Oolite Bulletins

Hi Harmless, welcome back to Oolite.

Thanks for your kind words, much appreciated. To quickly answer some of your questions:

Is it self-documenting, or should I be looking for a high level summary of the program structure?

The core of the game is written in Objective-C, which is quite a bit different to C++. In my humble opinion, much easier to understand and work with than C++, also much cleaner errior messages - it helps a lot. Of course, it requires some initial reading if you are not familiar with it, but if you have prior programming experience it should be very easy to pick up and do stuff with it. As for the program structure, I recommend you run Doxygen on the Doxyfile located in the root folder of the source code tree, in order to have the program structure generated and auto-documented in full detail.

Recently I played Oolite-1.84_x64.exe, then tried Oolite-1.84_x86.exe because x64 doesn't support full screen well, but the x86 seemed to have the same full screen artifacts (my motivation was to try to take advantage of time compression with pause/left-right arrows, only accessible in full screen mode).

Need to clear up a misconception here. Time compression does not depend on full screen, it just requires the Test Release version of the game (we distribute two types, Deployment and Test Release, the second is very useful to OXP developers). Also, I am not sure what you mean by not supporting full screen well. You may want to report the problem iin more detail in the Testing and Bug Reports section of the forum or raise an issue on the project page on github (https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite) and we'll take a look at it. Fullscreen has been tested extensively in various systems under Windows and is handled in the same way by both the x64 and the x86 versions.

I'm working on the theory that combat is noticeably harder now

Correct. The AI has been significantly improved in the 1.8x versions, and we are using Javascript now for guiding it. Tactics that used to work on 1.7x are not very profitable anymore. Diving head-first in a group of oppopnents is almost guaranteed to end in pressing Space. You will need to develop a more cautious style of approach to combat.

I do have to save a great deal under 1.84, because it crashes frequently on my laptop. I've filed a few bug reports, at least one of which was very repeatable. Hopefully that level of detail can be helpful, even if I never do figure out C++ and the Oolite program structure in order to make a better contribution.

Assiming that we are talking about the Windows version, crashing frequently indicates a possible driver issue to me (esp. in conjunction with the artifacts in full screen) or maybe an NVidia gfx card with Threading Optimizations enabled. If the second case is true, disable Threading Optimizations and everything will be fine. If not, then please raise a bug report as mentioned earlier, describing the issue in detail and a way to reproduce it, if possible. As for C++ and program structure, refer to the earlier paragraph - don't figure out C++, figure out Obj-C instead!

another_commander wrote:

I'm working on the theory that combat is noticeably harder now

Correct. The AI has been significantly improved in the 1.8x versions, and we are using Javascript now for guiding it. Tactics that used to work on 1.7x are not very profitable anymore. Diving head-first in a group of oppopnents is almost guaranteed to end in pressing Space. You will need to develop a more cautious style of approach to combat.

It's also worth noting that pirates are now more interested stealing in your cargo than in blowing you up … a non-combat solution to a pirate encounter is to do what they say and drop some cargo!

I haven't played Oolite since late 2011 (boy, almost six years) and at that time I ran version 1.74 with quite some OXPs installed. But yesterday I felt like starting all over again, so I installed the recent 1.82 version on my Linux desktop and was quite impressed with all the new features. Decided to install the ambiance collection along with Taxi Galactica and In-System Taxi (for the quick buck) as well as Station Ads (for a little extra fun) and then went off im my Mk. III - boy does it look nice thanks to the visual enhancements. Behold, CmdrGumbo is back to tackle those Thargoids again ... whoohooo ...

CmdrGumbo wrote: ↑Sun Jun 25, 2017 12:44 pm

I installed the recent 1.82 version on my Linux desktop

Oolite 1.82? The latest version is 1.84 (available here) - and welcome back.

Cody wrote: ↑Sun Jun 25, 2017 12:55 pm

CmdrGumbo wrote: ↑Sun Jun 25, 2017 12:44 pm

I installed the recent 1.82 version on my Linux desktop

Oolite 1.82? The latest version is 1.84 (available here) - and welcome back.

