Oolite Bulletins

Hello,
Newbie here, so newbie questions (noob?).
I like Oolite. It is sci-fi (always cool), a simulation (sometimes cool) and it is Free and Open Source. Great. But... wtf is this game so hard?
Apparently there is a tutorial....somewhere? I can't find it. space flight is limited to merely jumping through space and then for 20 or so minutes setting the green marker to your planet and increasing speed to max. Lots of fun. But then... when you try to dock it fails. I read the docking article, lined myself up with the buoy, turned around, revolved slowly in sync with the station. So far so good. 1/3 speed. Entering tunnel... Yay looks like I got it right.....no! WTF! A wall at the back of the station?!! Seriously! How am I supposed to dock? How does this game play.


Someone please help me before I uninstall this....

Hello... have you tried simply flying through the wall?

LK901 wrote:

Apparently there is a tutorial....somewhere? I can't find it.

I knew we shouldn't have put it in an obvious place, people have trouble finding it...

Start game, then from the intro screen menu Start New Commander, and second option down: Tutorial. I trust you are on version 1.82, right?

Maybe, I shouldn't metion it, as I don't want to mess up the learning curve and the tutorial has also already been mentioned, but anyways...as I also skipped the tutorial and had trouble with it...concerning the part about flying around for 20 minutes...for everyone else also skipping it, here's a tip (I wished somebody gave to me back then): Try pressing the 'j'-key. If there is an onscreen message and nothing else is happening, try again later after you did something about the enviroment. (Depending on chance the best time trying to test it, is imidiatly after a witchjump.)

LK901 wrote:

A wall at the back of the station?

Welcome LK901!

In my mind this wall is the inner door which open after the front door is closed behind the ship. You should fly into the dock without stop, first time looks like you will knock soon but at the moment when your ship's nose reach the center of the dock you should see the automatic docking sequence.

An easy practice if you try land back right after your first launch.

If you think it still too hard then there are many helper addon like Autodock, [wiki]ILS[/wiki] or [wiki]Neo-Docklights[/wiki] in the expansion manager, but all people in this forum always suggests to new players that play the game without game-changing addons first. Packages in the Ambience category are fine at start like a graphical update, for example [wiki]BGS[/wiki] add a much better lookout into the docking tunnel and F2-F8 screens.

If you're not one for tutorials, you can practice at Lave as well. Just launch from the station, fly out to the buoy, stop, turn around, get docking permission and fly back in. Watching some video examples might help too.

There is another issue with our Tutorial.



The first session refers to the colours of the energy banks and the fuel gauge changing as the resources dissipate.

They don't!

True for the default H.U.D.'s (just took a quick look at their .plist's). That should be amended in the tutorial as the default H.U.D. is what most new Commanders will be dealing with.

However, if you have a look HERE the colors on some of a H.U.D.'s elements can change with the proper coding. Reference: color_low, color_medium, and color_high.

It all depends on how soon a new Commander is willing to get their appendages wet with the possible changes OXZ's/OXP's can make to the game. From my own perspective, when my journey began back in 2018 (same Commander is in flight today) Vanilla game play never entered my mind as an option. Many OXZ's/OXP's were added from day one and coding of any sort was unknown to me. Currently stand with 350+ OXZ's/OXP's in use most of which have been TWEAKED in one way or another. Coding was learned along the way so that those TWEAKS became possible. Never was one to leave well enough alone.

Nite Owl wrote: ↑Fri Jul 05, 2024 1:23 pm

True for the default H.U.D.'s (just took a quick look at their .plist's). That should be amended in the tutorial as the default H.U.D. is what most new Commanders will be dealing with.

If I understand correctly, the Tutorial is one of cim's beloved "scenarios" - all OXPs are kept out and thus one tries out the Tutorial in "Strict mode". This might be what you implied... I'm not too sure!

Thus without Dark Side skills one will only ever play the Tutorial with the vanilla game HUD (which seems to lack the colour changes it refers to).

I wonder if Oolite originally had the colours (and they were then deleted - just as the compass shift to a square to signify the station also got deleted) - or if cim meant to introduce them and then got distracted.

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Fri Jul 05, 2024 1:46 pm

If I understand correctly, the Tutorial is one of cim's beloved "scenarios" - all OXPs are kept out and thus one tries out the Tutorial in "Strict mode". This might be what you implied... I'm not too sure!

Thus without Dark Side skills one will only ever play the Tutorial with the vanilla game HUD (which seems to lack the color changes it refers to).

True once again. Had forgotten the "Strict mode" part of the tutorial as it was too long ago having played it.