Thoughts on Elite Dangerous with relevance to Oolite

[arquebus]

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?

I was deeply unclear in what I was talking about there.

The "stragglers" I mean aren't necessarily missions as such. And perhaps I'm imagining the BB system to be something other than what it is. When I hear "bulletin board" I think news as well, not just, well, Craigslist. But maybe it's fine that it's Craigslist. I really wish I were at my Windows laptop right now because there are things I'm thinking of that I can't quite remember precisely at the moment, and I don't have a point of reference on my little MacBook to help me out.


Okay, one Google Remote Access later... I did confirm that I have the BB OXP installed (was suddenly not sure for a second there). And looking at the F4 page on the wiki, it's jogging my memory that I am pretty sure I'm seeing the Parcel contract deliveries and Passenger contract deliveries options on the main screen. I feel like those are bulletin board things. Super Craigslist-y.

[phkb]

I feel like those are bulletin board things.

Install  Contracts on Bulletin Board. That will move the standard cargo, passenger and parcel contracts on the BB. You can then optionally, via Library Config, move the other OXP contracts as well.

[arquebus]

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.

So thinking about this further...

The updated sorting of the F3 screen makes sense the way it is because with few exceptions (like maintenance), everything on the F3 screen is either something to install or something to remove. They are all conceptually the same. So maintaining it as a list makes a lot of sense.

But the F4 screen is a lot more eclectic. The categories more properly describe conceptually distinct things. The Embassy District is, as it says on the tin, a District. But the Commander's Log is probably a screen, or in 1984, a dot matrix printout. I can't "walk into" a commander's log any more than I can "read" an embassy district.

So to my mind it would make more sense for there to be multi-level menu, than simple categories. With the caveat that I can't run Oolite right now to get a more robust list and must rely on the F4 Page on the wiki... I would almost want the categories that exist now to be top-level menu options. For example:

Commerce
Deliveries
Diplomacy
Information
Logs
Ship Systems

Select one of these and then it goes to the contents of the category. Or, to take a concept out of the walkable station OXP stuff, divide the top level into:

ON STATION
ON SHIP

And in the above example, the first three categories go in ON STATION and the latter three go in ON SHIP. In order to be not completely annoying, maybe it should look like this (the fact that the categories alphabetized are in exactly the right spots being a coincidence):

--ON STATION--
Commerce
Deliveries
Diplomacy
--ON SHIP--
Information
Logs
Ship Systems

Thus each of these categories becomes its own zone of activity. That's sort of how I was thinking about it when I mused about the OXP that lets you "walk around" the station.

[arquebus]

Oohhhh or perhaps an F4 and F4F4 page, distinguishing SHIP STUFF (F4) from STATION STUFF (F4F4).

[phkb]

Select one of these and then it goes to the contents of the category.

Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say that. It's certainly *possible*, but it will be tricky. I'd essentially be rewriting the entire F4 screen. As I said, I'll have a think about how best to approach it.

[arquebus]

Select one of these and then it goes to the contents of the category.

Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say that. It's certainly *possible*, but it will be tricky. I'd essentially be rewriting the entire F4 screen. As I said, I'll have a think about how best to approach it.

If there's one thing I know how to do, it's give people more work!

[arquebus]

Given that the BB OXP is able to hoover up other menu list items and spit them back out inside the BB screen, would it be possible for an OXP to hoover up *everything* on F4? Leaving just itself. And inside, the glorious categories.

[phkb]

Given that the BB OXP is able to hoover up other menu list items and spit them back out inside the BB screen, would it be possible for an OXP to hoover up *everything* on F4? Leaving just itself. And inside, the glorious categories.

Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that. OXP's that register a screen on the F4 page do so with "callbacks", which are like function pointers. I have to intercept these pages at the registration point, so I can then redisplay things in another way, but still honour the callbacks. So, yeah, a little more complicated and opens up a lot of possible bugs.

[Nite Owl]

Slightly off topic but THIS POST OF MINE from almost two years ago does go into the process of sorting the entries of the F4 screen. It is not as detailed as what is being suggested here but hopefully will further the research. In my Ooniverse the most used entries are at the top of page one cascading down onto page two with stuff used very rarely.

