Oolite Bulletins

OTOH anybody who is looking for one of those things will probably still find Oolite to be very enjoyable so we shouldn't frighten them off.

So there probably is a need for something to say 'it's not a shoot them up but it's still fun and you can shoot lots of stuff' etc

Yeah, precisely my thoughts. In terms of the Instruction Manual, from my experience (and looking at the posts of other new folks) it has the feel of being written by an expert for an expert...so I think some basic stuff is missing which would help the new guy out, but there is some really helpful data in there anyway that would be a crime to remove.

So augmenting and refining is the order of the day, clearly.

As for Twitchers, have you *ever* flown a Benulobiweed Inc. ship?

The pleasure has yet to be mine. However, I have traded in my well-heeled Josher for a Cobbie with a view to arming it to the teeth and trawling the Anarchies to make some tidy profit to buy the SuperCobra. Did the trade, flew to the Anarchy, found some pirates and immediately realised I'd traded the ship, but forgotten to put the military lasers, shield enhancements, WFI, and the rest back on.

Fortunately I had enough fuel to jump back to safety before too much of my shiny new ship was blown away...a valuable learning experience (read: Muppetry of the First Class)

Commander McLane wrote:

It is not a graphically pumped-up first person shooter, it is not a round-based space-sim, it is not a real-time space-sim, it is not a proper flight simulator, it is not a couple of other things. So anybody who is looking for one of those should indeed look somewhere else.

It is the warm, snuggly feeling you got back in the eighties, when you saw that most important "Right On, Commander" and checked your F5 screen to see your Rating was ELITE......

Captain Hesperus

As I said before: I think we all are open to suggestions (and even more to volunteers! ), as far as amending or re-writing the instruction manual is concerned. Or all the other documentation, for that matter. I am sure you are aware of the FAQ-page in the Wiki as well. And of course there is the ReadMe that comes in the game distribution, and last but not least Ian Bell's Flight Training Manual, linked to from the Wiki (kind of a historic document).

I'm not sure what you are missing in these informations and manuals, so I wouldn't be able to revise them to your liking. All I can say that it's basically the same stuff that we already got in the 80's when we first played the game. And I was not feeling that it wasn't helpful, then. It was just the ordinary documentation that you would get with the game, in order to get started. And at the times you could be happy if you got any documentation at all!

@ Captain H

Absolutely - Oolite still gives that shiver up the spine of "what's out there?". Even X3 can't compare, even though it's technologically a better game. I can't claim to understand it, but I prefer to fire up Oolite (and pray it doesn't crash lol) that load up X3.

I remember one summer in the early 90s when I was playing lots of Civilisation on the Amiga and then I just got bored and fired up the 10 year old BBC B to play Elite for the rest of the summer holidays