Oolite Bulletins

With the new Explorers' Club available, I have been thinking of starting anew too.

For me the most desirable OXP's are not to do with eye-candy. Nor with allowing me to gather billions of credits.

For me the main purpose of the game (as with the original Elite) was to become just that, i.e. Elite. And to become that you need 'only' 6400 kills. And as befitting the name of the original game, that is a tall order. There's quite ( ) a bit of combat going to be involved.

And without using silly OXP's like killit it will be a long and drawn out slog. So I am going to need most of all little things happening along the way. Little improvements to give a change from the daily routine of flying from A to B, dropping off cargo, getting some more, all the while keeping a lookout for food for my lasers.

Although GN and RH can skewer the economics of the game, they also provide you with an ability to do something else for a change, like beating a whole invading Thargoid fleet 'almost' on your own , taking on enemy beattleships in your little trader/freighter/fighter. And stand a decent chance of surviving. (That is if your tactics are any good). If not ... well, you get another chance if you screw up so you can try something else.

So for me those two OXP's are a definite certainty. I am not going to install them just yet, mind you. I tend to wait until I have assembled a decent ship first.

Secondly a different ship gives you a different type of game. For me Cobbies are excellent to begin with, even though you need to make sure you have a clean pair of underpants for every one of the first ten to twenty jumps. Just because this is the baddies chance of stopping you before you get strong enough to stop them. And they will go for it. So thrills abound in the beginning of the game, with a few lucky escapes and a few Hooorrrraaaaaaaaaaaaah's!

From personal experience, be careful though. The mizzes ('Ur that shall be obeyed at all times) will not understand it when you shout at the screen at the top of your voice: "Eat this, you blue furry GIT! Who's the sucker now, ehhhh?!"

I agree that you can 'weasel' out of this in the beginning by flying to the sun first before heading to the station so you will miss most of the baddies along the way. But that is not my style.

But before long, the Cobbie will show it's main weakness, a not too big cargohold meaning that the credits you can gather per run will be limited. So I will get some OXP's that allow me an almost natural progression, with an STE to come after the Cobbie for the additional cargo, then wait until I have enough credits to get me a Python and then we are really making a few bucks. There is nothing so nice as to take en almost empty Python out to a planet, fight a few baddies along the way and scoop up their spilt goodies and sell them for a decent buck. For that, and to stay 'true' to the original game, I use the Illegal goods OXP. Plus it comes up with a few sub-missions along the way so another distraction.

Of course, the Python has a drawback too. The first is its speed which means you will be eating the dust of nearly every other vessel en route to the station. By the time that you are really getting upset about being the snail, the big hold should allow you to convert to a Python Special ET (another OXP), with still 100 ton cargo but pretty decent speed.

I'm not doing the starting mission OXP's anymore. Done that, got the teeshirt, time to move on. But for a new commander they are a perfect step into what sets this game apart from it's predecessor ELITE. And that is the OXP. Because of these extensions, you can build the game just as YOU like it.

There are oodles of OXP's that can help you, like the IFF police scanner to see who is bad before they start taking pot-shots at you. Or the extra fuel-tanks, so you can refill your tanks with 3 LY of fuel, VERY handy when you have overused your injectors, and so on, and so on. The other players have given a list of some of them already but I would suggest to go to the wiki and check out the OXP's that are listed there. It is well laid out so you can pick things up quite quickly. It is important that YOU can work out which OXP is going to help you with the way you want to play the game, which OXP's won't really help and which are going to make life more difficult for you.

If you don't particularly want to be a trader, then go for a fighter ship, there are plenty about. Or go for an ultimate trader. of course the nice thing is that if you install an OXP, use it and find out you don't like it, you can very quickly get rid of it again.

So I can't really say you need to get this OXP and this OXP but not to bother with the other ones. That all depends on you and your style of play.

But because of all the hard work done by the OXP-guru's (Stand up and take a bow, guys, you DESERVE it.) it is quite easy to create a game that you are happy to play and will keep on playing. And keep on playing. And keep on playing.

While most people here advise new commanders to only install eye-candy at first, I would advise these 3 (IMHO) essential OXPs which add life away from the main spacelane:

- Deep Space Pirates by Eric Walch
- Total Patrol by Cmdr. McLane
- Sun skimmers by Dr. Nil

The original Elite did not have a concept of spacelanes, and the above OXPs remedy that without tossing the spacelane concept completely - Total Patrol actually adds two more spacelanes per systems (between planet & sun and between sun & witchpoint).

It makes the game slightly more difficult, but I think it is not beyond the capacities of a green commander because these 3 OXPs do balance each other beautifully.

Gimbal Locke wrote:

Total Patrol actually adds two more spacelanes per systems (between planet & sun and between sun & witchpoint).

