Oolite Bulletins

Charlie wrote:

Maybe I should have said:

It's fun... could get a little 'Oold' eventaully.

Indeed, many people think it's StOopid

Captain Hesperus
"That doesn't even merit a response."

It probably would have been a rOod respOonse .

Please stOop...

Ookay, dOone.

personally I want to see more oOXP's!
Haha!

can't believe that was'nt used yet!

I used it as the final joke in my bOok. So I'm a fan!

Cheers,

Drew.

Sigh! It is as I feared... I'm in a minority. TIE Fighters and YT-1300s from an Empire "far, far away", lame (IMO) puns...

All I can do is strike back with my own darker, more serious, more Dark Wheel-y vision of what Elite/Oolite is about!

(No one say "Or abOot", for the love of Christ!)

Well, I think its a balance. The OO stuff is only for witchspace points and things that add charcter. The plot driven missions are pretty dark! LoveCats (as an eg) is a good reference to the orginal felines in Elite.

I hope you felt Assassins was pretty dark-wheelish, referencing Elite a lot. Same with Deposed, Military and your own Missions. I think it is important that Mission OXPs remain linked to the plot of Elite, but Character OXPs should throw in a few in-jokes. I like vararitey, but personally I'm a "story" fan. I'd really like to see more missions that develope plot ideas hinted at in orgininal Elite and FFE. But the onus is on OXP mission writers to drive the story forward. There's a lot of ideas from Fan Fiction and the Dark Wheel, but also The HPA I and II that could be incorperated, that hold the feel of Elite. Norman Mosser shoud be worked into an OXP Mission at some point!

I tend regard OXPs in three types: Mission (should be story based and follow elite plot lines), More Ships (adds to the variety) and Character (YAH, Commies, HoOpy etc) that add more background and depth to the Univererse in which Missions and such like advance the story. You started a really interesting story idea with your Company, like to see you advance it with some more missions!

Taken together, all add to the depth of the game. Shooting down the constrictor in front of an adversising beacon with one of Daljits planets in the background adds to the falvor of the game. But although I like new ships, its really the story deveopment that intersets me. There are so many ships in the game, but even a big mission like assassins only uses about 300K in story (the other 9 Megs is ships). I'd like to see more people writing mission oxps drawing on the ships that are already there!

Giles Heretic and Charlie have given us a lot of cool ships on the Navy and Thargoid sides. Some big mission, just using script and missiontext featuring them in some epic series of missions would be cool!

I totally agree with you on the importance of narrative in the game, in the spirit of The Dark Wheel and other good Elite/Frontier stories. And, as you say, there are lots of ideas from those stories that could be incorporated (though in the case of many of them, including my favourite, Nothing Like The Prodigal, you couldn't "play" the story - except in the sense of visiting the locations).

Re my Taranis storyline: I intend to progress it in my third OXP - however, until the problem of getting a ship to launch a Q-bomb on cue is solved, I'm pretty much stuck. I tried for about a month, before switching my Oolite-type creative energies to JfMC. Which is close to completion...

Re in-jokes: I'm not against them in principle - the "Oo" thing just doesn't do it for me. Don't find it funny, and I don't fancy seeing "Oo"s on ships, billboards etc when it doesn't make sense within the Elite universe. Still, each to his own, and I'm in the minority

I confess I haven't played Assassins yet - mostly on account of my curious attachment to Galaxy 1 (I wish it were possible to jump "backwards" as well as forwards through the galaxies - that's one of my top three wants). But I'll get round to it eventually - it does sound very cool.

*EDIT* The Navy v Thargoid thing interests me too - intend to come at it from the fan-fiction side, though this won't be for a while...

*EDIT* In preparation for this, I've been pondering "the Navy", and have formed some very definite ideas about ranks/structure/insignia, based on what we have here, but with a few adjustments. (For starters, no way would a Commodore ever be in total command, or the Navy would be tiny...) This is for the future, though

I totally agree with Littlebear in that there should be more plot driven oxps available,its the very nature of the game, sadly i do not have the know how to do so,so i'll have to be patient,.

I do enjoy the Oo puns, but i can see where the minority are coming from

This should be really another topic, but as the discussion already has developed to this point I feel free to add something of my view.

I also am more fond of seeing mission/story-OXPs, and that's the main reason I started to work on Equilibrium.oxp (yeah, that's what it's called now).

Before I discovered Oolite I had a lot of fun playing the games of the Escape Velocity-series, which I found to be a good addition to ELITE. I even paid for registering EVN, something I do very rarely (and it being free is one of the reasons I like Oolite so much). Of course the 2D-Graphics is nothing compared to ELITE oder Oolite, but what I loved very much are the extensive sets of missions, because IMO they add a lot to the gameplay, even the possibility to play it many times and each time completely differently because of choosing another storyline.

