Oolite Bulletins

Greetings Commanders,


Recently I started playing Oolite again. Well.. about 2 months ago.
Started a new Jameson on 1.84

Wow! It is beautiful and alive. Thank you so much!
It seems to have come a long way since I last played, years ago.

Running on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) on MacOSX 10.10



I started playing the plain/stock version.
After I killed the Constrictor I added a bunch of OXPs, mainly ambience/systems/dockables.
With the Comms Pack, the NPSc are very chatty. They mostly say appropriate things for the situation.

I love how alive the ooniverse is, with NPCs going about their business and triggering responses in each other.



Here are some things I experienced:
(Not complaints, just things that I noticed.)

Audio goes wonky after a while.
Mostly it happens during combat, when many sounds are spawned at/around the same time. But sometimes also when only few sounds are playing.
It's hard to describe, but I'll try: It's like sometimes the wrong effect is applied to the wrong channel. Sometimes buffers don't get cleared and start looping. Eventually channels start dying off and there is just buzz/hum or silence.

In this version, all ships and stations are nicely textured. I think I remember the previous version they were just plain coloured solids. With the new textured ships etc.., the Torus station looks quite low-res by comparison.

I have sniper lock. It works so well that I almost consider it a cheat, but on the other hand, it makes thinning out a pack at long range as easy as it was on the BBC, where everything turned in to a 2x2-pixel square.

I use headlights. I don't seem to have a gamma adjustment option, and without it, things are too dark for me. They do not seem to remember the setting. I have to reactivate them after every jump.

The Constrictor didn't drop any cargo, or I may have accidentally shot it. (I think it did drop an escape pod which I delivered to the main station and got a 'thank you' for.)

Delivery of the Thargoid plans is Nintendo-Hard. 3 war ships waiting for me at the witch point after every jump. Especially after a 6.8LY jump, no fuel left. It did teach me to appreciate rear mounted lasers.

I got a mission to deliver documents to <station> in <galaxy>. After I delivered the documents, the mission seems stuck in my ships manifest. Or if I didn't actually complete it, I have no clue what else to do.

Hitting ships that are on to others is much harder than when they're on to me. I guess this works the other way round as well, otherwise it would be impossible to take out a 12 pack. I.e. the other 11 have a hard time hitting me as I'm dogfighting one of them at a time.

Twice, I had a misjump, with not enough fuel left to get out of interstellar space. Luckily there was a navy behemoth there too, so I could refuel. (Or is it not luck?)

I had a 30 minute (game time) docking queue. First I was 15th in inbound queue on arrival, then had to wait for 18 outbound ships. Normally, there are one or two or so in front of me.

Upon jumping into another system, I was greeted by 17 (seventeen) hostiles. After killing them off, I ran into another 8 pack fairly close to the S-zone. Arrived at the station with 25 kills. Is this something that could happen to a new Jameson, or do I get special treatment for having lots of kills?

I came across a Coriolis station that was spinning way too fast and in the opposite direction and not pointing towards the planet/buoy. Something must have happened there but I wasn't around to witness it. (Later I occurred to me that I should have tried Docking Computers to see how they cope with that situation.)

Sometimes cops turn on me and I turn offender while doing nothing wrong in their presence. Can other ships (that have witnessed me doing bad things) snitch on me to the Vipers?

It seems I can shoot/kill clean ships in the S-zone as long as there are no vipers (or the station itself?) in radar range, without gaining offender status. Is that right?


Again: No complaints. I love the look and feel of the ooniverse.
Very impressive how far this project has come.
Thanks to everyone making this possible!




Apropos of nothing, I've been playing with goat soup.

After a lot of puzzling, I figured out the correct algorithm for the planet descriptions. ('correct' as in 'identical to the BBC disk version')

Most implementations 'out there' are almost but not entirely correct. Most/all have the same flaw, specifically in descriptions that have other (random) planet names int them. There are a total of 12 wrong descriptions. The first one is: vicious disease instead of deadly earthquake for Leleer. (1st galaxy, 3rd planet)

The issue is that the 'random' function in the original 6502 code uses the carry bit (for ROL and ADC), but the state on entry is not always the same. The solution is to keep track of and manipulate the carry bit. The puzzling was to figure out when to set/clear/leave it.

I put it here if anyone is interested: http://jobiwan.net/planets/




Someome should make an OXP that turns Qube into a cube.
(Qube is reasonably well known for its great dense forests and its unique geometry.)

Welcome back, Commander - are you using the newer version of the Torus station?

Welcome back, commander!

hoqllnq wrote:

Audio goes wonky after a while.