To be fair, it doesn't. Both exist in vanilla Oolite, without any OXPs (probably even in strict mode, although I'm not sure about that (breaks down to the question whether route2sunskimAI is assigned to NPCs in strict mode or not)), and are populated with traders, pirates, rock hermits, and the occasional police ship. All Total Patrol does is to add some more police, and make it switch between the space lanes.

Ahoy Captains!

After reading through all of these suggestions and recommendations, I installed most of the oxps listed here. One problem I'm having is that I can't seem to get the Ore Processor to work with Griff's ships. When I have Griff's installed, and I break up an asteroid, when I scoop the splinters all I ever get are "minerals" and no processing sounds or anything. If I remove Griff's, the processor seems to work properly with the sound effects and energy drain, plus I get the various cargos. I've done quite a lot of searches to see if anyone else has had this problem but all I found was a very old post that referenced this and a couple others indicating that it had been fixed. I'm using Griff's all in one 'replacement' package but I've also d/led all the individual ships. I figured I'd just try installing them individually except his asteroids to see if that would work. Any other suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated and I apologize in advance if I've posted this in the wrong area.

Thanks!
CC

I think this might be to do with the splinters in the griff_replacement oxp having the role "griff_splinter" whilst the standard Oolite splinters have the role "splinter", and the Ore processor script probably just checks for the scooped object having the role splinter before doing it's thing - this is just guesswork though!

A fix might be to change line 1737 in shipdata.plist in the Griff_Shipset_Replace_v1.32.oxp to add splinter as a secondary role to the griff splinters objects, eg so the line looks like this i think if you just change the primary role to splinter you'll get a mix of griff splinters and standard splinters in game - which isn't too bad and might make for a nice bit of variety

Or alternatively, change the line to
Which will give it the splinter role (so scripts checking if it has that role will return true), but with a zero chance of any populator picking it when looking to spawn a "splinter".[/color]

Thanks guys. I tried both of these but neither seemed to work. I'll admit I have no programming skills whatsoever but I assumed the changes could be done with a basic editor. Since I am on a windows pc and everything looked garbled when I tried to open the file with Notepad, I d/led a windows .plist editor called VIM that showed everything in proper format and then just basically edited the text and saved the file with the changes you posted. I also double checked the readme files and it appears I have the latest versions of everything available. The Ore Processor readme even states that code was added so it would work with Griff's asteroids.

I think I'm still going to go ahead and try installing just the individual ships without the asteroids and see how that goes.

Thanks!
CC

After editing the plist, did you re-start Oolite with the shift key held down (until the spinning Cobra appears), CC? This is necessary after any edits.

Oh... welcome aboard!

El Viejo wrote:

After editing the plist, did you re-start Oolite with the shift key held down (until the spinning Cobra appears), CC? This is necessary after any edits.

Oh... welcome aboard!

Hi El Viejo!

Thank you for the welcome and yes, I held down the shift key. I have gone back and installed each of griff's individually except for the asteroids and the processor works as it should now. The only thing I don't get is the really nice textured cobra to fly around in but the other in game ships look awesome. At least now I can farm asteroids.

Cheers!
CC

CC Waterback wrote:

The only thing I don't get is the really nice textured cobra to fly around in

Download Griff's standalone multi-decal player Cobra, then set that as your player-ship in the save-file (which is a simple edit).

CC Waterback wrote:

I also double checked the readme files and it appears I have the latest versions of everything available. The Ore Processor readme even states that code was added so it would work with Griff's asteroids.

Unfortunately Griff has updated his asteroids with his own splinter design since then and broken it again. I don't see the reason the Griff splinters have a custom role, anyway.

My 2p.
When I got addicted to the original I had plenty of time to get to Elite. You HAD to play it the way the designers had intended, and it was no less addiictive for it.

When I came across Oolite I was overjoyed because although I'd gone through other games (I particularly remember the original of Tomb Raider on my Archimedes) I'd never stopped playing Elite on my RiscPC (that and an accounts program I used were the only programs on the machine). I could see the potential of Oolite immediately. However, I started (and have not yet finished) playing to become Elite as per the original and then I'm going to treat the oxp's as the logical progression from the original 'end of game' and so I'm saving all of the brilliant oxp's for later (particularly Explorer), the only ones I allow are those that enhance the graphics (as I feel these help the immersion - particularly when projected onto a full size projection screen ). I would suggest that that this is the best approach for noobs as what made the game last this long in the first place was that addictive game play. Sadly I don't get much time to clock up kills and all too often I'm distracted by some of the inner goings on, as I intend to have a go at ship building and oxp programming at some point, so want to know how it all works)