Oolite Bulletins

RyanHoots wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

The answer is two-fold.

1) With turreted lasers what would the point in playing be? Fly along in a straight line while your turret mounted mil lasers zap everything within 25km.

2) The game isn't (shouldn't be) player centric with the exception of the (soon to be removed) E-bomb and the (likely to be removed) Torus Drive, core equipment is available to players and NPCs alike - so how would you like to try and fight an Rogue frigate + escorts armed with turreted lasers? (or pretty much any ship)

Wouldn't be much of a game at that point I think...

Just like laser cooling boosters. If only the player has turrets, the game's way too easy. If NPCs have them, it's too way too hard. The only answer is nobody gets them. I see.

I know I'm in a minority on this one, but I strongly disagree. I want the option to do anything in 'my' Oolite. I don't appreciate having the option of a laser cooling booster or changeable lasers denied to me by what amounts to whim. I appreciate it's Giles and the current Devs choice and I respect that, but I don't understand why we're allowed to create uber fast ships with uber fast recharge rates with uber numbers of missiles and we're not allowed to alter primary weapon config.

Folks claim I need to change the way I dogfight and snip at long range. Well, I jsut don't like that. I like to dogfight at close quarters and grind an enemy down bit by bit with frequent bursts of fire. I like to see the ships I'm fighting, wrestle onto their tails and blow them out of the stars. You can do this with a handful of ships in Oolite, but get stuck in a furball and you're just hanging around waiting for the laser to cool. That's *not* fun.

As a result I have now re-compiled the source code (rather drastic to be honest for something that should be a config setting) in order to set the lasers up as I think they should be (for reference, my weapon of choice is now a beam laser that heats up half as fast as in normal Oolite) - I've changed nothing else.

'My' beam laser is a compromise between the low power pulse laser and the high power military laser with the pros and cons of a halfway house, unlike the pointless beam laser in the trunk Oolite.

From *my* perspective, Oolite 1.75.2-drew is now more much more *fun*.

People say this affects gameplay. I disagree, it affects my gameplay, not yours. If you don't agree with what I've done that's fine and dandy. All you've done by preventing laser modification by config settings is made it incrementally more difficult for me to customise the game to my liking. I'll do it anyway.

I've got a laser cooling booster and I'm not afraid to use it.

Cheers,

Drew.

drew wrote:

I know I'm in a minority on this one, but I strongly disagree. I want the option to do anything in 'my' Oolite. I don't appreciate having the option of a laser cooling booster or changeable lasers denied to me by what amounts to whim. I appreciate it's Giles and the current Devs choice and I respect that, but I don't understand why we're allowed to create uber fast ships with uber fast recharge rates with uber numbers of missiles and we're not allowed to alter primary weapon config.

Folks claim I need to change the way I dogfight and snip at long range. Well, I jsut don't like that. I like to dogfight at close quarters and grind an enemy down bit by bit with frequent bursts of fire. I like to see the ships I'm fighting, wrestle onto their tails and blow them out of the stars. You can do this with a handful of ships in Oolite, but get stuck in a furball and you're just hanging around waiting for the laser to cool. That's *not* fun.

As a result I have now re-compiled the source code (rather drastic to be honest for something that should be a config setting) in order to set the lasers up as I think they should be (for reference, my weapon of choice is now a beam laser that heats up half as fast as in normal Oolite) - I've changed nothing else.

'My' beam laser is a compromise between the low power pulse laser and the high power military laser with the pros and cons of a halfway house, unlike the pointless beam laser in the trunk Oolite.

From *my* perspective, Oolite 1.75.2-drew is now more much more *fun*.

People say this affects gameplay. I disagree, it affects my gameplay, not yours. If you don't agree with what I've done that's fine and dandy. All you've done by preventing laser modification by config settings is made it incrementally more difficult for me to customise the game to my liking. I'll do it anyway.

I've got a laser cooling booster and I'm not afraid to use it.

Cheers,

Drew.

I agree, I think anybody should be able to make anything they please, but some things people make might alter the balance of power in the game in ways somebody else might not want. So people like me can have "cheats", like the Energy Bomb, while others choose to fight all 25 pirates. It's just a matter of personal taste, in my opinion (That's why I'll make an OXP Energy Bomb when it gets thrown out the airlock).

