Oolite Bulletins

In retrospect we should have shared the fact that we were struggling with this aspect with the community...

Cobblers! They waited for a 'good day to bury bad news' - sound familiar?

It is expected game v. received game

That makes a lot more sense to me now, thanks for pointing it out. As a general rule I'd agree with most of what has been said above, and in particular the off-line-mode-gate. For now I'm happy with what I have (but to me the £150 I paid for the lifetime beta pass was money well spent as I get very little time to play but enjoy it immensely when I do. My mates who play golf pay that for one club, if it's on 'special offer').

The Oolite version may not be as 'commercially' polished as Elite: Dang (not meant as an offence BTW as this area has improved immeasurably since my first download) but it still offers me the opportunity to 'keep my hand in' programming when I retire so I'm still keeping up to date with the releases and changes in the OXP type technologies, and will one day write the OXP that occurred to me when I first discovered them).

And this is still the friendliest board this side of Riedquat.

When the kickstarter of Elite Dangerous happened I backed it with the minimum amount to get access. Happy I did that now (instead of paying more). After waiting longer for the Mac version to appear I play it not very often. When I did it was fun but it just didn't has that 'addiction factor' for me. Oolite has. Also firing up Oolite and do a planet to planet run can be shoehorned in between other activities. Elite Dangerous not so.

In the end I always was more the fan of the Elite gameplay formula than the Elite Frontier formula. Although I have some fond fond memories of my Panther Clipper I obtained in the end with Elite Frontier.

Cody wrote:

I do sometimes wonder how intrasystem travel would've been had FD stuck to their original idea, rather than listening* to the DDF.

I would think considerably better for the basic trade/pirate/hunt ecosystem, but at the cost of being a lot worse for exploration (in the broadest sense, not just the activities it gives rank for).

It might not be possible to fit the two in the same game, though, if "a lot like Elite" is a design goal.

cim wrote:

... but at the cost of being a lot worse for exploration (in the broadest sense, not just the activities it gives rank for).

I'd be inclined to agree, but a chance remark, I think by Mike Evans (before he went silent), made me wonder. All water under the bridge now, of course.

A lot of passion has been devoted to this a lot of people wanted this to work. The question is has that free will been used wisely and harnessed to it's full potential?

"You had the flock, sir. They wanted to give themselves, heart and soul to you. All that was asked of you was make the sermon meet the passion of your congregation."

I will continue in my literary works to make oolite stand proud as it's own unique existence. We are not a stop gap between games, we are the game. A focused echo from the past. We live, we will endure.

<brushes cobwebs away> I'm told that you still can't name your ship in ED - is this so? Tragic!

Cody wrote:

I'm told that you still can't name your ship in ED - is this so? Tragic!

I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised ... yet another feature sacrificed to multiplayer issues, probably. It would just be an invitation to another form of griefing, unless every name was vetted by a staff skilled in multilingual profanity and racism.

Disembodied wrote:

every name was vetted

Or just offer a long list of selectable names aka randomshipnames, maybe with a register which prevent similar names, locking the selected name and free up only after a long inactivity time like domain names. If the original owner reappear when meantime the name is taken by another ship then forced to select a new name, if not then lock the name again.

I just hope this will not be another paid feature.

My main problem with ED at the moment is that I'm bored with exploring and I'm thousands of light years out. If I could buy a new commander for a few quid without having to pay for a whole new copy of the game I'd probably do that, but it doesn't look like that's an option.

Start again from scratch, Commodore? <grins> In self-imposed Ironman mode, perhaps?

@Norby: yeah, I wondered if they intend to monetise that feature!

Well, at least they solved another annoying issue: keeping track of your trip in between game sessions -- they put in the bookmark system
Who knows, they might be gathering the big ones -- ship naming, multiple pilots per account, <put your favorite one> -- for an anniversary release of some sorts...

Commander_X wrote:

Who knows, they might be gathering the big ones -- ship naming, multiple pilots per account, <put your favorite one> -- for an anniversary release of some sorts...

10th anniversary?

I see Frontier just scratched all the release dates for the current "season" http://web.archive.org/web/201606091551 ... s-dlc.html

At least the risk of late fulfilment is now nil ... seeing there are no target dates left to fulfil. Quite poor on players who pre-paid for the advertised schedule of expansions and are still expecting one to land this summer. Not to mention the chilling effect on new sales, given all that's being delivered today is the badly received planetary landings and RNGineers.

chrisjj wrote:

badly received planetary landings and RNGineers

Depends who you ask, I suspect. There's certainly a lot of unhappy people on the forums. Meanwhile, in-game, I've seen more people just randomly flying about than I have for a long time. Unless Frontier start releasing formal player numbers, it's all just guesswork anyway.

Personally, I think within the limitations Frontier set themselves with making it multiplayer at all - and those are huge and unavoidable limitations at the root of many of the current complaints - almost all [1] the expansions have all been moving in broadly the right direction. There's a lot of "I wouldn't have done it that way" and - especially on the bugs - also a lot of "I did it exactly like that". The main criticism I have is that they really need to hire a few more full-time writers to manage that side of it - the staff they have and player contributions isn't sufficient.

[1] PowerPlay was theoretically a good idea - the high level political stuff needs to be there for the sort of universe it is - but I can't find a redeeming feature for their design and implementation.

cim wrote:

There's certainly a lot of unhappy people on the forums.

That doesn't surprise me. I'd probably be one of them, but I've not been on the forum for eight months.