of non-OXPers, including at least one long-standing forum member and at least one recent newbie. I hope I don’t have to point out that the authors of the OXPs should be asked…
Also note that I wrote in the singular here. Having several starter packs would just bring us back to the same problem.
To me, it seems useful to get to an agreement on the parameters of the Starter Package before venturing into specific OXPs, and some of the posts above have already moved in that direction.
So, what I personally think is a good starting point, looks something like this:
- As much EyeCandy as possible. Like it or not, graphics sell.
- Anything that adds atmosphere and helps immersion.
- All Galaxy1 missions, whether G1 only or G1+GXYZ, as long as they do not alter the difficulty of the game.
- Some low end useful equipment.
- As for ships, nothing that outperforms any of the built in ships, or that is ridiculously underpriced. Note that for pure NPC ships, this does not apply if the ship in question always defaults to peaceful, ie will never fire until fired upon (or maybe not even then).
I also think it would be useful to let the discussion on how to adjust for low end machines rest for now. My suggestion would be to agree on what we think is the best Starter Pack, and then test it on a few older machines. If what we then have is too much for them to handle, then we can start discussing what to either pull out or put on a suggested-removal-if-your-system-is-slow list.
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