Oolite Bulletins

It's ALIVE!

Took me some testing to get the throttle to do something useful, but I think I can live with it!

arquebus wrote: ↑Sat Dec 25, 2021 11:25 pm

It's ALIVE!

Took me some testing to get the throttle to do something useful, but I think I can live with it!

Well done.

If you can tell us exactly what you did with your trouser leg, I can post the details on our wiki.

First up I had to (re)-install the Logitech X56 software from here:

https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/artic ... H-O-T-A-S-

Once that's installed you can go into the X56 "HUD" program and go to Programming. From there, select the Throttle.

You then need to create a new profile and start adding your controls to it. The Logitech manual is a little obtuse on the subject but it gets the job done. In order for Oolite to effectively recognize the throttle axis you need to set it to Band mode, which lets you assign W to the lower third of the band, S to the upper third (yes, these are reversed from expectation) and nothing to the central band.

After that the rest of the controls are pretty easy to set up.

Then you need to save and activate the profile - there's a button on the same programming screen, or you use the background program in the carat ( ^ ) menu on the Taskbar. If you're using the background program, right click on the program icon and select your saved profile.

Once activated, the software will override your default settings and Oolite will accept those commands instead of the throttle's "real" inputs. You can then "clear" the profile when you want to play a different game.

Just watching last night's film (Second Series, Episode 2).


Ship Identifier
As you realised, it uses up your viewscreen to show you the information. But. You can buy an MFD to show the data instead (1,250₢ & TL12+).


Your getting nobbled/baked.
You did not see it, but it was the Flying Dutchman oxp's curse!

The give-away was the phrase Away! Away! Flee from the wraths to come! which popped up on your HUD at 19:55 minutes into your film, from the Cobra Mk.1 behind you on the left...


Mass-locking at Leesti
22:25 minutes in: You were too close to the planet. If you had looked at your altitude meter, you were only 35km from the planet surface. You did the same at Riedquat, and got mass-locked there too!


Spare dosh
You never bought luxuries (you are back in Stranger's World - luxuries are no longer sold in 1TC containers as they are in the Vanilla game) - or your Telescope...


Visas: the anarchy of Riedquat
Diplomancy.oxp: You only need visas for Corporates, Dictatorships & Communists. Not for anarchies. You were fined for other reasons on your first trip to Riedquat (probably for illegal possession of that thing you call your sense of humour ).

The problem with anarchies is that they have no embassies. So you cannot buy a visa in Riedquat to go to corporate Leesti. And if two systems are at war, you cannot buy a visa in one warring system to visit the other warring system (this is shown in the System History entry under the Diplomacy sub-heading on your F4 ship-station interfaces page while docked).

Saw you were having some difficulties targeting things. Normally you can only target an object if it is within 25km away. Telescope OXZ changes this an allows you to target Stations and Planets however far away they are. However, telescope will lock onto the nearest station / planet, so you can find you are trying to target a nearby object but Telescope is automatically locking on to the nearest Planet or Station. You can adjust the sensitivity of the auto-lock feature in the Telescope Options on the F4 Screen. By default it's set to the maximum sensitivity of 180, which I personally find too high as it is auto-locking rather than targeting the thing I want to target. I'm playing with it set at 90, which means to rarely misses the target I'm trying to lock but you have to be pointing more in the direction of a planet or station to auto-lock it. As you can locate planets and stations with the ASC, I tend to keep the sensitivity of the auto-lock quite low. If you play around with the setting it should solve it.

The problem I keep having is that the "target next object in list" option in Telescope seems to arbitrarily decide not to do its job sometimes. That's really the main issue for me. I can see what object is bracketed in the Telescope MFD and if I hit the key to move to the next object, either nothing happens or it jumps to a completely different object that's not the next one in the list.

Quite enjoyable gameplay

Redspear wrote: ↑Thu Dec 23, 2021 8:01 pm

arquebus wrote: ↑Thu Dec 23, 2021 4:22 am

So I'll posit my own question. And I realize that it's an "unfair" question that deliberately ignores both the original intent of the game and the long history of its development to this point.

If Oolite were dropped into Early Access today, on Steam, in its current form, what would be the top 5 complaints by new players who have never experienced this game or its predecessors?

Here's my list:

1) Not enough sound.
2) The interfaces are clunky.
3) The trading system requires pen-and-paper to use effectively.
4) The suns are too close/too big.
5) If it's going to take this much time to get from A to B, there needs to be a speed toggle. <- this only matters until you get injectors, but imagine being a new player without them, and having to go get them.

Unfair maybe but still relevant...

