Oolite Bulletins

I've been playing some other space-sims recently and there are a couple of things I like about them, some things I dislike and some things I really think Oolite should have:

Vendetta Online:
Good bits:

Graphics: the ships and stations look beautiful
Weapons: the focus on rail-gun like weapons is great and they are great fun to use, making it a skill to actually hit something
Asteroids: the asteroids are MASSIVE and the 'roid fields are hugely dense making it great fun to dogfight in them
Huds: While CSOTB is brilliant at HUD making and has got so many things to work that before was "impossible" the HUDs in Vendetta look so much better purely because the curved gauges and numerical readouts were made to be like that in the first place

Bad bits:
MMORPG: while the idea is a good one the fact that the universe in the game is so massive and the fact that it isn't really that popular ment that in 5 hours of playing I saw only 2 other players, everything I fought against was an NPC
Gameplay: The NPCs are in asteroid fields and almost nowhere else so you can't mine without getting killed so it gets boring after a while...

SOL: EXODUS
Good bits:

Engine: built on the Unreal Engine the physics are seamless and well made
Graphics: with the Gemini render-engine the effects are brilliant... but quite GPU intensive
Particle effects: Very, very awesome. When a ship is damaged it smokes everywhere, making it hard to see when you are directly behind it but also making it look very real. oh, the explosions aren't just white flashers either.

Bad Bits:

Gameplay: so repetitive that it gets boring after about 10 minutes.
AIs: enemy AIs are exactly the same, as soon as you understand how they fight then you can kill them easily
Voice acting: annoying and un-turn-offable
HUD: Un-understandable

What Oolite should have:

Particle effects,
More railgun-style weapons
Bigger 'roids and bigger 'roid fields

Anyone else have any opinions?

Staer9 wrote:

What Oolite should have:
Particle effects,
More railgun-style weapons
Bigger 'roids and bigger 'roid fields

A big 'Yes' to those three ideas, but what Oolite should have is probably very different to what it can have.
The drive plumes badly need improving, in my opinion. That would be linked to 'particle effects', I presume.

I'd like to see some bigger asteroids, but I'm not a fan of dense asteroid fields ... although I suppose Rock Hermits might live inside a really big asteroid, and bring a few smaller ones into their neighbourhood for convenience. So you might get a Hermit sitting inside a little cloud of smaller rocks.

In particular I'd like bigger, better asteroid fields.
The other things would be good as well.

Disembodied wrote:

Rock Hermits might live inside a really big asteroid, and bring a few smaller ones into their neighbourhood for convenience. So you might get a Hermit sitting inside a little cloud of smaller rocks.

Aye... rock hermits should definitely live inside very large asteroids!

It is easy to change the model for the asteroids in the normal game, but there are different OXP's adding different types of asteroids like Griff's shipset.

For the normal game just a shipdata-overrides.plist with the following code will be fine.

What's the objective of this topic? If it's about discussing other space games, shouldn't it be in Outworld (= things that are not Oolite)? If it's about suggestions for Oolite, shouldn't it be in Suggestion Box (= suggestions for improving Oolite)? Discussion (= general discussion regarding Oolite as it is, and not things that are not Oolite) seems an odd place.

Staer9 wrote:

Huds: While CSOTB is brilliant at HUD making and has got so many things to work that before was "impossible" the HUDs in Vendetta look so much better purely because the curved gauges and numerical readouts were made to be like that in the first place

Thanx Staer9. You know what you said and some other interesting ideas and bits that I've read on here in the last few weeks has got me motivated again to get back to work on this and other oxp ideas. The new numeric hud has been sitting on my hard disk with extra features I've been working on once in a while for the past 3 months(hey, I didn't want to obsolete version 2.1 within weeks of releasing it) but some of those ideas have not panned out while others are experimental. So, I'm going to rip those out and get this hud ready for downloading, perhaps by easter. If the ideas in the way they are executed in this new numeric hud are acceptable and an improvement then I will apply a similar technique to a curved bar gauges hud. This technique is only a slight notch below animating images and text in a hud which is not activated yet in oolite. This technique has some limitations so I'm curious to see if it's use will be acceptable or not so I think at this point I will need some feedback from players. So I'll get right on that then.

Also I think you are in the ballpark on your ideas Staer9. I wonder if the smoke from various places on the ships that are damaged could be simulated somehow by releasing/spawning entities? kind of like explosion debris perhaps?