Oolite Bulletins

I spent a few hours watching Cmdrs flying the new Elite on you tube.
PvP and Close combat.
Well, tis heaps impressive.
Sorry I will not be playing. Too much work for fun.
Tends to look like a hollywood CGI production. Oops, is it not?

In my mind Oolite still has way more to offer than any commercial game yet.

But then I'm really biased.
I play to relax and have fun with the game. And to that end, with all the people that help me develope my ooniverse without derision. THANK YOUS.
If I want an Uber ship, I can have one. If I want a ship with auto turrets with uber fire power stuck on every surface of my ship, I can have that. If I want a tiny wee ship with 2T cargo and no guns, yup can have that too.
Point is; In Oolite you have your game. And a bunch of people that like that too.
So Basically saying; Elite 4. Impressive graphics if you can afford the machine to run them. Would take years of game play to see if it stands up to versitility that Oolite gives.
Not going to hold my breath on that.

Would like to hear opinions from any Ooliters that play/playing Elite4
Fair or biased opinions welcome.

It's good to see you here again Alex. I have missed your enthusiasm.

Docking/landing is great, the flight model is excellent - it could've been a real humdinger of a single-player game!

Oh yeah... the Cobra Mk III remains the best all-round ship, and it also happens to be one of the fastest under boost.
There are thirty-one system names from Elite/Oolite, one of which has become my adopted home system.

If it had been single player it would have been awesome. If they'd taken the lore seriously, it would have been spectacular. As it is, it's occasionally fun, away from the network-y delays and mmo aspects, though curiously 'soulless' at times.

Cheers,

Drew.

drew wrote:

If it had been single player it would have been awesome. If they'd taken the lore seriously, it would have been spectacular. As it is, it's occasionally fun, away from the network-y delays and mmo aspects, though curiously 'soulless' at times.

Cheers,

Drew.

What he said.

It's a good game. It looks f****** amazing. It does a good job of reproducing Elite. And it actually does a surprisingly good job of following on from Frontier and FFE.

The LORE, though. Oh my god, the poor lore.

drew wrote:

... though curiously 'soulless' at times.

<nods> That was something I remarked upon way back - the lack of soul. Some games have it, some don't.

drew wrote:

If it had been single player it would have been awesome. If they'd taken the lore seriously, it would have been spectacular. As it is, it's occasionally fun, away from the network-y delays and mmo aspects, though curiously 'soulless' at times.

Cheers,

Drew.

You mean it doesn't allow off line gaming??
Well that totally sinks it for me.
And no running base stories to be added to.
Well how sad.

Alex wrote:

You mean it doesn't allow off line gaming??
Well that totally sinks it for me.

Nope.. you can play a kind of single-player mode, but you still need an internet connection, and the wider actions of others (such as wars, or changing a system's political allegiance) will still affect your game. Basically, you still share the same universe as everyone else, even though you and other players don't see or directly influence each another.

I would agree with Selezen though. It does look awesome. If we could have that game engine, with the participative nature of Oolite and a full time time of crack writers and OXP-ers (or whatever they're called now) - Perfection.

Cheers,

Drew.

I think the graphics engine in Oolite is easily capable of reproducing the kind of sights we see in ED. WIth full shaders and the addons for HD and shadered planets, I think Oolite gets pretty damned close. And we had planetary landings WAY before ED.

If I'm being honest I still see Oolite as the spiritual successor of Elite. ED is the official sequel to Elite, Frontier and First Encounters, but Oolite never strayed from the original's design and feel.

We have several loremasters lurking here. Anybody up for turning Oolite into an "alternate ooniverse"?

Nothing official, mind. Just playing.

Selezen wrote:

I think the graphics engine in Oolite is easily capable of reproducing the kind of sights we see in ED.

Not really - you could get an Oolite screenshot which looked like an ED screenshot with careful faking of various things [1], but nowhere close for actual in-game visibility. Their lighting and shadows model is massively more advanced and it shows, as are things like particle effects.

Some of it's just more detailed models and textures than anyone has time to produce for Oolite ... but a lot of it is having an engine which makes use of the features of the last ten years of graphics cards.

[1] You would probably not need to go quite so far as sticking a pre-rendered texture on a backdrop the size of the screen, but for some things you'd be pretty close.

Selezen wrote:

And we had planetary landings WAY before ED.

I suspect the Frontier forums would be even less happy than usual if Frontier announced that planetary landings were to consist of "fly close to planet surface, short cut-scene, station menu"

Selezen wrote:

Anybody up for turning Oolite into an "alternate ooniverse"?

Have a look at the Altmap OXP for a demo of some of the possibilities there. It's all(ish) technically possible to OXP - just a matter of a lot of design and programming.

cim wrote:

Selezen wrote:

And we had planetary landings WAY before ED.

I suspect the Frontier forums would be even less happy than usual if Frontier announced that planetary landings were to consist of "fly close to planet surface, short cut-scene, station menu"

Thargoid's (very old now) OXP is not the last word in planetary landing. Nothing prevents stations & docks at the planet surface*, it's just that no-one has bothered to publish such an OXP.

* 1m above it anyway.

Wildeblood wrote:

* 1m above it anyway.

They'd probably have to be a bit higher than that to avoid colliding with the planet or making it impossible to dock with them without colliding. At that point the scale issues - and planet texture issues - would be rather obvious. It's certainly possible but I'm not surprised no-one has.

If you're careful you can hover a player ship 1 or 2 metes above the surface of the main planet. Not so easy with other planets because of the random jitters, but they told me you'd fixed that. Putting a station model well below the line of the shipApproachingPlanetSurface JS event* should be no drama at all. The textures are more distracting than the scale IMO.

* Says 500m on wiki page, shouldn't that be 400m?
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite ... netSurface