Oolite Bulletins

Micha! Great to see you back with us!

There's my house!



The ice caps don't seem to have melted by 3300, although DB did say at the prem that the sea levels had risen quite a bit.

Did anyone see the prem? I particularly enjoyed Occulus Rift Guy, who wasn't quite on message!

Micha wrote:

Yes, there's the solo mode, but it will still get updates from the community (galaxy evolution etc blah blah).

Oh, it's worse than that.. every single 'transaction'.. which is to say every time you earn/get a fine/bounty, every time you dock, buy/sell equipment or cargo, take a mission, jump to a new system or exit supercruise, even just extracting minerals from a splinter, will have to be moderated by the central server.. you will need a constant connection to play at all. Those who've tested it have found that within 5 seconds of losing connection, you'll drop out of the game.

On the other hand, it does look pretty - here I am on the way to Bradbury Station in my Cobra MkIII (explorer option).



I had to post a pic, and having been spawned at Boole Ring, Bradbury Station was just around the corner (relatively speaking).

Wildeblood wrote:

I'm still coming to terms with the idea of charging suckers to beta test, rather than paying them.

If it's done right, it can be a Good Thing™. I've been enjoying Prison Architect, which has been in early-access alpha for over two years now. They ship a new version each month, and you'd be excused for thinking that the latest (alpha26, bug bash) is a fully featured finished game.

Besides, ever since games reached a certain complexity, no one ever bought anything but beta versions. It's just that it used to be called release versions, and then if you were lucky they would release a 1.1 patch sometimes later, once the paying customers had found the bugs they either didn't know about or didn't bother/have time to fix before release. At least if you're buying something called a beta, you know what you're getting.

watched Scot Manly do a trip to Sol and flyby jupiter in the gamma version... didnt think the rings looked too bad....

Nice pics all. I still have to wait till a Mac version is launched.

pagroove wrote:

Nice pics all. I still have to wait till a Mac version is launched.

Can you not run it in bootcamp?

I backed the mac stretch goal. So I wait. I have not bootcamp installed atm.

CheeseRedux wrote:

Wildeblood wrote:

I'm still coming to terms with the idea of charging suckers to beta test, rather than paying them.

If it's done right, it can be a Good Thing™.

Absolutely! I've managed to spend a little bit of time with Kerbal Space Program earlier this year.

Firstly, there's a limited but fully functional demo so you can get the gist of the game and see if you like the concept.

Then it's quite cheap during the beta process.

Finally, all the forums are completely open, and there are weekly DevNotes which often go into quite a bit of detail as to planned features, or technical implementation. The Dev's definitely seem to consider the community input, having significantly changed several design decisions.
Also there's a very strong modding community (similar to Oolite) which expands on the core game significantly, or fixes some of the biggest omissions. Again, the Dev's sometimes choose one of the most popular expansions and turn it into a core feature of the game.

Quite frankly, it's night-and-day difference between FD's ED kickstarter program and the KSP one. The former was quite restricted unless one stumped up for extra access, the latter is completely open (apart from the actual game source code).
I have no idea how open FD is/was during the development process as to DevNotes, community input, etc. to those people who did pay for the access, but to an outsider like me, there appears to have been a breakdown somewhere between the initial premise and to what it now looks like it's delivering. Perhaps the community which got involved is perfectly happy with the end result (and the game does look very nice!), but there is definitely a part of the community which is now quite disappointed.

Perhaps ED will come good, and perhaps there'll even be a Linux version in the distant future.. one can hope anyway!

Personally I think although they could have been a bit quicker to come forward about the no offline mode, as well as handling the situation better rather than hiding it in a sentence within a newsletter, they have produced a very nice looking game and with a lot of scope for improvements. The basic stuff like trading, mining, missions are there it just needs a bit more substance now. Hopefully this will come in time!

Happy Birthday, Pleb!

(I'm assuming that is you over on the FGE boards.. )

Diziet Sma wrote:

Happy Birthday, Pleb!

(I'm assuming that is you over on the FGE boards.. )

Haha yes that's me thank you! The big 27 today...getting old!

happy Birthday... nah your just a baby.... im almost twice your age...lol

I feel old...27 married got a 2 year old and another due in march...time to get the pipe and slippers!