[arquebus]

That makes sense. (I don't know what it means but it does make sense.)

Since this is the "thoughts on Elite Dangerous" thread, I thought I'd just continue the discussion on this point. So this isn't to belabor it, merely to discuss...

Elite Dangerous handles categorization when docked at a station in a number of ways - even more with the Odyssey DLC. At the top level (still in the cockpit) you have Station Services, Launch and Disembark. Inside Station Services you have category blocks/buttons for commodities, administrators, missions, ship outfitting and so on. It conceptualizes these all as interfaces you're interacting with in your cockpit, even though trading is distinct from having a serious discussion about your illegal activities with the station manager. If you Disembark (Odyssey DLC), you end up on foot and you can then go to a kind of zocalo on the station, which has shops (for equipment, etc.), kiosks (an additional set of Odyssey-specific categories) and shady people standing around in corners (mission-giving NPCs).

Elite Dangerous doesn't try to hyper-realize the on-foot stuff the way Star Citizen does, so the zocalo location is really just a glorified menu with extra steps (literally). But it serves to distinguish different types of activities for the player. Missions that you get from on station will always involve doing stuff that requires getting out of your ship, whereas missions that you get from your cockpit will never require you to get out of your ship or SRV (a wheeled vehicle). They have to distinguish the two ways to get missions in order to avoid immersion-breaking (such as by having the mission text tell you explicitly "this is a get-out-of-your-ship mission!"). It's effective but it does require time spent to get there. But that's sort of par for the course with Elite Dangerous. Never do anything quickly that you could do ten times more slowly.

[arquebus]

And I think fundamentally my comments here run in the direction of how to make it clearer to players what they can do within the game, whether that's vanilla/base, or with a sensible collection of OXPs, or with my mutant nightmare setup. Oolite is surprisingly good at letting you know what's possible, at least for a great number of things, precisely because it's menu based. You don't have to accidentally stumble into the Closet of Special Missions to find them. They're right there, in the menus. Where Oolite needs help is in the formatting/organization of all of that readily accessible information. The paradox is that readily accessible information is also, not surprisingly, readily accessible - which can get overwhelming, or create attention noise. It's the problem of choice: humans aren't built to handle more than a few options at once. Elite Dangerous may be as big as a Costco, but Costco is organized by type of goods and it lets you ignore areas that you're not concerned with. Oolite is smaller, but it's a bazaar, and everyone is yelling at you mostly at the same volume to come to their kiosk.

[Wildeblood]

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.

The F4 screen has a list of a half-a-dozen predefined categories. The problem is it is not an enforced list - when defining an interface for the F4 screen, you can write anything in the "category" field. OXP authors discovered on day one that writing:

category: expandDescription("[interfaces-category-uncategorised]"),

puts the interface for their cheat menu at the end of the list, but writing:

category: "AddOns",

puts it at the top of the list. This had a double benefit for them of putting their stuff where they "could find it", and saving 60-300 seconds checking in descriptions.plist what the "official" categories were. The result was the inevitable mess you have now.

[Switeck]

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.

I'm just going to leave this link here to sum up my feelings of not enough details in-game on how to do something that's often "mission critical" to success:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GuideDangIt

[Redspear]

Has anyone here played Astrox Imperium?

Not me but a word of caution on 'boon states'. Oolite doesn't have much of a progression path by default. Sure, there's harmless to elite (and the missions associated with that) but Jameson to Iron-Ass is markedly short.

Any extra cash will influence the latter, which in turn will influence the former (albeit to a much lesser extent).

Come to think of it, maybe too much is made of the player's bank account and not enough of their rating?

What if rating enabled:

• Access to the more valuable trade goods (rather than creating new ones)?
• Access to the more powerful ships e.g. Adder at harmless, Moray at average, Cobra at dangerous (could still require considerable cash)?
• Access to better equipment (you need the rep to get the contacts for the best gear)?

Harmless to elite is a slow climb. Poor to rich, not so much.

[Switeck]

Maybe Oolite could be set up so certain ships are simply not available for any price unless you complete a long campaign?