Oolite Bulletins

Mad Hollander wrote:

ED has shown, that no-pixel-aiming approach is significantly better.

Ah, I guess you have some sort of metric that objectively demonstrates that, yes?
Or are you just presenting your opinion as fact.

Given that E:D has been released, and Oolite is still here, still being developed, and still gathering new forum members, I think the answer to the original question in this thread is "Yes". But if we assume that, as soon as a new space game appears, all the players of any older ones stop playing them and rush off towards the latest offering, surely the new burning question is "Will Elite: Dangerous survive the release of Star Citizen?" (or Drifter, or Limit Theory, or No Man's Sky, or whatever the next shiny thing will be) ...

Oolite will survive for as long as there are developers prepared to give their time and talents to the community. I suspect that we may well see some vigorous attempts to bring some of the features of E:D into Oolite - or at least, to make it possible to expand Oolite in certain directions inspired by E:D's more positive aspects. If E:D players are lucky, this will maybe be a two-way street, with some of the best aspects of Oolite's gameplay feeding back into E:D.

That's what I'm hoping for, anyway. I've not played E:D, and I've only watched a few videos of other people's gameplay, and not much of those either. I did back the Kickstarter, and when the Mac version comes out I'll download it and give it a go. I have to say, though - speaking from an acknowledged position of near-total ignorance - I'm not chewing the furniture with excitement. Much of E:D looks very swish and shiny, but there seem to be some pretty horrible compromises lurking in the design which, I fear, may flaw the game ultimately beyond repair. Partly, maybe, this is because I've been here before: my furniture still has the teethmarks from waiting for Frontier, which also looked very swish and shiny but which contained some of the most boneheaded game-design decisions in recent history. A swish and shiny boring, joyless grind is still a boring, joyless grind.

Cody's comments about E:D's lack of soul worry me. The faint whiff of David Braben's trademark "It's more realistic! Apart from that. And that. And those. And ..." approach worries me. The various (in my opinion, damaging) design compromises shoehorned in to accommodate multiplayer worry me. The fact that it took just 24 hours for someone to reach the centre of the galaxy really worries me: along with E:D's developer boasts about "1,000LY route planners", it makes me think they might have really dropped the ball here. But I'll give it a go, nonetheless. Maybe the E:D Kool-Aid will sweep me away, and I'll never be seen here again. Mind you, Mad Hollander's taken a good big dose, and keeps coming back regardless, so ...

The fact that we play a game that is not so much different from 30 years old ELITE is proof enough that some old games do not die, never become oldfashioned.

Players move on. At one time, there is a point where a game can not offer you more. So you move on to s.th. different. As long as there are a few players coming in newly infected by the Oolite Virus like me recently, the game will compensate the losses of old veterans. Big games like e.g. Diablo II tend to have such a publicity that everyone worldwide plays this at the same time. By the time the players move on in bigger numbers the game dies. Not least because it is a multiplayer online game. Oolite is not widely known, so there is always a potential for new players keeping the game alive in any aspect.

Disembodied wrote:

The faint whiff of David Braben's trademark "It's more realistic! Apart from that. And that. And those. And ..." approach worries me.

<mutters something derogatory about sales weasels>

Disembodied wrote:

The fact that it took just 24 hours for someone to reach the centre of the galaxy really worries me: along with E:D's developer boasts about "1,000LY route planners", it makes me think they might have really dropped the ball here.

Those two points really worry me too!

Disembodied wrote:

... accommodate multiplayer ...

One thing I have noticed regardless of what game you play, the PvP bunch seem to be more wired than most. There is just something about multiplayer that brings out or attracts (possibly both) an undesirable type of personality that reminds me of professional footballers. A bunch of selfish, elitist, crybabies. Of course I am using the broad brush here as there are plenty of decent people who enjoy playing against another person without throwing a strop, but then there are the 'others'.

This place on the other hand is a very nice place to be

Fatleaf wrote:

One thing I have noticed regardless of what game you play, the PvP bunch seem to be more wired than most. There is just something about multiplayer that brings out or attracts (possibly both) an undesirable type of personality that reminds me of professional footballers. A bunch of selfish, elitist, crybabies. Of course I am using the broad brush here as there are plenty of decent people who enjoy playing against another person without throwing a strop, but then there are the 'others'.

Yup, this segment of the MP playerbase is very vocal on the ED forums. They take particular umbrage that solo mode exists at all and rant on about how it provides "an unfair advantage" and similar other guff because of the possibility that some solo players might build up their careers offline, before taking to the online environ.

Aside from the simple fact that you'll never know which online players used solo mode for this purpose, the whole argument seems to boil down to certain online players wanting a nice supply of new players to shoot at.

Currently the mechanics of ED don't place a great deal of risk on PvP behaviour, certainly not in any way that would encourage it to take place in anarchy systems over more civilised space. There seem to be plenty of loons stalking the starter systems looking for newbies to kill. How dare new players try to avoid this "fun" by playing offline.

