Oolite Bulletins

That's cheating, right?

It is all a frame of mind if it is cheating or not.
My pilots use it as it has been mentioned in Some of the stories as something used by the Navy to track embargo breakers. What the Navy and Galcop can use, can be purchased on the blackmarket and used effectively by those who can afford them.
I have a D.T.T Cyclops that is currently a brainship trader and it has integrated it into it's trading circuitry.
I also have a Vortex bounty hunter that uses it to great advantage over his chosen targets.

Is this cheating? Not to me... I am using technology that is available.
There are those who will say "YES" because of their own reasons.... so do what your conscience dictates.... if you believe it is a cheat.. so be it... none will judge you for what you use in your OOniverse or how you use it.

An OXP can be made that gives you 1 million credits for free. It's a cheat, but much less so if it was a mission plot that the 1 million credits sum "landed in your lap"...at the price of a huge bounty put on your head. (Black Monks OXP comes to mind as a lesser example...)

The Long Range Scanner OXP was probably made for testing other OXPs and for goofing around in Oolite. It's extremely good for telling the player exactly what ships and stations are in a system, which can normally only be discovered piecemeal and with at least a small risk unless you have a fast cloaking ship with huge energy production to stay cloaked. That's a cheat. It can also do jump routes from system-to-system for no fuel cost. Considering how important the 7 LY jump limit is to game balance, it's pretty much a cheat.

Switeck wrote:

The Long Range Scanner OXP was probably made for testing other OXPs and for goofing around in Oolite..

Switeck is correct, Okti developed this as a tool for OXP authors and it was never intended to be part of the game itself. However lots of people seem to use it anyway
As for cheating, well yes it is. Anything that works around 'rules' or gives the player an advantage has to be considered cheating. But who cares? It's a single-player game (Thank Giles!) so as the single player, you can set the rules and weight things in your favour (or against) as you see fit.
All I would say is that this game (perhaps more than any other computer game) has stood the test of time. The basic game is so good it has been around for years and has kept thousands of people amused and entertained in its standard form. Changing it substantially should be approached with extreme care in my opinion.

Cheating in Oolite is like cheating in solitaire , who are you cheating? (answer, yourself.)
I have tried to use only eye candy OXPs and optical enhancement OXPs (bad eyesight) and yet when I used Griff's replacement ship-set I inadvertently slowed down my computer making it foolproof to dock at full injector speed, and I considered that a cheat, so I removed the station OXP to make ME feel honest to the vanilla version.( I have to sleep with myself at night)
It's only cheating when your on the BB and comparing your kills and cash to others who earned theirs the hard way....well,, that's how I see it. ( I don't have to sleep with you )

Doug Stuart wrote:

I removed the station OXP...

Keep the Station OXP - simply adjust the station_roll in the OXPs shipdata.plist to taste (ask for help if you ain't sure how to do that).
You should be able to dock on injectors regardless of how fast/slow the station is rotating.

I see... I feel it like cheating just for the fuel, actually. If it consumed fuel / time, I would feel ok about it. I guess that I could think "It uses Thargoid technology" like something I read about the Long Range Planner somewhere...

Now that I played a little with it, it changes a lot the gameplay. I'm a bounty hunter and it makes the missions more quick to end, I will check the Long Range planner when I can afford one, I understand that it does the same but at galactic level, I think it would be a good mix with the New Cargoes oxp to make more money...

It's all about imagination, right?

iperich wrote:

It's all about imagination, right?

Yeah... whatever floats your starboat! Personally, I sail close to the core game.

I agree with Cody, keep it close to the core.
I'm treating it like it's two different games, I want to see how far and how good I get in Oolite-Core, then when I get to the point where I think I'm at the end,(10mil.Cr. or 6401 kills) then open the flood gates and start playing Oolite-OXP!
Plus by then I should have a better computer to handle it all.

P.S. Thanks Cody for the advice, do I have to download VIM to edit it?
I spent the better part of the week reading through some of the vast postings (Treasure chest)
and think I can learn to tweak (on copies), if not I know where to come.

Doug Stuart wrote:

do I have to download VIM to edit it?

Only if VIM is your idea of fun.. (could be worse, I guess.. at least you didn't say "Emacs" )

If you're using some flavour of Windows, Wordpad is ok, Notepad is EVIL (breaks things) but Notepad++ is what we recommend.

If you're using some flavour of Linux or *nix, just use whatever is your favourite text editor.

If you're using some flavour of Mac, you can use the built-in plist editor.

iperich wrote:

I see... I feel it like cheating just for the fuel, actually. If it consumed fuel / time, I would feel ok about it. I guess that I could think "It uses Thargoid technology" like something I read about the Long Range Planner somewhere...

The jumps done by Long Range Planner do indeed cost game time -- their jumps are a little quicker than manually jumping only because they lack the 15 second countdown. Outside of that, not having to dock somewhere to refuel (or sunskim) is a big time-saver as well...though various OXPs speed that up considerably.

So for over 100,000 credits initially and over 1,000 credits more for each overhaul you can jump around "for free".