1 & 2 used to be a matter of installing BGS.oxp but as it became more elaborsate, there emerged both alternatives and new design issues.

It's kinda like decorating a room, only to have to keep changing what you do with the room (varied player preference and customisation).
Customisation and neat and tidy don't easily sit together unfortunately. Oolite is a car with most of the fittings and panneling removed in order for it to be easier to tinker with.

Old Murgh wrote: ↑Thu Dec 23, 2021 7:16 pm

But he wanted the starting blank canvas to be a time capsule of something special from the mid80s. Maybe a museum experience to young people at the outset, but with so many possibilities to play-doh shape the antiquities.

That's the charm, right there...

As for the other #

3) It's got issues for sure but food/liquor/furs (depending on finances) or alloys/machinery/computers (same reason) just requires a starting hint I think.
4) One of the reasons I started the rescaling experiment. Long, long thread but a successful (or at the very least functional) conclusion.
5) The only oxps I have in my sig are to address this issue. The other ones I made to help are power to engines and traffic redistributer.The very fact I have made 4 different oxps to essentially address the same issue (and can all be used alongside each other) perhaps highlights the extent to which I agree with you on this one.

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Thu Dec 23, 2021 7:34 pm

I would suggest these:

And this is where folks start to want different things...

I didn't see any bad suggestions in there (I even wrote one of them) but it's hard to recommend any of them as suitable for everyone.

Even randomshipnames (sorry Cody), great as it is, isn't for everyone.

BUT.

But he wanted the starting blank canvas to be a time capsule of something special from the mid80s. Maybe a museum experience to young people at the outset, but with so many possibilities to play-doh shape the antiquities.

That's the charm, right there...

Arqubus is saying that this charm does not exist for new players who never encountered Elite. They compare Oolite with E:D and all the other modern games, and Oolite loses out, despite being free. The vanilla game is not a modern game and does not compare.

...but it can be modded to become a modern game. Yes, BUT!

Oolite has 1100 oxp's. How much time will it take a starting player to work out which of 1100 oxp's they want, and which they don't? Back in the days that it was 200 simple oxp's, fair enough, people could look at Oosat and make relatively simple choices. But we now have 1,100. 1,100!

Let's just consider the 700 on the Expansions Manager. Some of them are incredibly complex and impact on very many different areas of the game. Think of Hard Way. Ship Configuration. Ship Version. Equipment by Ship Class. Smugglers. SW Economics. Anarchies. How much time is it going to take to work out what is what? What are we expecting of new players - and is it reasonable?

I feel that it would be much better to have a suite of oxp's preloaded which do the Arquebus thing and "modernise" the game. The structure of Oolite means that the new players can always fiddle as they get to know their way around, but that there is a modern variant for them to try. I think that Arquebus's critique is an important one.

What about adding another option on the initial game menu: Modern modded?

We could then start off with
Normal Start (modern modified version)
Easy Start (modern modified version)
Normal Start (your own modified version)
Normal Start (original version, unmodifiable)
Tutorial (original version, unmodifiable)

That way, the incoming new players have a couple of choices which show them Oolite in all its modern glory. Where is the harm in that?

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 11:11 am

...but it can be modded to become a modern game.

A "modern" game? Like Solar Sails: Space Pirates? Link to Steam.

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 11:11 am

Arqubus is saying that this charm does not exist for new players who never encountered Elite. They compare Oolite with E:D and all the other modern games, and Oolite loses out, despite being free. The vanilla game is not a modern game and does not compare.

I would probably nuance my argument here, as I've had some time to think about it, because there is a valid critique to be made that "Oolite is supposed to be what it is, the audience knows that."

I'd argue that there are two types of players of Oolite (or of any retro or retro-adjacent game, really):

1) The ones who remember the original, want the original experience, want the feel of the original experience and enjoy living in an environment that gives them the feeling they had when they were kids/younger.

2) Everyone else.

And I put #2 that way quite deliberately. The number of people in the #1 bucket is tiny. Not just for Oolite - for any game of any size that is meant as a callback to an earlier/original game. *Everyone else* is literally *everyone else* who might want to play a game of this sort. And they do not have that experience of nostalgia, they do not feel the "charm" of the style of the interface, and so on.

If Oolite exists to serve the interests and needs of #1, great! Let's leave it as it is. We've got our audience, we have our player base, that's what we're after and we've got it solid.

But here's my thing: Oolite is *too good* of a game to limit ourselves to #1. But #2 is just *not* going to tolerate some of the base game quirks. If we have any interest in expanding the player base outside the #1 bucket (and perhaps a few #2 bucket people who are just really, really tenacious), then we need to think seriously about how the game presents itself to new NEW new new players, not just new-but-used-to-play-it-as-a-kid players.