RyanHoots wrote:

(That's why I'll make an OXP Energy Bomb when it gets thrown out the airlock).

No need, just download Armoury.oxp . Although the equivalent in there is somewhat more of a balanced weapon.

Thargoid wrote:

RyanHoots wrote:

(That's why I'll make an OXP Energy Bomb when it gets thrown out the airlock).

No need, just download Armoury.oxp . Although the equivalent in there is somewhat more of a balanced weapon.

Armoury.oxp sounds good, I think I'll download it. I'm in the mood for a few more OXPs, anyway. Got to keep my Ooniverse changing...

Got an idea on how turret laser might work. How about a turret that has no up/down control, and very limited left/right control? Limited as in slow moving, can only move a few degrees. But it could help. Maybe it could be scripted somehow to aim at the targeted ship, so that if the ship was properly lined up in the sights the "turrets" would adjust so that all three (or more) lasers would hit the same place, but only if the ship was the targeted object and was properly lined up in the crosshairs. Is there anybody who might be able to make this work? Thanks.

I'm going to sort-of agree with Drew here.

Laser coolers shouldn't be in the core game, IMHO. But as an OXP option, sure, why not?
That way, commanders who want it can download it, and commanders who don't want it... Well then, don't download it. It's the same with other kit or uberships, nobody's making you install them.

McLane doesn't like ships with turrets, but I'm not putting him aboard a Kirin. Nor is he making me load Killit bombs, which I'm none too fond of.
So if some guy really wants a laser cooler, just let him have it. He's not harming the rest of us with it.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

...So if some guy really wants a laser cooler, just let him have it. He's not harming the rest of us with it.

Agreed. Maybe Oolite 2 will be more open about cooling boosters, turrets, and all that sort of stuff some commanders think would disrupt game balance.

RyanHoots wrote:

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

...So if some guy really wants a laser cooler, just let him have it. He's not harming the rest of us with it.

Agreed. Maybe Oolite 2 will be more open about cooling boosters, turrets, and all that sort of stuff some commanders think would disrupt game balance.

I don't know. At the end of the day Oolite 2 will still have to be a balanced game.

Commander McLane wrote:

I don't know. At the end of the day Oolite 2 will still have to be a balanced game.

True.
What I'm saying is, a Jameson thinks a laser cooler would be of some use, that's why the request for laser coolers keeps popping up. While us veterans would think it's so much useless overpriced junk, cause we learned how to control our guns.
Like the docking computer: A Jameson really wants one, manual docking isn't easy for them. Us vets can manual dock while taking a nap, it's just that easy.

Anyway, keep laser coolers out of the core game, but make it an OXP-able option for the plebes who want it.

I would agree that the "vanilla" game that new players start with *must* be well balanced. It also has to look good while running on a wide assortment of machines. It is the first impression, and likely it *is* Oolite to most people. The dev team here does a great job on that. The people that will come to a forum for a game are usually a small minority of those who actually download and play the game. For all the OXPs available for Oolite, it is likely that many people we never meet who play the game do not know or care about the OXPs. For these reasons, I believe it will always be the core game that is really going to decide if the game is popular or not.

So OXPs and any other modifications made to taste, well, if they ruin the game, then the player will learn that and take them back out. That's just part of the trial and error of customizing one's Ooniverse. I don't see much reason for any sort of limits to such things. If a player wants to fly through space with flowers instead of stars and riding on the back of a giant purple gerbil that fights by spitting candies at enemy gerbils *and* wants a candy cooler so their gerbil can spit more.. Why should I care?

*I* wouldn't want it. But if somebody else goes to that degree of bother (can you imagine modeling a good giant gerbil?) and they or maybe a couple of other people feel it's a hoot, then I don't feel it harms anything. I don't want a one-shot instant kill laser either (well, except for against something like an escape pod where it only makes sense it wouldn't hold up well at all to a laser meant for a weapon against ship sized objects). But it doesn't matter to me if some other player is using one in their own Ooniverse or not.

