Oolite Bulletins

Catsy wrote:

Count me among those who love and cherish the non-Newtonian flight model of Elite and Oolite, but who would like to have a "killswitch" of sorts that would switch off the inertial dampeners and shut off the engines, causing my ship to drift in the direction of travel at my current rate of speed. Reapplying any thrust would immediately reactivate the dampeners, a sort of safety mechanism.

yes, who wouldn't love to kill the engnes and go dark?

Me!Me!I would!I would....and while were on the subject of that....that could be a very easy implementation.....just create an upgrade that you can buy at a fairly high level station that when activated while cause your ship to appear as though it is just junk and when deactivated you would come back online...of course once activated it should have some effect,like it slowly drains your energy banks until they zero out and it deactivates....this also could be useful for evading pirates too! say your out gunned by the pirates and ur out of fuel for the injectors, just turn on the machine and the pirates will think they killed you,and go off flying....this is also very possible from the view of the game because sometimes you can "kill" a ship but its still floating there,just its systems are dead....thats my 2 cents on this topic

Actually, that's a pretty cool idea, although not at all what I was talking about. It's even feasible fluff-wise--you shut down your ship's reactor, so life support has to run on your power reserves, gradually draining them. When they run out--game over!

It would be a great way to balance what could otherwise be a really cheap get-out-of-trouble-free device.

A device that hides your ship when the engines are turned off?

Like some kind of cloaking device! Interesting.

I also like the idea of being able to use a ship's momentum to allow a strafing run.

It actually reminds me of the one thing that made Frontier battles winable. This was what appears to be a bug, or omission in the code.

When you had a ship with turrets, it was possible to aim, even when the game was paused. So, I would equip my turrets with the biggest guns the ship could support.

During a space battle it would be an easy thing to pause the game, aim slightly ahead of the other ship, and blast away as soon as the game was unpaused. Of course, you would have to have a ship with a turret or two to do this, but it made the game a LOT easier.

However, movable turrets were never part of the original Elite. Therefore I suspect this particular trick will have to wait until someone re-releases, or makes a re-imagined version of Frontier. (Anyone feel like taking this on?)

I vote for yaw control. My $0.02:

Classic Elite ran on some aufully primitive, terribly lowpower platforms, with periphials that just plain sucked. A crappy two-axis, one-button joystick was the best flight controller available at the time, and Bell & Braben coded the flight model with that in consideration; roll was needed because of spinning stations. Forget canon for the moment, I believe that if there was a platform and a joystick that supported more than two axis, then B & B would've put yaw control in.
Nowadays, our computers do support more than two axis, and it's pretty common to find four axis sticks for $20 or less cheap prices.

Please Giles, gimme yaw! A Wing Commander Privateer type flight model would work well, methinks.
Can yaw responce be taken from the pitch key in the shipdata.plist? That might allow yaw to be disabled in purist mode, while letting oxp ships to work as-is. Not to mention the puke-inducing evasion manouvers that could be pulled with it...

PS - If I could make sense of the joystick handling code in the source, I'de take a crack at a yaw-friendly custom compile.

Newtonian physics make for a duller gameplay I think. I never found it interesting to approach a planet at the wrong angle or speed and be catapulted 100+ AUs into a cold and silent grave. Or missing a planet and being unable to catch up with it because you got behind it in it's orbit. Or a combat system which made you use mouse, keyboard and joystick at the same time, to select your enemy as a target and let the autopilot try to align your front laser.

I liked the planetary systems and multiple stars of Frontier. And the one-huge -galaxy approach with some familiar places mixed with old Elite names was really nice to. I really liked having buy all/sell all buttons and being able to load my cargo up with fuel. I liked the turrets and the Tiger Trader. And I guess that's it.

Oolite is a superior game. Not due to realism but due to gameplay.

Dr.-SPACE-Nil wrote:

Newtonian physics make for a duller gameplay I think. I never found it interesting to approach a planet at the wrong angle or speed and be catapulted 100+ AUs into a cold and silent grave. Or missing a planet and being unable to catch up with it because you got behind it in it's orbit. Or a combat system which made you use mouse, keyboard and joystick at the same time, to select your enemy as a target and let the autopilot try to align your front laser.

I'll totally agree with you there. Frontier's Newtonian flight model was as irritating as a trumble stoned on megaweed, and every bit as impossible to deal with.

In short -
Yaw? Yes, please!
Newtonian? You gotta be out of your frakkin' mind!

Oh yeah, a small deadzone, say about 10 - 15% would be great. It would end the tendancy for the more agile ships to drift randomly when the stick is centered.
I'm currently using joystick profiler software to force a deadzone, and it really helps. However, I'de rather have that memory freed for the game.

One of the things that bugs me about Oolite is the way unpowered objects like asteroids or cargo cannisters "hang" in space. "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't", as Douglas Admas put it. I like the old Elite's not quite Newtonian physics, but the way nothing ever stood still, and if you watched an asteroid for long enough it would drift off on its own orbit. Yeah, there's a "strict gamepay" mode in Oolite that enables this, but I'd like to have all the OXPs loaded and still get things drifting about in space.

johnsmith wrote:

One of the things that bugs me about Oolite is the way unpowered objects like asteroids or cargo cannisters "hang" in space. "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't", as Douglas Admas put it. I like the old Elite's not quite Newtonian physics, but the way nothing ever stood still, and if you watched an asteroid for long enough it would drift off on its own orbit. Yeah, there's a "strict gamepay" mode in Oolite that enables this, but I'd like to have all the OXPs loaded and still get things drifting about in space.

If you stop the ship and watch closely, you'll notice cargo containers, bits of blasted asteroids, and ship pieces have a very slow drift. Dropped q-bombs tend to drift close to the speed they were deployed at.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

Dropped q-bombs tend to drift close to the speed they were deployed at.

The blighters

I'm surprised no one mentioned Space Combat.

It's a free proof of concept tech demo by the guy who did X-Plane that implements full "realistic" controls of a spacecraft.

It's virtually unplayable.

Yaw would be nice, though.

There was a game for the PC around 2000. It reminded me a lot of Elite in that the game had handling like Elite. Looking online, it looks like X: Beyond The Frontier but I could be wrong, because I only played the demo version. But this screenshot brings back some memories.

Anyhow, it was similar to Elite (mine stuff, shoot ships) but had some bells and whistles. When you came in to land manually at a space station, the program would take over once you passed a certain point and land your ship perfectly (even if you screamed in at full throttle).

Back to flight dynamics. It was just like Elite; you could pull up and down, and rotate. But there was an added bonus. The 'motion lock' button or key. When unpressed, the ship would fly in the direction it was pointed in, as long as you had thrust. But if you held down the button, the thrusters instantly cut out (but would cut back on again at their original level once the button was released) because your forward motion would continue along its original vector and speed. Meaning you could now turn the ship to pass-and-strafe an asteroid or enemy ship.

That was it. Simple, but it was incredibly intuitive and it was immense fun.

Don't push the button = direction of flight is dictated by direction the ship is headed in.

Push the button = ship is locked on last known trajectory, orientation of ship just moved the ship around like you're handbrake-spinning on an icy road. Meaning you could speed by a target but then pivot and get off some great shots before releasing the button and shooting off in the direction you were now headed.

Pangloss wrote:

Meaning you could speed by a target but then pivot and get off some great shots before releasing the button and shooting off in the direction you were now headed.

I guess it didn't have a rear laser then.

Viffing is a good tactic, especially when your rear laser overheats, that is providing your opponent is fairly close.