Oolite Bulletins

Go ahead, make fun of me, say my computer doesn't compute well, etc...

It's been a while since I played Oolite, but last Sunday I finally downloaded and installed it again. Then I went for the OXPs - and you people have been busy!

Out of the huge list, I installed all I found. I heard about the Chernoosat2 accident, but it's still quite a long list.
After too many hours of point-click-download, I finally started to unpack the OXPs to the Addons folder.

...
and kept unpacking
...
not finished yet
...
<yawn>
...

Monday! "Ok, I'll just laze away and play, and bugger the parts I've got to go look for to reassemble the boat's engine." Or, I would have. I had to remove about half of the OXPs to be able to play... and still, only slowly and ceasing to respond each time there was a large explosion!
I also noticed that the original ships became extremely outnmbered, and the lanes overcrouded.

This gave me an idea - which I'll pass on to you people since I can't code.
I noticed that there are some main "scuderias", based on this or that galaxy. How about if the ships of certain companies would appear on a certain galaxy, then in reducing frequency on the two following (such as 50%, 10%), but not in the previous galaxy?
There could also be a price increase for selling them outside their original galaxy out of their rarity, up to doubling or tripling the price by the time the player has almost cycled the galaxies in the ship.

Conversely, get too far from the home galaxy and the price drops due to lack of available parts.

As for the lag...lag...crash. I had a similar incidenton my WinTel PC (as opposedto an OSXTel). Even without OXPs installed had some serious instability. I was informed that Oolite is very memory hungry and does NOT like to page swap.

I also found ooliteTP5.exe to be more robust (plus eye candy with the Texured Planets). This may be unique to my situation, but...

This is where I found the Textured planets .exe:

http://developer.berlios.de/project/sho ... up_id=2999

Checking you have up to date graphics card drivers can also speed things up. If you install the ClearSkys.oxp that takes some of the load of Oolite. It may just be down to memory though. All the OXPs stack up to nearly 200 Megs, which Oolite has to store in RAM. If you close your browser and Anti Virus that will if its a memory problem.

Not being that technical, but I have found that some OXPs cause some stability issues with my system. Unfortunately the OXPs that cause the instability are fantastic (such as the Condor OXP) so I have to play without them.

You might want to completely uninstall oolite and reinstall it (with the textured planets mod).

My game is fairly stable, but I still get random crashes even with 1gig of memory. (However, this might be the perfect excuse to buy more memory heh heh)

Cheers

Gareth

Yea, but not a good enough excuse for my wife. "But honey I NEED a new PC. I can't become Elite without one!" Nope, not gonna fly.

(although Maximum PC mag says that MS Flight Sim X IS the perfect excuse to buy a new 'puter because of Direct X 10)

reills wrote:

Yea, but not a good enough excuse for my wife. "But honey I NEED a new PC. I can't become Elite without one!" Nope, not gonna fly.

Ah, I see your error! You should have said, "But darling, if we don't get a new 'puter you'll have to spend hours listening to me whining and whinging about us NOT having a new 'puter."

After a few weeks of that, she should crack. Mine's right on the brink now.....

<EDIT> P.S. Welcome aboard, Maegil! How's the boat/ship/yacht (covering all the bases)?

Captain Hesperus
"Sneaky? No, I'm a downright bastard!"

Luckily we have a new (heated) barn to sleep in when I'm kicked out...

Captain Hesperus wrote:

<EDIT> P.S. Welcome aboard, Maegil! How's the boat/ship/yacht (covering all the bases)?

Sailing -> Outworld

I've read on the black monks topic that it's not possible to change the ship's prices, so for the local ships idea...
Still, is there any plan for making OXP packages, to avoid newbies/catastrofy survivors spending hours to get them all?

On the ship prices, you can change them, but just not a one particular station. On the OXPs. I have them all on my machine, so I could make a ZIP out of AddOns! Trouble is it would be somthing stupid like a 60M zip, so somebody would need to host it. Many OXPs do all lots of stuff in one go though (such as oldships, x-ships etc).

60MB isn't all that much, but it could be split in theme packs and subdivided if still too big. Another cool thing would be an update checker capable of seeing what you have and comparing versions.

As for my current problem, I've got only 2.5GB of free space on C:, could that be why Oolite crashes every time a pirate cove is destroyed?
I'm backing up my programs and files to merge partitions so I'll have more free room.