Another newbie

[LittleBear]

Sounds like there's either somthing wrong with your System or your install of Oolite is messed up!

I play on a fairly low spec PC will over 100 OXPs installed, but I added an extra 512 of RAM to take it to 750 M total and Oolite runs well.

Occasionally the game will crash to windows for no apparent reason, but I do mean occasionally - like once in 10 hours of play. PC Oolite 1.65 is prety stable, but it is very memory hungry.

500M of RAM is pretty much the minium to run it. Idealy you'd want 1 G, particulary if you have browsers, firewall software and virus scanners running. (Oolite is unplayable with Spy Sweeper running).

Oolite will crash all the time if you force it to swap to disk. Remember XP chews up 100 odd Megs and browsers and firewalls will easly chew up another 200 M, playing with all the OXPs in chews up another 200M, so if your low on RAM there is not much left to run Oolite.

TIPS:-

Re-install Oolite, just in case it got curropted. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to reinstall Word over the years beacause it "can't find" the spell check files - and thats a comercial piece of software rather than home-brew! Having to reinstall things seems a fact of PC ownership!

Shut down all your other applications.

Buy some more RAM - Its cheap at £30 for 512M and easy to fit.

Run in Full Screen. The window seems less stable.

In my experience RAM is the problem with Oolite. It can cope with the machine being slow or the Graphics Card being old, but it will crash a lot if it has insufficent memory.

As for the Mass Locking by the Station. Just hit your fuel injectors for a couple of seconds and you'll clear the gravity well. I a fast ship like Asp, IC etc you could hit H as soon as you leave the station and be clear before the countdown has finished. In the Cobra III you might have to wait 10 seconds before hitting H, in the old bucket of bolts Cobra I you have a long wait. There are disadvantages to downgrading at the start to get a lot of kit straight away!

[Killer Wolf]

Cheers Captain.

probbly is the RAm - i got myself a nice mobo w/ 3 mem slots for Photoshop, put 1/2 gig in each. lovely. except, it's not. had nowt but trouble w/ it turns out, after maaaaaany hours trawling techy sites, the mobo don't like 3 mem sticks. so, why build it w/ fricking 3 slots!?!?!? >:-(
should really take it apart and pull one out, but y'know...Delta Force has a habit of doing the same, will just vanish or bleb on boot up of the game, odd thing is it usually does it about 3 or 4 times then runs stable, i've just had oolite bleb about 4 times off the trot, i stopped, had my tea, came back and was fine for about 2 hours.
it was all those Event thingies that got me, i'm wondering if the reason i haven't been attacked as much is because it's blebbing when trying to generate events?

anyways - where's the Large Cargo Holds? i got a Cobbie MkI, 10t of space, no where's selling the large cargo hold. iss it only available if you have a MkIII?

KW
//\oo/\\

[johnsmith]

Some ships can't take large cargo bays. Just the way life is I'm afraid.

[DaddyHoggy]

@Killer Wolf - PCs are potentially horribly complicated things - I've just spent a day trying to upgrade from a 128MB FX5600 to a 256MB FX5700 and have had to give up as it made my whole PC completely unstable - no reason - just did - a whole day of potential Oolite (not to mention real life) wasted. But to answer the question about your memory and three slots issue. My motherboard also has 3 slots for memory but what slots get used depends on what I'm trying to run - max 1GB stick of PC3200 (DDR400) max 2x1GB sticks of PC2700 (DDR333) or max 3x1GB PC2100 (DDR266) - so what I'm actually running is a stick of 512MB PC3200 and a stick of 256MB PC3200 but running them both underclocked as PC2700 otherwise my motherboard would do one of two things 1) fall over a lot because it was trying to read PC3200 from two slots and it can't 2) ignore all the memory in slot 2 and leave me with effectively just 512MB - as Oolite is memory intensive I'm much better with 768MB of slightly slower memory than 512MB of quicker memory. There will almost certainly be some combination of memory/FSB bus speed you can use to get the most out of what you've got.

Re: Cobby Mk1's - all my friends who downsized found out about the lack of cargo expansion the same as you did - you make your choices - well spec'd CMk1 but with limited trading capabilities or struggle initially with the CMk3 (like I did) but good trading potential once you're over the hump... Me I'm aiming for a SuperCobra

[LittleBear]

Or shield booster or Military Shields. One of the downsides of downgrading at the start. All though the Cobra III is mince-meat until you get ECM Injectors and Military Lasers, its a handy ship as it can have all available equipment fitted. Installing Murgh's Rusty Ships OXP is handy as you can get old banger versions of all the clasic elite chips. Cos they have thing wrong with them!

[Cmdr Wyvern]

You could stick with the startup Cobby and stay off the space lane 'tween the witchspace beacon and the planet, till you have it dressed up enough to survive a few bandits.
Fuel injectors, scoop, beam laser, and ECM are the minimal needed to do some fighting with, otherwise a stock Cobra 3 doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell.