Oolite Bulletins

Those who play RPGs may be familiar with the concept: Experience is shown on a bar display with a graphical representation showing the progress towards the next level.

The Elite rating and kill count displayed on the F5 screen could be redone or added to with a bar tracking the kills as a ratio compared to the kills necessary for the next Elite rating. It would be especially appreciated, in my opinion, for those working on the later ranks, like Dangerous and above. I personally am Dangerous working on Deadly.

I don't know.

Essentially, Oolite isn't an RPG (or an FPS, for that matter). It isn't about stats being displayed all over the place, and life energy bars hanging over all your opponents' heads. It isn't about experience points.

The status screen already informs you not only about your current rank, but also about the exact number of kills you already have under your belt. What else do you need? Finding out what the next step is, and how many more kills it will take you, is not difficult. To be precise: it takes you either one klick on the  Elite Wiki, or one look into the Reference Sheet (page 3), followed by a very simple subtraction: next rank threshold minus current number of kills. In my opinion, this very small effort can be expected of a player who plays the game for progress.

But, and this is the essential point, Oolite itself isn't about progress. Integrating a "progress indicator" into the status screen would provoke the misunderstanding that the player somehow needs to progress. And that's a big, fat misunderstanding. Oolite does not have a fixed goal. It's a wide open sandbox. Each player sets a goal for himself. And those players who don't want to set goals for themselves play the game without any goal whatsoever. But Oolite does not set any goal of any kind to its players, not even the goal of "becoming Elite". Therefore the screens of the game should not pretend it to be otherwise.

Last time I played "DaddyHoggy" had a defensively tricked out Cobby 3, 60K in the bank but only 16 kills (original plan was to have zero kills full stop).

I feel no urge to reach Elite - I did that on the C64, Amiga and original PC DOS version - and if I want a fragfest I have another pilot where I can a blast (literally)

Heck.. I'd be lucky to pay any attention whatsoever to my kill-count more than a couple of times a session. I'm far more concerned with what missions and hits I've got going on..

But Commander McLane totally nails it with his comment:

Commander McLane wrote:

But, and this is the essential point, Oolite itself isn't about progress. Integrating a "progress indicator" into the status screen would provoke the misunderstanding that the player somehow needs to progress. And that's a big, fat misunderstanding. Oolite does not have a fixed goal. It's a wide open sandbox. Each player sets a goal for himself. And those players who don't want to set goals for themselves play the game without any goal whatsoever. But Oolite does not set any goal of any kind to its players, not even the goal of "becoming Elite". Therefore the screens of the game should not pretend it to be otherwise.

Commander McLane wrote:

...this is the essential point, Oolite itself isn't about progress. Integrating a "progress indicator" into the status screen would provoke the misunderstanding that the player somehow needs to progress...

That's why I suggested it be made into an OXP. That way, choice would dictate.