I do like the idea of maybe having two installers. One is vanilla, one is "vanilla plus" - where there's a set of community-selected OXPs already installed that gives the truly new player a better jumping off point. It could be a bare bones list. BGS, maybe Xenon UI for the station backdrops, an OXP that updates the market screen info, and... that could be it. Just enough to brush off some of the dust that's going to cause a little bit of a choke to truly new players. It doesn't need to be a radical re-imagining of the game. It just needs to be *barely* enough UI support to clear the runway.

arquebus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 6:36 pm

I do like the idea of maybe having two installers. One is vanilla, one is "vanilla plus" - where there's a set of community-selected OXPs already installed that gives the truly new player a better jumping off point. It could be a bare bones list. BGS, maybe Xenon UI for the station backdrops, an OXP that updates the market screen info, and... that could be it. Just enough to brush off some of the dust that's going to cause a little bit of a choke to truly new players. It doesn't need to be a radical re-imagining of the game. It just needs to be *barely* enough UI support to clear the runway.

Maybe we do not have to label it "two installers". Both on Mac and Linux there is the option of having a 'system wide installation' vs a 'user's local installation'. In no means it allows you to have different AddOns folders with different sets of OXPs. Thus I'd suggest that there is one installer only, and via the Expansion Manager one can choose which addons to have installed.

But in future we might want to think of starting different games - for each of them you could configure which OXPs are active. Whether the active OXPs can be changed at game runtime can then be discussed. Yes, it would take changes in the core game code. But hey, what am I repairing the CI/CD pipeline for? Software should be allowed to follow a lifecycle. It is not carved in stone - that's why it is called Software.

hiran wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 8:10 pm

But in future we might want to think of starting different games - for each of them you could configure which OXPs are active. Whether the active OXPs can be changed at game runtime can then be discussed. Yes, it would take changes in the core game code. But hey, what am I repairing the CI/CD pipeline for? Software should be allowed to follow a lifecycle. It is not carved in stone - that's why it is called Software.

Yes it would be great to be able to have OXP "sets" that you can activate/deactivate based on which save you're running. The save would have to hold the OXP information. But to do that properly you'd also have to be able to load a save without entering the save (stay in the main screen) so that you can modify the OXP set before actually going into the game.

arquebus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 8:52 pm

hiran wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 8:10 pm

But in future we might want to think of starting different games - for each of them you could configure which OXPs are active. Whether the active OXPs can be changed at game runtime can then be discussed. Yes, it would take changes in the core game code. But hey, what am I repairing the CI/CD pipeline for? Software should be allowed to follow a lifecycle. It is not carved in stone - that's why it is called Software.

Yes it would be great to be able to have OXP "sets" that you can activate/deactivate based on which save you're running. The save would have to hold the OXP information. But to do that properly you'd also have to be able to load a save without entering the save (stay in the main screen) so that you can modify the OXP set before actually going into the game.

Or, when loading a savegame that requires OXPs not yet installed the Expansion Manager should popup and offer the installation of the missing bits.
This situation may occur if you receive a savegame from someone else or reinstall your machine and want to load a savegame you still have from an earlier setup.

I would challenge the feature to edit the OXP set when loading a game. If you can only do that at game creation time it would lock you into a fixed set of OXPs which would then lead to a more consistent gameplay. This may even be a feature configurable for the advanced plist-modifying user...

I'm not against adding some oxps in at the start and there is a very early precedent for that.

From here...

aegidian wrote:

Now, I'm a traditionalist, and I would prefer to keep some way of playing old-school Elite within Oolite's core features. That said, old-school Elite varied from implementation to implementation (contrast Atari ST Elite with Commodore 64 Elite and Electron Elite and you'll find a wealth of differences) so Oolite having different features doesn't exempt it from being old-school particularly.

I also have to add the mea culpa that I added features to Oolite's main code, that, if I were implementing them for Oolite now, I would add as an OXP (ECM hardened missiles and fuel injectors, for example) so that the base code remained closer to 'core Elite' anyway. But I was lazy and didn't, sorry.


So... and it kills a little bit of me to say it... forget strict mode, and please forget trying to maintain a 'strict mode OXP'.

Strict mode should be replaced with an All-OXPs-Off option, perhaps maintained within the saved game as 'strict'.

Then there's Griff's shipset of course, the aforementioned contracts, shipyard changes, wormholes, planet textures etc. none of which were inherited from elite.

Who doesn't want improvements?
The more pertinent question I would suggest is which improvements?

arquebus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 6:36 pm

community-selected OXPs

That's proved rather tricky in the past, likely because...