I suppose somebody could come up with an OXP that would change the game into killer submarines instead of spaceships and have missions that were a re-enactment of scenes from "The Hunt for Red October". At that point one would have to wonder why they don't just branch off and call it a new game, but it probably wouldn't be impossible to do, just a huge amount of work. Myself, I don't want Killit.OXP in "my" Ooniverse, and the furball OXP, I mostly only load for testing weapons or if I need to work off a lot of aggression. I won't save after a session with the furball OXP because to me personally, it eliminates the hunt or gameplay that I feel are part of Oolite in regards to my kill count meaning anything. To me personally, it makes it into too much of "just a shooter game". But that's my rule for myself, and it doesn't apply to other people.

What I'm trying to say is this..

What I want should not affect how your customised Ooniverse has to be. And vice-versa.

Live and let live.

"I like this guy. He gets it!" - Carrol, Where the wild things are

Well said, Ganelon.

Now the hard part, getting the devs to agree.

Commander McLane wrote:

Thargoid wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

Concerning the railgun, it turns out to be more difficult than I thought. I'll be able to present a proof of concept soon, but it has severe limitations which are non-trivial to overcome.

Eh? They're easy to do - the problem is given sizes and distances they're absolutely useless and couldn't hit the broad-side of an Anaconda at 5km.

Yeah, that's about it.

Thargoid wrote:

I got bored a few weeks back and had some silly fun making an asteroid gun, especially as I then modified the asteroids to be homing asteroids. The sight of a Thargon frigate being chased around the scanner by a couple of asteroids was quite bizarre...

To begin with, I'm working with something considerably smaller than an asteroid. Smaller than a cargopod, actually, roundabout the same size as the basic missile, but with a really high speed. One major problem is that most of the time the projectile flies straight through the target, even if aimed perfectly. Collision detection, again. Which is of course bad for a weapon which deals its damage only through collision.

Another problem is that its next to impossible to connect the projectile to the firing entity (in this case the player ship). The owner property is read-only. So if it isn't defined as a missile (which I don't want, because missile firing is inconvenient; you have to press two keys each time, and you need a target first), it doesn't get attached to the player, and the engine doesn't recognize it as a weapon. Therefore no kill is attributed, no legal retribution, and no AI-reaction to an attack.

An oddity is that the amount of damage dealt is increasing with distance. I have incorporated some sort of 'space friction', so the projectile loses (a little) speed over time. Nevertheless it becomes more destructive.

Sorry, reading this post an idea came to my mind. At the moment I don't have the time to read through 7 pages, so I don't know if it is a new one...

If you have a way to script projectiles being "spawned" from the player ship triggered by a keystroke, then why not make them a long, thin entity just like the lasers, divided only graphically into many single "projectiles"? Of course, unlike lasers, they would have to move forward to give the right effect. But still programming would be much easier, methinks.

If I can have laser cooling boosters, so can the NPCs. If I can fire my military laser continuously forever, so can the NPCs.

If the NPCs can fire military lasers like that, the game will be unplayable. I won't use a "MegaLaser.oxp" that means I get killed within 2 seconds of being sighted by a pirate.

Nor will I play a game where I have a MegaLaser that spontaneously kills but NPCs don't get it - it would be boring.

I agree that players should not have access to a laser cooling booster; it would spoil Oolite the game.

I disagree with getting rid of the Energy Bomb. Every time I have accidentally pressed <TAB> and fired it, I have become a fugitive. Consequently, I never use it! But knowing it is there is good. If the desire is to lose it, then bump the price up by a lot, and give it a mass so that only large ships can afford the cargo space to carry one.

In Real Life™, you have three options for dealing with a bad marriage:
1. Murder your spouse. Yes, it is an actual option. The price is 10 to 20 years in prison.
2. Divorce. But you lose your worldy goods.
3. Do as you're told and put up with it.

In the OOlite world, I like the idea of mega-solutions:
1. Kill EVERYTHING in scanner range. Oops, fugitive. And no cargo pods to scoop, either. Damn.
2. Use the single-use MEGAWEAPON to save my life. Oops. That cost me ¼ million Credits. But I did get 370 Credits of bounty.
3. Learn to fight.

But the laser cooling booster, even at a stupid price, is the same as editing your saved game file for stupid money, untouchable shields and increasing kills.

Yes, it's my Oolite Ooniverse, but it's not my Oolite. I like to fiddle with my Oolite Ooniverse to increase the fun, but please don't take away my Oolite game by breaking the balance.

The Energy Bomb in earlier Elite versions was much weaker, unable to kill full-health Thargoid warships -- so there's other ways to balance it besides removing it.