The problem with online games is, that you will rarely have someone with the same intention to play the game like you. In Diablo II I tried quit often to find someone to quest with me, in the end I mostly played alone and wondered about the way the crazy other guys play. You were lucky if you know someone from real life with whom you could date online for playing. But we should try not to offend anyone who choses to play differently. We are at least very proud this friendliest forum this side of Riedquat. And it seems highly unfair to hold one person who dislikes Oolite responsible for what happens in the dark pool of online games.

In one point, I have to agree with the PvP guys: PvP ist the only real test, what ship is better. If one assures equal skill and experience levels. In Diablo, Programs simulated players. PvP characters were build with the sole reason to kill these Bot-Characters. That was fun! But the discussion if PvP was allowed in regular games to kill innocent gamers was constant.

ralph_hh wrote:

Oolite is not widely known...

Oolite is more widely known than you might think - the number of users on the ED forum who play (or have played) Oolite has been a pleasant surprise.
Alas, it would seem that none of the ED Devs have ever played Oolite - they might have learnt something about the importance of NPC names if they had!

Sendraks wrote:

Yup, this segment of the MP playerbase is very vocal on the ED forums. They take particular umbrage that solo mode exists at all and rant on about how it provides "an unfair advantage" and similar other guff...

<grins> Much wailing and gnashing of teeth from that lot - they hate it!

A complete non-sequitur here now, but I want to add to something I wrote upthread. When the subject of Limit Theory was mentioned I opined that it was looking like Mr Parnell had well and truly lost the plot. I'm pleased to report that he seems to have made a new year's resolution to knuckle down and actually get it finished this year.

I wasn't aware of Limit Theory so I'll add that to my watch list of forthcoming space games along with No Man's Sky.

Cody wrote:

Mad Hollander wrote:

[stuff]

Have you considered basket-weaving? Or perhaps even flower-arranging - very zen, is flower-arranging!

As an expert of these arts, could you give me some pieces of advices ?

ralph_hh wrote:

Anaconda across the galaxy a very easy and a very boring thing. It would destroy the game balance.

Some ships can have less than 7 LY of fuel, and some can have more than 7 LY, i.e. from 3 to 15.
Anyway, the max jump 7.0LY is not changed. To destroy the balance you can use Fuel Tank oxp

Since Oolite does not offer Multi Player option, it's a bit difficult to finally test it player vs. player. I dare say, that if I take my Cobby against you in an Adder, each of us aiming precisely, each of us doing the same damage with ones military laser, your Adder with one energy bar and no mil. shields will be blown to pieces before my military shields are only half empty. The only advantage the adder has is its small cross section that makes aiming difficult.

You forgot about the size and maneouvrability. At distance 15...25km I can quite easily aim cobra's hull. In dog-fight adder can attach to the any of the blind spots of the cobra.
This is the only place where the size matters. Using this exploit you can defeat any opponent on you adder. For close fight, i.e. against thargons, of course adder is not good choice.
The weakest point of the adder is not the energy, but the only laser. Don't try to use missiles. Use mines to run away. Fight at max possible distance.

I'd be VERY curious to learn how you earn a million a day in only a few hours a day.

Ok, I will create the new thread.

Will Oolite survive the release of Zork: Dangerous?

It is now official. Rolling Stone has confirmed: Oolite is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Oolite community when IBD confirmed that Oolite market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all players. Coming on the heels of a recent Rolling Stone survey which plainly states that Oolite has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Oolite is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent BBC comprehensive gaming test.

etc etc

In Mass Effect 3 they wrote:

Shepard: How'd we get here? The geth are better than this.
Legion: No. Based on empirical evidence, they are not!

... any similarities ?

Other than being space sims that explicitly inherit from the legacy of Elite, the two games feel really different, in terms of flight model, universe, style, ... there's definitely room for the two of them, and No Man's Sky looks set to be quite distinctive as well what with the whole procedural ecologies thing going on.

What I like about Oolite is that it's very playable without investing in lots of peripheral hardware, and also the way you get equipment allows you to learn the controls gradually, unlike E:D which throws you in with zillions of systems, subsystems, menus, etc. etc. at once and basically seems to require at minimum a decent 3-axis joystick. Definitely Oolite feels more casual whereas E:D seems more hardcore, and often I don't want to play something where I micromanage half a dozen ship subsystems in the middle of a dogfight.

E:D on the other hand has rather more diverse systems, which is one of the major attractions for me. My personal preference would be to abandon the BBC Elite galaxy maps (heresy!!) and replace them with something with more variety of economic types than the rich-poor/industrial-agricultural system allows. But that's just me, and fair enough if the community and developers don't want to do that!

Nevertheless it's definitely not a simple case of one being better than the other.