Is this with BGS installed, or just the standard FX?

hoqllnq wrote:

use headlights. <snip> They do not seem to remember the setting. I have to reactivate them after every jump.

Norby might be able to address that one.

hoqllnq wrote:

I don't seem to have a gamma adjustment option

In your planetinfo.plist file you can adjust the light level with this setting:

hoqllnq wrote:

The Constrictor didn't drop any cargo

I believe this is correct. The Constrictor doesn't have any cargo space.

hoqllnq wrote:

It did teach me to appreciate rear mounted lasers.

They are critical, and not just for Thargoids!

hoqllnq wrote:

Luckily there was a navy behemoth there too, so I could refuel. (Or is it not luck?)

There is another way. You just have to stay alive long enough to get it.

hoqllnq wrote:

I had a 30 minute (game time) docking queue.

The ILS oxp can help here in speeding up docking ships.

hoqllnq wrote:

I came across a Coriolis station that was spinning way too fast and in the opposite direction and not pointing towards the planet/buoy.

I've never seen this one before! It sounds like an OXP-related issue. Was it the default Coriolis station?

hoqllnq wrote:

Sometimes cops turn on me and I turn offender while doing nothing wrong in their presence.

I've had this happen too. If cops find you fighting another clean NPC (eg assassin) they will make a judgement call based on your role weight as perceived by the game, and sometimes it roll comes down in favour of your opponent. I've often been on approach to dock at a station when some loopy Hognose pilot accuses me of eating his brother and starts shooting at me. The police quite often decide I'm the guilty party and I get slapped with a fine.

hoqllnq wrote:

It seems I can shoot/kill clean ships in the S-zone as long as there are no vipers (or the station itself?) in radar range, without gaining offender status. Is that right?

Pretty much. Although the more you commit acts of piracy or indiscriminate shooting the more your role weights will change. The game will view you differently.

It's great you're enjoying the game so much, and that you held off installing OXP's until after your "initiation process".

Fly safe, commander!

Welcome back hoqllnq!

No problem at me with [wiki]Headlights[/wiki], it save the settings into the game and restore at load and after jumps well. Note there are two settings and set the lower (default) one after jumps so you should increase that and not the high level only.

Traffic jams are cured by [wiki]ILS[/wiki] even if you do not have the equipment just installed this oxp due to NPC ships "buy" it.

hoqllnq wrote:

Recently I started playing Oolite again. Well.. about 2 months ago.
Started a new Jameson on 1.84

Just like i did (i played about ten, maybe eight years before).

hoqllnq wrote:

The Constrictor didn't drop any cargo, or I may have accidentally shot it. (I think it did drop an escape pod which I delivered to the main station and got a 'thank you' for.)

I received a bounty of 1,000 Cr for that escape pod (besides 256 extra kills) when i docked after destroying the constrictor.

hoqllnq wrote:

Delivery of the Thargoid plans is Nintendo-Hard. 3 war ships waiting for me at the witch point after every jump. Especially after a 6.8LY jump, no fuel left. It did teach me to appreciate rear mounted lasers.

Yes, this mission forced me to evolve a new strategy:
Do not attack the Thargoid Warships first. Just watch what they are doing. They seem to select random targets and each warship selects his own target. Sometimes one is just flying away (to a target outside of your scanner range), sometimes one is shooting at the witchpoint beacon. I have seen two shooting at each other, one shooting at another one that didn't strike back and also my cargo shepherd was shoot at once by a thargoid warship. As long as they are busy with their actual targets they won't harm you (unless you are one of those, of course). If this target is destroyed you might become its next target and as you attack a warship you will become its target.
Sometimes only one is attacking you: Keep the focus on that specific warship and kill it. While it is on low shields/energy it will bear and control up to (if the warship is not destroyed faster) five thargoid robot fighters that help defending it. Just keep hitting the main ship. As it is destroyed, the robot fighters either become inactive - in this case scoop 'em up for later and attack the next warship - or are controlled by another thargoid warship, sharing its target (means: they stop attacking you). Just follow the robot fighters to their control ship to attack it so it releases the next five robot fighters.
If you are chased by a warship and his robot fighters keep at least 10 km between you and the robot fighters. They stop shooting at about this distance. As you mentioned, keep hitting the warship using the rear laser.
Eventually all warships are destroyed and all robot fighters become inactive. Kill em all, as killing one increases your kill count and gives a bounty of 50 Cr.
If your laser is overheating when shooting the robots or other ships start scooping them, you better quickly scoop as many robots as you can. You might even attack and destroy the other scoopers as they usually will "give back" the robots to space when destroyed.
After scooping, fly far away from any ship that may scoop your robot fighters. On half speed release all robots so they are lined up in a nice row. Stop your ship and line up with the row-o-robots, keep firing until your laser overheats, yaw (or pitch) your ship so the next (cool) laser can be used and so on. If you are using four lasers the first one is cooled down after using the fourth.
Hint: Do this before docking anywhere as docking will turn any thargoid robot fighters into rather useless (well, you at least can sell those...) alien items. I surely missed far more than 50 kills this way (as i noticed each time after docking) when i fought against other ships after scooping and forgot about my "cargo".

