Oolite Bulletins

Hi all! New commander, here!

First of all, I would like to thank all the community for Oolite, a really great game nicely crowdforged.

Then, I have one or two suggestions that can make this game even better, IMHO.

1) BATTLE MUSIC/TENSION MUSIC: I would like a feature/OPX/OPZ that automatically play music with fade-in/fade-out when there is a direct menace in the scanner range (1:1). Something like this or this, may be...

2) VINTAGE TOMBSTONE: No one is nostalgic about Frontier spinning tombstone in game over screen? I will be happy to download an expansion pack to see it again...

3) HARDCORE STRICT MODE/SPACE TRADE ROGUELIKE: A new game mode. You know... Permadeath, no manual save but hidden/encrypted auto savegame on landing/exit (that also delete himself when you continue the game, to prevent save scumming... ). ...Plus a solid score system to populate one or more hardcore vanity boards, to store the memory of past commanders (vanity boards that can be also build to fill a "top 100" online database, if the save scumming system is solid and difficult to hack... ).

That's all. Thanks for reading and keep up the good work!

Hi Marte, welcome to the boards! Some interesting suggestions there. A warning: suggesting OXPs tends to lead to writing OXPs, with subsequent loss of sanity/job/family. The cookies are good, though, by all accounts!

In terms of keeping track of things other than death, you might be interested in the Explorer's Club OXP ... and I think the Mac version at least used to have a contextual music system, although I may have dreamed that bit ...

Marte wrote:

1) BATTLE MUSIC/TENSION MUSIC: I would like a feature/OPX/OPZ that automatically play music with fade-in/fade-out when there is a direct menace in the scanner range (1:1). Something like this or this, may be...

This would be fairly easy to OXP (now that 1.80 lets you volume control sounds for the fade-in/fade-out). The tricky bit is finding a large enough collection of suitable music files under an appropriate license. (Classical is certainly easier for that).

Marte wrote:

2) VINTAGE TOMBSTONE: No one is nostalgic about Frontier spinning tombstone in game over screen? I will be happy to download an expansion pack to see it again...

A static tombstone picture would be fairly easy to OXP with a few tricks. A spinning one - especially one with your commander name written on it - would be much more difficult. I think still possible, just about, but it would involve some advanced shader work well beyond my abilities.

Marte wrote:

(vanity boards that can be also build to fill a "top 100" online database, if the save scumming system is solid and difficult to hack... ).

It's been a while since I wrote or played any roguelikes. I believe that the only solution the roguelike community ever found for that was "run the entire game on the scoring server".

Since it would be on honour anyway, I think the practical solution is probably to be honourable in when you reload the savefiles. An OXP could do a character dump to the log file any time you died, though, for ease of posting.

(Someone did have an idea a while back to configure Oolite in a particular way and add a small OXP to make it harder to savescum, but the amount of setup it would need it would just be easier not to cheat)

I've seen scoring lists of online games. The idea is nice, but it tends to promote cheating. Whenever one can reach the top of a list, one is tempted to use whatever method available. I remember Diablo II, MMPORG played in a closed internet server environment. The top 100 players all depended on thei characters hardware that was obtained from very questionable sources.
Also Oolite is different from player to player due to the various ways, the game can be modified by OXPs.

Hey, there is a rotating tombstone, if I remember this correctly. Does the random hits OXP not reward you with such after a successfull kill?

cim wrote:

Marte wrote:

1) BATTLE MUSIC/TENSION MUSIC: I would like a feature/OPX/OPZ that automatically play music with fade-in/fade-out when there is a direct menace in the scanner range (1:1). Something like this or this, may be...

This would be fairly easy to OXP (now that 1.80 lets you volume control sounds for the fade-in/fade-out). The tricky bit is finding a large enough collection of suitable music files under an appropriate license. (Classical is certainly easier for that).

CSOTB had a working OXP that played appropriate music for all events in Oolite a couple of years ago.. problem was, the music he chose was not suitably licensed, so he never released it.. I've tried a few times to get him to release it without the music, but haven't had a response to date.

cim wrote:

...suitable music...

Diziet Sma wrote:

...appropriate music...

Thunderbirds or it's not worth doing.

Wildeblood wrote:

Thunderbirds or it's not worth doing.

Gets my vote, for sure..

(by 'appropriate', I should clarify that I meant 'situation appropriate')

cim wrote:

The tricky bit is finding a large enough collection of suitable music files under an appropriate license.

Can start with a dependency on [wiki]Hyperradio_Musicpacks[/wiki].

ralph_hh wrote:

Hey, there is a rotating tombstone, if I remember this correctly. Does the random hits OXP not reward you with such after a successfull kill?

<nods>

ralph_hh wrote:

Hey, there is a rotating tombstone, if I remember this correctly. Does the random hits OXP not reward you with such after a successfull kill?

Yes. I've seen 2 or 3 tombstones with different textures in Random Hits.

One of them zooming in with a superimposed (with normal text printed on screen) "Sadly, Commander X, you are dead. PRESS SPACE." will do the trick, maybe.