Oolite Bulletins

Hello community; I have played Elite on the BBC (a loaded school mate),speccy and ArcElite (emulator). All years ago.
Recently there was some talk about 'No Man's Sky' with a playstation guy and it sounded like Elite...interest reignited, I found Oolite, found a long lost pirate that lives inside me. For this, I give great thanks!
I'm playing on a pretty old netbook, with an Nvidia Ion chip, and getting 20 to 30 fps which is great; I would appreciate any tips to up the frame rate; I found disabling Windows Update to be the best tweak ever. One last question: was docking made easier, or there more visual cues?
Cheers
Mr Puds

Welcome aboard, Commander! When I found Oolite, I found a long-lost contrabandista that lives inside me. Check the Graphics Detail in Game Options on F2 - is it set to Minimum Detail? That may help. You could also seek newer (though still old) drivers for your Ion netbook - but I suspect you'll have little joy.

Mr Puds wrote:

One last question: was docking made easier, or there more visual cues?

The latter. A station nav buoy was added that helps commanders line up their entry.

And welcome aboard.

Welcome!

In order to increase your performance, you can try the following things:
- try both fullscreen and windowed mode and see which works best for your FPS. Also, try a lesser resolution.
- in my experience, the number of background stars and nebula play a significant role. There are two or three OXPs that change them. See also KeeperSky.
- You can try "Game boosters" (like Game Booster 3 or JetBoost). They require some technical knowledge to really take advantage of them, though.

Hello Mr. Puds,

also playing on an old dell notebook with humble intel gfx so I'm one the same boat, I have to be careful what to install and what not.

Try Cody's advice reduce the graphic details first one step to normal detail and if to no avail another step down to reduced detail.
You will loose eyecandy of the shader effects, but it helped on my machine to have some more fps. OXZs/OXPs should work nevertheless but might not
look as nice as advertised. (shameless plug(tm): there's some noshader oxps *g*)

Stay clear of things like fancy HUDS, BGS, anything that extensively uses flashers and like Astrobe stated the Cinematic skys and nebulae. It does look nice but it slows down my machine. I ended up to manually install just the BGS soundset for voice, laser and such and leave the rest. Concerning skys and nebulae... Be sure to edit the values concerning the number of stars and nebulae, iirc the latter slowed down my machine most.

Amah

There's a  Hidden Setting - animation_timer_interval. Setting it (see Issue 206) on an older machine reduced the CPU usage significantly for me. Before it was just eating one core completely - after setting it got down to 18 to 24%.

<low spec machine derailment>

thanks svengali for the interesting hint on the hidden setting. However I set it to 30fps like adviced and things now got jerky on my machine. (btw. my .Gnustepdefaults was in XML rather than in Openstep syntax). It is interesting concerning battery consumption though. I will tinker a bit to find a good performance/fps ratio.

Btw. On default I get between 17 to 35 fps depending on what is shown (lowest fps facing planet and some ship exiting station, blank space around 35fps).
Seems I won't get a racing horse out of this cold blood

</low spec machine derailment>

phkb wrote:

Mr Puds wrote:

One last question: was docking made easier, or there more visual cues?

The latter. A station nav buoy was added that helps commanders line up their entry.

Docking was always easy! <grins> Don't Oolite's Coriolis stations rotate a tad slower than those in BBC Elite?

Welcome Mr Puds!

For FPS advices I suggest to open a new topic and post there the content of your Latest.log file. If you exit from the game right in the first menu then it is not as long as later, just contain info about your hardware and a list of your addons which help us to give tips.

Docking is easier due to the modernized main stations contain larger docking slots: the old height was 64m, now 103m in coriolis and 81m in dodo/ico, so all core ships except Cobra Mark III can dock sideways. Additional stations created by OXPs offer the old small dock.
[wiki]ILS[/wiki] is a big help also: NPC ships dock faster and you get a message if you can dock into the targeted station without roll. If you prefer manual docking but want to know when you must roll then just untarget the station after this message or switch to missile lock ("t" key).

Thanks for all the advice commanders. I'm playing full screen, minimum detail, and wireframe graphics. Getting 20ish fps and that is acceptable on this box. I went through a tedious round of graphics driver up/downgrades previously to get FTL to run smoothly, and had to roll back Windows 10 to 7 (I managed to self-inflict repetitive strain injury playing that game.. ). . Seriously, the most effective change I have made for Oolite was disabling Windows Update: it was hogging resources for about an hour after booting.
If anyone has the same laptop (ASUS 1215n) and wants to know the best video driver I've found, its 310.42. This could all be fixed if I used the dusty desktop or dropped the creds on a modern lappy, but I am loathe to a):move seats or b:)spend cash.
Anyhoo, thanks to the devs and the community for taking Elite and running with it, now I'm an oldster I can fix a real cocktail when I'm cruising to Leesti.

Right On,
Mr Puds

Windows Update? <spits>

don't know if it helps, but on my old Desktop it helped to reduce the screen depth to 16bit to gain some more fps.

I played Elite back on the c64. I loved it but honestly, forgot the name.

I was looking for a new game to play and happened to come across a description of a game where you play a starship captain who makes money trading, etc. and has to fend off pirates and such. I thought "wow, that sounds like that old game I played 30 YEARS ago. Wow!"

Then I saw that it had been remade for the PC.

I tried it on my laptop and remembered all the little gameplay features that made the flying really cool.

haven't been able to get it to run on my Windows 7 PC. Posted on a separate thread on that today.

Welcome aboard MrAnalogy! I was a C64 player as well, Elite was one of my favourite games.

I have no idea why you're having problems on your Win7 machine. But I'm sure we'll get to the bottom of it.

Sooo another gamer from wayback here, think I played the PC version of Elite on CGA but it's getting kinda hazy.. Course I was playing space games way before Elite came along, on my TRS-80 and Apple 2 (The Cosmic Balance 1 & 2 anyone?) then onto the Amiga with games like Warhead which most probably wouldn't know(?) but was brilliant.

I wonder if there's been a surge of activity here due to that *other* space game bombing in the popularity stakes? Either way, it's good to have a game and community such as this.

Cheers.