I still remember how excited I was when--after many hours of playing ELITE (on a C64 at that time)--suddenly and completely out of the blue my first mission screen appeared, must have been Constrictor then. After I finished it I started to visit all planets systematically, because this mission-thingy added so much fascination and depth to the game that I didn't want to miss any other mission. Unfortunately in the original ELITE there were not so many missions included, as we all know.

So for me the BIG thing about Oolite is the possibility of adding OXPs with missions. Don't get me wrong, I also like "flavor"-OXPs like Lave, Diso, TOGY, Tianve or Commies, and I enjoy trying out new ships (currently I'm in an Imperial Courier), but I could live with the original set of ships in the original Ooniverse. What I wouldn't like to live without is lots and lots of missions. Because--let's be honest--the normal gameplay of ELITE and Oolite, while being fascinating, is also sort of limited. Trading, bounty hunting, a bit of pirating, fighting my way up to become ELITE--with way above 8000 kills and a couple of million credits in the bank I can lean back and say "been there, done that". What I can't say that about is all the missions I haven't done yet. Still I'm looking forward with a lot of excitement to Assassins, to Lovecats and to Deposed (that one I downloaded only yesterday). The prospect of doing these missions is what keeps my Commander going.

Having said that, there is one point I'm not so sure about, and that's what seems to be a bit of a common sense here in regard of new missions having to expand the original setting of the game like represented in The Dark Wheel or even the Frontier-Games. I'm not so sure about that, because, while obviously standing in that tradition, Oolite is also a game of its own. And I also have to admit that I personally never have read The Dark Wheel (my C64-ELITE was part of a Best-of-distribution, and none of any possible gimmicks were included in that) and never ever have played any of the follow-up games, so I simply don't know anything about this background (and in hours and hours of playing ELITE in the old days I never had the idea I could be missing something; the game in itself was sufficient). So should I give up working on Equilibrium.oxp, because it won't be an expansion of something that was already incorporated in The Dark Wheel??? I don't think so. If anybody thinks the storyline I am developing shouldn't be there in the Ooniverse, well, okay, he doesn't have to install my OXP, does he? However, I have read Status Quo, so some part of my plot could be derived from that (I already have an idea on that) and am eager to read the last part of Justice for Mrs. Combs.

So, sorry for this long off-topic sermon, but I felt I had to say this. Comments on my opinion are welcome and appreciated.

Some really first class thoughts here Commander, thank you for airing them. Whilst I am a traditionalist, I have no hesitation in agreeing with you about missions and how much they improve the game. Oolite has really expanded the Elite theme and improved on it immensely, and as far as introducing themes that were not in The Dark Wheel, I don't see that as a problem in any way, since the Dark Wheel is not a "complete" story. Where I would draw the line is on things that might contradict what is actually in Elite and The Dark Wheel.
One of the great things about Elite is the different styles of gameplay, ie trading, piracy, navigation, etc, and as I see it Oolite has introduced even more with the extra missions, and as you rightly said, now there are so many different ways to become Elite, you can start all over and play a totally different game.

So, the first thing I would say is you have to read The Dark Wheel. When I was first introduced to the game, I was told the book is a must read, and IMHO it really sets the scene. I doesn't matter if you are already immersed in the game, but there are so many insights and descriptions that you will find really informative. Please don't give up on equilibrium, just make sure it isn't contradictory. The Dark Wheel is a corker of a read and it is permanantly on Ian Bell's site here.

Thanks, TGHC, for the link. While I am browsing the bb I have downloaded it. So I guess I'm going to read it sometime soon, if I get the time ( :SIGH: why on earth can my computer do pre-emptive multi-tasking, but I can't? I have to work on my OXP, to browse this forum, and there is even my work in RealWorldTM. Nasty!)

I'd agree that every Eliteer or Ooliteer needs to have read 'The Dark Wheel'. I think it probably sets the definitive flavour of the original game, and provides modus operandi for a lot of elite events that you saw (atleast at some level) in the original Elite and now much more so in Oolite.

I took the approach that 'The Dark Wheel' was 'canon' when putting 'Status Quo' together and tried my best to adhere to it wherever possible whilst keeping an eye on FE2 and FFE. I think realising that the Q-bomb has a limited lifespan within elite/oolite/fe2/ffe adds to the story, rather than detracting from it, for instance.

I'd encourage everyone who is writing fiction or OXPs to have a spin through Selezens chronologies and try to adhere to them, keeps everything in place.

Cheers,

Drew.

Commander McLane wrote:

( :SIGH: why on earth can my computer do pre-emptive multi-tasking, but I can't?

If you listen to my wife, men are genetically incapable of performing more than two tasks at once and one of those tasks is remembering to breathe.

Captain Hesperus
"Women, you can't live with 'em. You can't live with 'em."