This way i "abused" this mission to increase my kill count up to about 4,000 while working on my progress for the explorer's club . I even got - besides the naval energy unit - 256 extra kills as a reward for this mission too.

Welcome back both!

And glad you still seem to be enjoying it

phkb wrote:

hoqllnq wrote:

I came across a Coriolis station that was spinning way too fast and in the opposite direction and not pointing towards the planet/buoy.

I've never seen this one before! It sounds like an OXP-related issue. Was it the default Coriolis station?

This is a known long-standing intermittent bug with Oolite on Macs.. but the cause is proving very hard to pin down. If you want to help kill the bug, the last page or two of the discussion I linked above have some info on how you can set some de-bugging breakpoints that might aid the devs in identifying the culprit.

Cody wrote:

Welcome back, Commander - are you using the newer version of the Torus station?

I use the one that's in the OXP manager. It says it is 2.02 which is also the highest/current one on the wiki.

phkb wrote:

hoqllnq wrote:

Audio goes wonky after a while.

Is this with BGS installed, or just the standard FX?

I use BGS now, but I think it also happens without any OXPs. I will try it for a bit.

phkb wrote:

hoqllnq wrote:

use headlights. <snip> They do not seem to remember the setting. I have to reactivate them after every jump.

Norby might be able to address that one.

So yeah .. not only does this Norby character point out what I'm doing wrong .. when I follow the suggestion on how to fix the issue, the issue is fixed. What's up with that?

Norby wrote:

Traffic jams are cured by [wiki]ILS[/wiki] even if you do not have the equipment just installed this oxp due to NPC ships "buy" it.

I don't mind a bit of a queue. To me, it adds to the realism of the ooniverse. I see a lot of traffic go by while I play around in the space lanes. It would be weird when I get to the station and nobody is there. This 30 minutes queue was an extreme example and happened only once. I will install the OXP and see how I like it.

Diziet Sma wrote:

hoqllnq wrote:

I came across a Coriolis station that was spinning way too fast and in the opposite direction and not pointing towards the planet/buoy.

This is a known bug on Macs...

I will read that thread and see what I can do.

hoqllnq wrote:

This 30 minutes queue was an extreme example and happened only once. I will install the OXP and see how I like it.

Should be some queue due to ships which are not equipped with injectors still need time to arrive into the dock, but improve the most annoying last part where docking computers made slow adjustments.
[wiki]Trails[/wiki] can visualize the new shorter trajectory of landing ships.

I would be glad if you report your feelings in the ILS topic.

I too have come back after several years away. I seem to be an OXP hog though as I appear to have over 500 installed.

scaseman wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2017 4:21 pm

I too have come back after several years away. I seem to be an OXP hog though as I appear to have over 500 installed.

I'd say it's impossible. 500 is the current number of OXZs available in the manager, and some of them are incompatible with each other.

I think scaseman installed some manually from the OXP List which are not OXZ-ified.

With apologies to Blackadder...

"Darling, take a note of the word 'OXZ-ified'. I like it. I want to use it more often in conversation."

Welcome back scaseman, hoqllnq and indeed anyone else.

Runghold wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2016 9:15 pm

Kill em all, as killing one increases your kill count and gives a bounty of 50 Cr.

I must admit that I hadn't noticed that bounty. Since a lot of the time, you struggle to get 35 € per tonne of "Alien Items", that changes the strategy for an encounter considerably.
"Bring 'em back dead or alive" becomes "bring back right hands" or something similar. Even for robots.

I have 341 installed via the in game manager and 223 installed manually. I have not noticed any real clashes although I did have problems with cargo contracts which I solved by removing the add on in the game manager and fixing the game save file. Frame rate is usually around 25 to 40 sometimes a bit more sluggish but not enough in my opinion to affect game play. Currently running on 12GB RAM Vista 64 bit Intel i7 920 2.67 HZ Nvidia Geforce GT630.