Oolite Bulletins

Have you ever considered an Oolite without pirates?

It would get boring after a while wouldn't it?

It would lack an element of surprise but you would have more time for trade and exploration.

Agis Silverfish wrote:

Have you ever considered an Oolite without pirates?

Er, no!

Agis Silverfish wrote:

Have you ever considered an Oolite without pirates?

I often contemplate a world without banksters and politicians, which is essentially the same thing..

Diziet Sma wrote:

Agis Silverfish wrote:

Have you ever considered an Oolite without pirates?

I often contemplate a world without banksters and politicians, which is essentially the same thing..

<chuckles>

Agis Silverfish wrote:

It would lack an element of surprise but you would have more time for trade and exploration.

This does raise one interesting thought.. despite the many OXPs adding all kinds of things to the Ooniverse, there really isn't all that much in the way of exploring to be done.. something which added various surprises to random and out-of-the-way spots could be fun..

This is a good point. While there are plenty of 'Touristy' things to do and places to go, especially in G1, the options for actual exploration are almost non-existant.
Part of the problem of course is that the Ooniverse is pretty well documented already - there are no un-explored regions and even the un-reachable 'Lost Worlds' are under GalCop control.

Maybe we know it's there, but we want to know more about it. There could be a 'scientist' role: contact cosmologist A, take photos of stars Y and Z and compare them, take samples from the asteroids around system C...

A few months ago I wanted to add a bit of that exploring feel to the game and created an oxp that introduces a buyable galactic map. The idea is that for start all system information is overwritten with bogus information (TL1 anarchy hi-tech) when you go to the map screen. When you visit a system then the info on that system is retrieved and updated to the map. For 30 cr you can update your map for surrounding systems and for 1000 you can buy the whole map.

The original thread is here https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12273.

If you try it, make a copy of your save file. It should be considered highly experimental. No idea of trunk compatibility either.

In the end it felt that the galaxies and systems are just too well known. We'll have to wait till we get random galaxies or a game mechanic that alters the systems dynamically.

The main complaint I have about explorablity of the Ooniverse is that most systems are really just the same as the next with government type being the most important factor making what differences there are. To make exploring interesting you need more differences so things like the Tionisla Graveyard, local goods, ships only tending to be found in certain galaxies or regions, hidden treasures, etc would be the way to go. As long as these things tend not be a tied to broad system parameters such as government type, species, economy, etc (some are fine just not too many) any tied more to specific systems.

edit: fix typo

More destinations! That's one of the things I've found so delightful about Deep Horizon Systems: there are more planets (and moons) to explore. Now, if we could get some gas giants in the mix with those additional planets (even have some with cim's rings ).

As PG says, system-specific things like the TOG would make for more 'explorability' in the game.

If you're really bored and want to explore something new, add more galaxies to Oolite via the source code. However it will basically be more of the same old thing. Like CommRLock78 said, we need more planets in the systems and maybe other interesting things to explore. Stations you can fly inside, or a planet you could fly down and look at (like in Frontier). However that would take an insane amount of coding...

Exploration? That sounds nice!

I don't know if that would be possible, but perhaps there could be some systems which are unexplored, meaning they don't have starbases yet. These systems could sometimes contain some kind of space anomaly, like a nebula which has some effect on ships, or perhaps magnetic asteroid fields that get attracted towards the players ship and ram it Surprise would make it fun!

Perhaps some of these systems could only be discovered by misjumps from a certain system A to another certain system B.

Missions could be to cartograph those unknown systems, perhaps take scans of the objects there (sun, planets, asteroids, nebulas...). Perhaps the player even encounters some new, unknown civilizations? That reminds me of an OoLite-story I've read about the green-knights? (not sure about that)

Pleb wrote:

If you're really bored and want to explore something new, add more galaxies to Oolite via the source code. However it will basically be more of the same old thing.

Combined with Spara's buyable/hidden map system mentioned above, that would make for a fun combination, and a sense of real exploration.