Oolite Bulletins

I only bought my A1200 to play Frontier because the Frontier box said that it was Elite II. The friends that I shared an apartment with back then (93-94) still talk about how I hardly ever left my room for months.

I gave up on reaching those far away places. In Frontier you scooped fuel from gas giants, right?

Frontier also needed some 'real' missions (even though I only ever played the nova mission in the original Elite). But Oolite could still use a lot of features from Frontier. Frontier with more Elite like 'physics' (at least for combat) and the OXPs would be really nice.

Dr. Nil wrote:

Frontier with more Elite like 'physics' (at least for combat) and the OXPs would be really nice.

Yeah... I know there are fans of the Newtonian flight model but for me, Frontier was killed by the absense of dogfighting. Just setting the autopilot, firing, breaking off, repeat... no fun.

I'd like to see more variety in the trading model, too: have some systems/societies where goods are sold at auction, under a variety of bid models, and some where currency doesn't operate and players use a barter system. And a whole mass of unique trade goods, too, so we could ship Reidquat Ale or Orusgeian Shrew Steaks instead of just Liquor/Wines or Food, and find worlds where people are crazy for those specific items. Not like Escape Velocity, where the "special" items had only one seller and only one buyer, but one where you could sell Reidquat Ale anywhere you liked, for more or less profit based on local tastes. More merchant-adventuring, in short!

One of the OXP-dreams Dis.
Varying prices we already have, it's predicting where goods will sell well thats the problem.
There is a thread discussing this stuff someplace, this was when everything was still plist.
With the more flexible scripting of JS, some of these ideas could eventually come to fruition.

Don't worry some people wil eventually work on this idea.

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star-coronas could be scooped too, but star heat was a problem IIRC with huge or hut stars, as well as the gravity of some. So the safest were dwarfstars and gasgiants.

What I liked best were the panets, landing on them and missions on them. Unfortunately mining did not work properly in the official versions. (only later did JJ IIRC fix this mishap)

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

star-coronas could be scooped too, but star heat was a problem IIRC with huge or hut stars, as well as the gravity of some. So the safest were dwarfstars and gasgiants.

And how does one tell the difference? I know that different stars have different corona colours, but I don't know the significance of the colours in relation to the star's heat, size or energy output.

Captain Hesperus

the info was in the starmap. spectrum-type, size, surface temp.
BTW gravity also sucked when too close to gasgiants. (especially when flying a brick through space.) On more than one occasion I managed to get myself to the PONR, circling ever closer to crushing depths.

Also I think to scoop from gas giants you only needed atmospheric shielding, but to do the same from stars you needed a shield generator as well. I remember it being quite difficult though and so I don't think I did much scooping - plus I often used military drives which needed different fuel.

For the relationship between star temperatures, colours, sizes, etc, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram summarises things nicely:



And yes, all those ternary/quarternary etc systems in Frontier were quite a pain. You never knew how close you'd be to a station when you arrived, and you'd often find yourself having to cover a huge distance in a very short space of time.

Ah yes now I remember.

The main reasons for not exploring far beyond the core systems was being slingshot by large objects when trying to scoop and those nice small military drives requiring special fuel. And the drive failures.

I still miss a lot of features from frontier, but I'm not yet ready to pay for it a third time - not even with the nice looking OpenGL support. A version with easy modding and a dogfight mode for combat; that I would probably pay for.

I did quite a lot of scooping when I tried exploring...did get to far away places, but never found any aliens or new settlements.
Also when mining in uninhabited systems.
Mil fuel was a major hassle, but neccesary for contracts with tight deadlines.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

I did quite a lot of scooping when I tried exploring...did get to far away places, but never found any aliens or new settlements.

No. It's a bit of a shame that they did not hand code a few far away settlements (as far as I know) or alien encounters. But that's probably why they managed to fit it on a single DD disk.

I spent quite a ,long time looking for unexplored systems, as exploration sounded like a fun proffession to me. (although not supported in any way by the game).
Thus I noticed some clusters of explored systems that did have settlements, created by algorithm probably, some even had several stations.
Unfortunately there was no way of getting there, save by a freak long-range forced hyperdrive failure.

Indeed. I Almost wish for a more Vendetta Online style thing, where Each system is not nearly as empty, and there are little sub sections to each one, holding *usually* its own asteroid field, and in this games case, Hive Robots for the killing. Even though the game is multiplayer, you rarely see other people, but still the game does not feel lonely.

Also on that subject, does, or will Oolite ever have a IRC Chat channel.
/methinks if it does, somehow incorporate that in game... Can talk to peeps while trading!

Of course I also know that half of this is a pipe dream, so dont flame me too much