Oolite Bulletins

Hello all,

Would it be possible to have a different sound for a missile launch warning? As far as I can tell, you get the same noise for a missile launch or when another ship becomes aggressive towards you, which is fine when you are dealing with one or two hostiles from distance. When you are in the thick of things, with numerous ships within 10 km radius, then it all gets very busy. I try to rely on all the stimuli I can get, and when I hear that warning I normally press E just as a precaution, because I sometimes also have a dodgy caption stuck on screen as well. Again, this is all well and good if your banks are full, but if you are getting roasted the last thing you need is your ECM draing away precious energy.

I don't want to puss out from the finer points of gaming here, as it should not be a walk in the park, but I don't thik this would detract from the pure gaming experience...

There we go shoot me down chaps....

Something else which might be worth looking at is the ability to shoot missiles. I seem to recall shooting missiles out the sky on a regular basis in Elite, but it's next to impossible in Oolite. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it should be noted.

northers,

have you tried the custom sounds project?
http://oosat.alioth.net/node/71

Cheers Rxke.

I have downloaded the file, will try and install it tonight. Thing is, I am a total moron when it comes to this sort of thing, where exactly do I unzip it to?

I have been waiting until I score the constrictor mission until I add anything in, as I am trying to keep the experience as 'pure' as possible, but I don't think this will hurt......

re: OXP (Oolite eXpansion Packs) installation see the excellent wiki write-up:

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP

Like northers, I was also thinking a sound for "incoming missile" that differs from the "ship gone agressive" sound would be good. I did install the custom sounds project (almost immediately upon beginning to play), but the sounds of the two actions sound the same as one another, to me.

So, I wondered if the custom sounds oxp was really installed right. I noticed that some oxps come in folders, while others don't. (I am not talking about the nested-folder phenomenon warned about in the "how to install oxps" info, but simply having the oxp file in its own folder.) I knew that some of the oxps that were bare inside the AddOns folder (lacking a folder of their own) were working, so I tried taking the custom sounds oxp out of its folder. This disabled it! (There was no longer a sound effect for leaving or entering a station, and the fuel scoop sound had been replaced by a voice saying "container acquired" or something like that, which was odd when scooping fuel from a star.)

So now I am wondering why some oxps work without having their own folder, and others need to be in one.... and which of the oxps I have installed may not actually be active because of this phenomenon.

Does it have anything to do with the custom sounds project having 2 different downloads (custsounds, and the alt_sounds ogg files), with multiple files in the latter of those downloads ?

I am a programming ignoramus, so I may be asking a dumb question here.

Instead of just a different alarm noise, wouldn't it be fun to have a tracking ping? Like the sonar noise you hear on movies when a torpedo is incoming.

Ping ... ... ... ... Ping ... ... ... Ping ... ... Ping ... Ping Ping [BOOM]

I think that would scare the living daylights out of me. If I didn't have ECM.

I like the ping idea!

Yeah, the pinging idea sounds neat.
I've mentioned it before, but I think also you should suffer momentary flash blindness if a missile goes off visible to you at too close a distance (or a ship explodes too close and you can see it), in the style you get flashblinded in True Combat: Elite (an ETWolf mod)

One sound could be the console quoting Shakespeare at you:

I am constant as the northern star!

followed by the 'player' growling

I'd give real money if he'd shut up!



</trek>

Note to Galley; Romulan Ale no longer to be served on this bulletin board.

Have you detected any radiation surges?

<accent=Russian>Only the size of my head...</accent>

I'm pretty sure that with Custom Sounds in, the voice says "Missile Launched" and "Warning Incoming Missile" as approprate. You may need the latest version of the OXP and the new 1.65b3 version of Oolite for this to work though.

Yeah, it was doing that.

Two things about the voice, though:

1) It is so calm and subtle of a voice that it doesn't inspire me to to be alarmed, and I would often take little notice of it. I think I started to ignore the voice, like a girlfriend who talks too much. ...Which leads me to my second point:

2) Despite the aforementioned calmness and subtleness, I eventually got annoyed with having the voice on, as it comments on every little thing: "forward view. Aft view. missile armed. missile locked onto python. missiles on safety. missile armed. ECM system activated. Toilet seat left up. What are you thinking about? Do you really love me?...."

So, I turned the voice off.

I thought the voice was part of the basic game. I didn't think it was only a function of the custom sounds oxp. Is it?

Think "nagging nora" is OXP only (unless Giles made it native in the new version, it certainly used to be OXP only). If you want to personalise what the voice says (ie so it doesn't warn you of everthing) if you go to the OXPs Sounds folder and delete or move elsewhere the events you don't like.

Personally though I like the star trek feel of the computer voice for everything.