Oolite Bulletins

Hey anyone streams your game on Twitch? Would be great if you stream Oolite so I can follow your channel, but any other game also ok

So it's a no? well...shame, I thought it would be fun platform to broadcast Oolite...

Making a stream for Oolite is actually quite difficult. The game is not a fancy pew-pew shoot-everything-spectacularly affair. It has slow gameplay in general (with occasional explosive moments of action) and this is generally not a good match for what a stream would normally present. I have seen a few streams and, for me, the main issue is the long moments of doing basically not much while cruising to the station. A lot of people enjoy this relaxing style of play, but streams need stuff happening all the time to maintain the interest of the viewers.

The fact that you need to add expansions to bring the graphics and sound up is also another issue. Streams need to be visually exciting and Oolite, in its base form distribution, does not have that. Many streamers don't go into the trouble of making the game "modern", either because they don't know what graphics and sound packs exist or they can't be bothered; they just download the base and start streaming that.

It would probably be better if instead of streaming, someone could edit a video of the game with most of the long waiting times removed and the action moments enhanced with the best graphics and sound packs that are available.

another_commander wrote: ↑Fri Mar 02, 2018 10:59 am

It would probably be better if instead of streaming, someone could edit a video of the game with most of the long waiting times removed and the action moments enhanced with the best graphics and sound packs that are available.

There may be something of the sort in the top Oolite videos in YouTube.

another_commander wrote: ↑Fri Mar 02, 2018 10:59 am

The game is not a fancy pew-pew shoot-everything-spectacularly affair. It has slow gameplay in general (with occasional explosive moments of action) and this is generally not a good match for what a stream would normally present.

That - and I'd guess many of us prefer to play rather than watch someone play.

Cody wrote: ↑Fri Mar 02, 2018 1:53 pm

That - and I'd guess many of us prefer to play rather than watch someone play.

Heck, I very much enjoy watching others gaming, both IRL and on youtube/twitch, and even I find the vast majority of Oolite videos to be boring as hell.. (despite loving to play the game myself)

So far as I can tell, this is because - like so much of old-school gaming - all the best/real action is going on inside your head. A video can't capture that.

DataPacRat wrote: ↑Fri Mar 02, 2018 1:32 pm

another_commander wrote: ↑Fri Mar 02, 2018 10:59 am

It would probably be better if instead of streaming, someone could edit a video of the game with most of the long waiting times removed and the action moments enhanced with the best graphics and sound packs that are available.

There may be something of the sort in the top Oolite videos in YouTube.

The most recent one there seems to be four years old, unless you go well down the page to one in Russian, so most will be missing a lot of recent add-ons etc.

I have streamed Oolite about twenty hours total on SmashTV (formerly HitboxTV) at the end of last year. Hitbox has far less viewers than Twitch, but I never got Twitch to make my stream appear in the live streams list - I suspect probably due to the low quality of my stream because I have very little upstream bandwidth. At least with Hitbox my stream was actually visible; and they updated the icon for Oolite quickly on my request.

My hope was to make someone discover Oolite, but the only viewers I had were people from the IRC channel. Which is still nice to have, because it "ups" your stream in Twitch's/Hitbox's live streams list and make it more visible. I got no "new" viewer, yet I will probably stream again when I come back to Oolite. Building viewership requires a lot of patience for any game and any platform.

As AC noted, Oolite is a tough sell. However I'd rather show it as it is than making a somewhat misleading sort of trailer (let's leave that to commercial games . In the end, only a certain type of player will actually stick to it. Showing something else can only work against us.

On the subject of streams, here is one I thought was quite cool, only 16 hrs old at the time of this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jItwNuOTT0g

like so much of old-school gaming - all the best/real action is going on inside your head. A video can't capture that.

Yes, Diziet. Excellent comment. I think streaming Oolite could possibly work with a good enough personality narrating. Maybe. I watch slow, chess game streams from good personalities.