Oolite Bulletins

Hi All,

Just wanted to poke my head in and say hello. I just discovered Oolite via Wikipedia a couple of days ago, and have already let my "Old School Gamer" buddies know about it. I had Elite on my PC (XT with 640k of RAM) and played it pretty religiously. Oolite has recaptured that era pretty effectively - when thousands of hours of gameplay goodness could be encased in one flimsy 360k floppy.

Sweeeet.

For the most part, I like the updates to the game. It feels like Elite, but with some extra spiffiness as set out in The Dark Wheel - multiple missile targeting and ship-ship comms (distress calls, etc) for starters. Very nice.

One thing though - hyperspacing into Riedquat used to fill the player with adrenaline - no sooner than you'd exited Witchspace, pirates would be all over you like fat kids on candy. Now, you have to jump in and out from the Witchspace Buoy looking for a fight.

Oh yeah! Where can I find one of them Scanner Upgrade thingies that shows you the target's legal status? In the wiki it's listed as Tech 11 planets, but they're not at Leesti. Am I missing something?

Thanks all for listening!

-MW

Hi MW

I can't remember how many pirates used to be in different systems, but if you're not challenged enough by the basic game, you could go ahead and install some dozens expansions from Oosat 1 & 2. That should liven things a bit up. (got 100+ running myself). You could also produce a simple expansion yourself, ensuring that anyone jumping to that system is ambushed by pirates at the WP buoy - it's surprisingly easy to make expansions for this game.

It looks like the Wiki is wrong with regards to where to buy the Scanner Targeting Enhancement. You need to find a shipyard with tech level 12 or higher.

Hi, MadWallaby,

welcome to the forums.

Dr. Nil, the Wiki entry has been changed. You absolutely sure it's TL >=12? Been so long since I bought one...

Quite sure. I checked the equipment.plist before I posted the answer.

Yes of course, best place to go looking.

Dr. Nil wrote:

Hi MW

I can't remember how many pirates used to be in different systems, but if you're not challenged enough by the basic game, you could go ahead and install some dozens expansions from Oosat 1 & 2. That should liven things a bit up. (got 100+ running myself). You could also produce a simple expansion yourself, ensuring that anyone jumping to that system is ambushed by pirates at the WP buoy - it's surprisingly easy to make expansions for this game.

There is the pirate ambush oxp on Oosat1....

Captain Hesperus
"Running from pirates is the worst time to find that your Witchdrive Fuel Injectors really should have regular maintenance to prevent the feeds from clogging...."

@ MW - welcome - the game is superb but follow others advice start filling up with oxps to make life on the spacelanes very (sometime too) interesting.

Even just sunskimmers, piratetraps and piratecoves can make things a little hairy at times!

Cap'n H wrote:

Running from pirates is the worst time to find that your Witchdrive Fuel Injectors really should have regular maintenance to prevent the feeds from clogging....

Yeh, the only rapid pulsing going on there was his sphincter

Captain Hesperus wrote:

There is the pirate ambush oxp on Oosat1....

Thanks. For some reason I believed it to be an older version of the Pirates' Cove and deleted it.

Thanks all for the warm welcome.

I guess I should have got off my fat, lazy can and hypered over to Zaonce (Tech 12) for my Scanner Upgrade. Done and Done - and boy does it make Bounty Hunting a breeze. No more "Look harmless and wait to be attacked".

I will indeed start scoping out the OXPs. From what I've read so far, the Oolite community has been going nuts with some seriously cool modding. I wonder though - do you guys and gals have some recommendations? If you were to put a limited number of OXPs in, what would they be?

MadWallaby wrote:

If you were to put a limited number of OXPs in, what would they be?

If my hardware could only handle one OXP then I'd choose ClearSkies since it lowers the the load on the machine and allows one to install some more

Beyond that it's really a personal choice. You can go for break neck pirate action or missions or visual variations like tourist attractions or loads of ships. I try to avoid choosing and fill up on everything until it starts affecting how fast the game runs and then maybe take out an expansion or two.

Since the game only reads the files in the folders within the add-ons folder which end with .oxp you can have a folder within the add-ons folder called 'out' where you store the OXPs that you don't use at the moment (installing and removing expansions is as easy as that).

Are there any issues with savegame compatibility? Like, if I put in WhizBang.OXP then decide later it's teh suq (s1c), can I back out the OXP and still have Commander Wallaby fully operational in Vanilla Oolite?

I get the feeling that someone's going to say something like "All these questions and more are answered in the wiki, n00b"...

The only savegame issue I'm aware of is that you have to keep an OXP of the ship you are flying. Otherwise you can change what you like.

And again don't uninstall an OXP containing equipment you have installed on your ship.

Otherwise you will need to reinstall it before you can load.

Most missions and other OXPs other than mentioned above should be fine to uninstall.