It's the latest one that the Mint 18.1 apt repositories provide

CmdrGumbo wrote:

It's the latest one that the Mint 18.1 apt repositories provide

Hi CmdrGumbo, welcome,
I know mint users are encouraged to stick to repository versions, but I have been running the current version of oolite on mint 17.3 with no problems. Installation is pretty straightforward and oolite comes compiled with all the dependencies it needs to run so no issues with that. Even the Trunk version, which gets updated nightly, is pretty stable and I have only had one trunk update that had any real problem (couldn't see laser) and that was fixed the next night. I have successfully run every latest stable version of oolite on mint since oolite 1.77 when I discovered it.
If you run into any problems the members of this forum can often help.

Stormrider wrote: ↑Sun Jun 25, 2017 1:22 pm

CmdrGumbo wrote:

It's the latest one that the Mint 18.1 apt repositories provide

Hi CmdrGumbo, welcome,
I know mint users are encouraged to stick to repository versions, but I have been running the current version of oolite on mint 17.3 with no problems. Installation is pretty straightforward and oolite comes compiled with all the dependencies it needs to run so no issues with that. Even the Trunk version, which gets updated nightly, is pretty stable and I have only had one trunk update that had any real problem (couldn't see laser) and that was fixed the next night. I have successfully run every latest stable version of oolite on mint since oolite 1.77 when I discovered it.
If you run into any problems the members of this forum can often help.

Sounds good, I'll try that once I have delivered Tiilstbe Sobistdi-O'Folks to Aona.

<grins> Fly free, Penguinista - break the repo chains!

Stormrider wrote: ↑Sun Jun 25, 2017 1:22 pm

CmdrGumbo wrote:

It's the latest one that the Mint 18.1 apt repositories provide

[...] I have successfully run every latest stable version of oolite on mint since oolite 1.77 when I discovered it.
If you run into any problems the members of this forum can often help.

Cody wrote:

<grins> Fly free, Penguinista - break the repo chains!

Just removed the apt repo version and downloaded and installed 1.84, which works pretty well. Addons are also still working, thank you for your recommendation.

Hello Ooliters!

I thought I'd better sign up here and say hi! I've been working on porting Oolite to SDL2 on GitHub and just spent the last couple of days learning Javascript and writing my first OXP!

I'm a *very* long time Linux/Gentoo developer, and before that I hacked on Acorns. I've been playing Elite since Electron Elite, and it was a motivator for me to upgrade to the Archimedes back in the day!

Hi TheUAoB, and welcome. I think you'll be quite at home here.

Hi TheUAoB, and welcome … I think the question we're all asking is, "What's taken you so long?"

Disembodied wrote: ↑Fri Jul 14, 2017 1:40 pm

Hi TheUAoB, and welcome … I think the question we're all asking is, "What's taken you so long?"

Fair question. Just too many other projects on the go I guess. I'd been meaning to try out Oolite for years! I actually finally did only after fixing up various BBC emulators to work on my system to play Elite on!

Welcome man!

Hello everybody,
My name is Darek, nickname comes from my name and first 3 letters of my surname.

First of all big thanks to everybody behind the project, it's great!

Never in the past I had contact with Elite series, although I've played one of Wing Commander games (either 2 or 3) long time ago. I found this place (together with Pioneer forums) after searching for Linux space combat/fly game with open world as an alternative to Elite: Dangerous. I really like Oolite, the gameplay and how open it is for any modifications, nowadays I prefer to edit than play the games.

For last couple of years I've been contributing to Project Reality mod for Battlefield 2, mostly as 3d artist. Few weeks ago I've started working on ship model for Pioneer. Hopefuly I will be able to soon contribute something to Oolite too. Officially I work as an Android apps programmer. I expect in the future I will try to contribute oxp expansions to the game, I have few ideas already.

That's it for introduction, any tips for beginner (I already installed long list of addons ) or where to catch people besides the forums? I am often online on IRC channel as darekdeo.

Cheers!