Oolite Bulletins

Ok, 1 person close to my age - 13 in 17 days...
Thanks, admin, for adding "over sixty" - I put it in but it must not have gone in right.

Even after 25 years, Elite has a diehard fanbase, and has seen many remakes, elite-alikes and spinoffs, Oolite included as an enhanced remake. That's player dedication most games never achieve. Elite is a gold level classic, and I suspect - at the least hope - that Oolite lives just as long if not longer.

I turned 43 just last December, and I'll still play in my twilight years.
They'll have to pry my X52 out of my cold dead fingers, and that gold wing badge on my jacket means they'll have a hard time doing so!

I started playing when it first came out in 1983 and was 13. I'm still playing now. I fully intend to keep playing until I pop my clogs. I'm 38 now.

Not exactly an even distribution of ages is it though?!

My potted history of Elite/Oolite:

Read the book > Played the Game > Rediscovered the Game > Wrote the book > ?

Cheers,

Drew.

Next poll, coming soon to a board near you:
Gender:
Male:
Female:
N/A: (thargoid...?)

drew wrote:

Not exactly an even distribution of ages is it though?!

I've been thinking about that point, too. Maybe at that time we were the typical people with enough time and interest into the computers which were running it? Then, maybe, we were so young (the brain changes a lot during that age!) that it had the most impact on us

Anyway, that game was probably the biggest influence towards the idea of learning how to write programs myself...and even though I got burnout later on doing that job, I do want to continue coding. It's probably one of the best jobs someone with ADHS could do, anyway. The concentration amount required is high, but ADHS comes with hyperfocus, and writing code often brought me into that state.

Screet

I can't see it ageing out. Elite is still going strong in the shape of Oolite, which suggests that as long as the game keeps pace with technology it will survive. Frontier and FFE were interesting departures but, at heart, they were still Elite (and there are still people playing those).

So long as there are people interested in an open-ended game, it'll keep going. So long as there are inventive OXP writers around, it'll attract others. Not everyone enjoys merely shooting wave after wave of monsters.

The "lump" in the middle of the poll (30-40) is very unsurprising if you think about it. What is more telling is that there is one person who voted who is over 60 and another who is less than 13 - and that in a survey with only 35 responses. It's the same game, but just look at the age-range appeal.

More power to Ooliters' elbows, I say.

Mike

<13 - that's me for another few days..

And there are at least three people over 60 regularly on the boards. The other two just stumbled across this poll yet. (Or—being our seniors—remembered all the other polls where they had already answered the question. )

I am 30 but as 30 appears in 2 selection I chose the "20-30" option.

I feel so much younger now!!!

AHHH the BBC micro computer...

I feel old again...

Carrotcat II wrote:

I am 30 but as 30 appears in 2 selection I chose the "20-30" option.

I feel so much younger now!!!

Ah, sweet youth...

Personally—being in a similar situation 10 years ahead of you—I voted for the '40-50' option, because with age comes wisdom, and that tells me that the tendency of the ageing process is clear...

Carrotcat II wrote:

I am 30 but as 30 appears in 2 selection I chose the "20-30" option.

You're not reading it right. You should only have problems responding if it has been _exactly_ 30 years, 0 days, 0 hours and 0 minutes since your birth (only then you'd fit into both categories). However, if your birthday was yesterday, you clearly belong to the 30-40 category (since you are MORE than 30 years old, even if by mere hours).

A nice topic--

I can't see aging it out. To be honestly other commercial producers in the past two decades always took elements out of Elite. Even a modern game like GTA 4 is based on the idea of open ended play and player freedom. Although it's no space game but if you compare the open structure of the game they are alike. Also in Oolite you can rob (attack a convoy) assassinate oponents (Random hits for example) explore etc. So many modern games open ended are in essence a sort of Elite.

We've seen many companies that tried to make a better Oolite that at first glance looked like the next big Elite but in the end just failed.

-Freelancer was nice but was not too open ended
-X -series. Open ended but very complex and just not as fun
etc.etc. I have X3 Terran conflict but did not play it very often.

Oolite is a game you keep playing. For example 2 weeks ago I bought GTA4 and played it four 3 days (I had a holiday) but after the long GTA sessions it was nice to play Oolite.

Oolite is just gameplay with a capital 'G'

Hehe, I am 28 and obviously didn't actually play Elite when it came out (...) but that was mainly due to me being born in Eastern Germany - nice thread about the prehistoric computers from that region of the world btw, I actually had one of those, a KC85

Anyway here's a probably quite amusing story of why I like Oolite now - or maybe not, then please just skip this So I was of course around on my very own Amiga when Frontier came out. However, I badly wanted to but did not really like it and it was not until last week (!!!) that I found out why I like space sims so much but can't get into Frontier or First Encounters (with that lovely planetfall and real surfaces...). It was the Newtonian flight model. I tried several remakes of FFE over the years but never even touched Elite (why? because it had no planetary landing at all). And then I discovered that one of the fellow Elite fans on this board created a Planetfall oxp. So I downloaded Oolite just to see this and thought - "hey, wait a second - flying a ship in Elite is actually fun??" And voilá, I didn't know that the original Elite wasn't Newtonian at all. From that moment I was hooked