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 11:11 am

Oolite has 1100 oxp's. How much time will it take a starting player to work out which of 1100 oxp's they want, and which they don't? Back in the days that it was 200 simple oxp's, fair enough, people could look at Oosat and make relatively simple choices. But we now have 1,100. 1,100!

I would strongly suggest that the two are not unrelated.


Here's my suggestion: rather than asking the question, 'what would be cool/helpful?', try the much more focused, 'what is missing?' and then add/suggest the minimum to address each issue.

This is why I thought this post by arquebus was particularly pertinent and I responded.

For example:

Problem - lack of sound
Solution - add an oxp that adds only sound effects and not a UI overhaul

Problem - clunky interfaces
Solution - issue needs clarifying to my mind, easier to make this worse than better IMHO. For example there is already a near bewildering list of equipment by default at high tech stations

Problem - pen & paper trading
Solution - there was an oxp that addressed this in the form of profit/loss from each potential sale but I can't remeber which one right now.

Problem - suns too small/close
Solution - change the default sun_distance_multiplier and don't rescale (I love my rescaling but I'm still suggesting minimum to fix and if the sun's furtherr away then it's less obvious that it's so small - from a snapshot, no, but from travelling around, yes)

Problem - agonising travel times
Solution - (I'll pick one of mine because I know them best but it needn't be) 'power to engines' oxp, not because it's the best but because it is the least intrusive upon the standard game. If you don't have weapons off-line then it does absolutely nothing.

That's four out of five problems addressed with only three oxps (four if you fix sun distance by oxp).

But once we start with...

The main game could come with several dozen oxp's preloaded.
I would suggest these:

Basic information for new players
Ship's Library (with ships manual)
XenonUI (handy guide to the buttons on your astrogation console)
Technical Reference Library identifies ships when you target them (just ships) - might need tweaking
GalCop Galactic Registry - guide to the galaxy you are in
Market Observer - necessary statistics for analysing the F8 markets page (with Market Ads at the bottom - keep these, good for lore)
Vimana HUD (flashes warnings for High Temperature, Low Altitude, Low Energy & Low Shields)
+Galactic Almanac when OXZ'ded

Background Effects
BGS
Communications Pack A
Death Comms
Randomshipnames OXP
Famous Planets

Ambience
Solar Flares (improve it first?)
System Features: Rings (improve it first?)
System Features: Sunspots
One of the sun distancing oxp's from here (not Strangers World - keep the SW suite for more experienced players).

Dockables
Lave Academy: training courses in combat, docking & ship-handling!
Superhub: adds variety - and an easy dock
Torus station: adds variety
Z-GrOovY Small System Stations: adds variety (and needs Griff Station Bundle)
Traffic Lights OXP helps docking - and puts a time-limit on the wait
These add specific stations to specific types of systems (good variety), help docking more and provide training at Lave - and a reason to go back there!

Basic Improvements
Equipment 'Sell Item' Color: helps make sense of long lists of F3 shipyard outfitting options
LogEvents: vital when needing help
Oolite v1.88 Base Shipset Normal and Specular/Gloss Maps
Commies
Dictators OXP
Feudal States
Anarchies
Illegal Goods Tweak

Extra Equipment
Email System: record of purchases, kills, etc.
Fast Target Selector OXP: helps target your missiles
Fuel Tank: an emergency fuel tank in case of need (many others also available)
Police IFF Scanner Upgrade: advance warning about (some) pirates
Repair Bots: fixes broken equipment in flight
SniperLock: for targeting lasers - vital if your aim is as lousy as mine!
Welcome Mat: warning if the system is currently pirate or Thargoid infested!

Also just for the Easy Start
Paddling Pool - and we can then move the Easy Start back to Lave - and get to use the Lave Academy...

I should point out that Redspear has been beavering away creating OXP's specifically addressing beginners issues. There should be a bunch of those included with the Easy Start.

...then I really think we're fixing stuf that ain't broken.

Will most players think that some of that stuff is cool? I would hope so.
Will some players think that most of that stuff is cool? I would think so.
Will all players apprecioate all of that being included in their game? I would be amazed if that were the case.

Part of the character of oolite is that you're alone in a cut-throat universe. Nothing wrong with a few pointers or early breaks but 'spoon-feeding' not only reduces the difficulty, it also reduces that atmosphere.

If there are more problems/complaints than the 5 that arquebus listed then lets address them direcly and (I would suggest) minimalistically, not just think 'what would be cool': there's plenty of time to explore that later and according to one's personal tastes.


And if it's not already obvious: I have no authority whatsoever on these matters.