Oolite Bulletins

just wondering what oxps most people are running. I've downloaded virtually all of them but i'm sure some are obsolete/half finished or just plain broke as I am getting the occasion crash with seg faults or texture not found in any directory errors. So if you could do a quick ls of your addons folder and paste the results here it'd be good to see which ones are common and I'll probably delete some of the others.

Odd!

Like yourself when I discovered OXPs as a new player, I installed all that were avilable and didn't hit any problems. Now as a Dev, I run with all OXPs installed, so I can try to ensure anything new I submit doesn't crash Oolite. I'm playing with every OXP installed and not hit any problems, BUT the more OXPs you put in, the greater the drain on your systems reasorces. Oolite (unexpanded) chews up a few megs. But if you run with all OXPs in, its an extra 200+ Megs that your system has to cope with.

It may not be a problem with any idvidual OXP installed, but the collective effect, if you see what I mean. Suprised though, my puter is over 4 years old and runs Ok with all OXPs in. Turning off browsers and virius checkers whilst playing helps a lot though, as these chew up a lot of RAM. Also check that your drivers are up to date.

possible linux incompatabilities? as for virus checkers, what the hells that? Perhaps I should just go through the wiki list and cull any oxps that don't appear there?

Just that Anti-virus software running in the background chews up a lot of memory. Oolite is memory hungry and tends to crash if forced to swap to disk. I play on PC windows XP though.

My 'puter has 0.7 G available. My virus defence is Norton and Norton runs in the background to all my other programes, happly chewing up memory. But if its turned off then it doesn't. If I run Oolite with it on then after loading it, XP, browsers, Oolite AND 200M of OXPs, my puter just just dosn't have enough RAM left to run Oolite, it trys to swap to disk. "The Computer says No." and crashes, as it just can't handle all the OXPs being loaded into memory along with the stuff its being asked to do. Closing unnessary apps whilst playing should help.

My OXPs (for example) have been around for a while and don't cause problems in themselves. Other authors (such as Murgh) submitted their first OXPs 3 - 4 years ago. Its not that there are "problem OXPs" as such, it just the volume. If you installed all Murgh's OXPs (or mine for that matter) it would only chew up a couple of Megs of Ram. But the Community is busy and installing the entire communities OXPs chews up loads of RAM.

I'll check on the memory useage then. I have noticed the occasional freeze whilst exiting hyperspace or when a large ship explodes so the memory usage must be fairly high.

Sometimes it also depends where you downloaded the OXPs from. Some of the OXPs on Oosat 1 still have bugs in them that were bruised out in a later version that was available on Oosat 2.

Now a few months ago the old Oosat 2 broke down. A new Oosat 2 was established and is accessible, but not all of the content of the original Oosat 2 is yet moved to the working one. That means that the (supposedly) bug-free versions of some of the buggy OXPs on Oosat 1 are not available anymore.

As for your specific problem: Why don't you post your error messages here? E.g. if it's a "texture not found" it is very likely that somebody on the forum immediatly knows which OXP that texture is from. Then you can either remove that OXP, or try to re-download it, or try to fix it.

A sticky on this would be helpful.

The first thing to say is that Oolite even with OXP's added is pretty stable, and it is not common to have problems, but they can occur.

There are so many OXP's now that if you load all of them at the very beginning, you can have a few issues. If you are having crashes etc, then it is best to load in OXP's one at a time (this will be time consuming, so you could try adding them in groups but keep a record of each group untill you sure they are running ok)and play for a bit to make sure that the game is stable. As far as missions are concerned, it would make sense to load only the ones that pertain to the galaxy you are in. Assassins for example occurs in Galaxy 7, and is a humongus OXP, (almost a game in itself) so in theory there's no reason to loading it untill you are in Galaxy 7.

Mission OXP's in the Wiki here

AFAIK all the ship OXP's seem to be trouble free, but here is an overview of OXP's from a user point of view.

There are different types:-

1. Ships (old/new/retextured/paintjobs/pimped etc)
2. Missions (finite and open ended)
3. Equipment
4. Eye/ear candy (custom sounds/Huds/moons)
5. Sociological/Organisational/political

Some OXP's will be a combination of these eg a theme based mission with new planets, stations, ships,etc.

Some Oxp's eg Huds it is only possible to have one loaded at a time, although some are unique to individual ships.

There is a known conflict between the native mission Nova, and the Deposed OXP Mission, which both occur in galaxy 4. It is recommended to complete Nova before loading Deposed.

Find your up to date OXP's and links to other locations here

HTH


TGHC

gabbakeisen wrote:

texture not found in any directory errors.

Probably the Linux case-sensitivity.

Some people are a bit errr careless with that, because they can easily get away with it when writing for Windows.

This is quite a tricky one (but an issue worth pursuing) I have all the OXPs installed on quite a hefty machine (1 gig of memory, geforce 6 gfx card amd64 3000 cpu) and still I get a number of odd crashes - some seem to relate to the ships (yes Condor I'm looking at you! The Hognose Tugs also looks sheepish here) - then again no-one else seems to have had the problems I've had. Additonally Orbs OXP crashed my computer after sending a stream of Q mines at other ships. Some of the star wars oxps have crashed my game of oolite as well. However, memory is huge issue and after a few trading/combat sessions my pc slows down and then drops out of the game. I'm hoping the next version of Oolite will be a little more stable. Nevertheless this the only game I've played in the last month which tells you something about it.

Ahh the old "sudden crash to windows / virtual memory bug"! Successive versions of PC Oolite have reduced this bug, but its still there. The Alpha released in January 2006 was almost unplayable due to it. None the less of course I did play it, as the game is just do damm addictive!

I have this problem on my PC from time to time, usually though only once every 5 or 6 hours of play, so its not too bad. The new version 1.67 seems a bit more stable than 1.65, but it is still there. I suspect the problem is made worse by certain OXPs. Charlies ships are immensly cool, but I guess all the lights and wirling sub-entries do push Oolite to it limits!

Some great suggestions / ideas here guys thanks

Commander McLane wrote:

Sometimes it also depends where you downloaded the OXPs from. Some of the OXPs on Oosat 1 still have bugs in them that were bruised out in a later version that was available on Oosat 2.

I downloaded all the Oosat1 missions so this is highly likely, as when I later downloaded from Oosat2 I didn't overwrite files as I thought I already had that one. So I might redownload all the Oosat2 oxps and overwrite what I have.

TGHC wrote:

If you are having crashes etc, then it is best to load in OXP's one at a time (this will be time consuming, so you could try adding them in groups but keep a record of each group untill you sure they are running ok)and play for a bit to make sure that the game is stable. As far as missions are concerned, it would make sense to load only the ones that pertain to the galaxy you are in. Assassins for example occurs in Galaxy 7, and is a humongus OXP, (almost a game in itself) so in theory there's no reason to loading it untill you are in Galaxy 7.

Yeah, I removed all my oxps then added them in groups based on first letter. This allowed me to quickly find the 3 or 4 that immediately crashed the game. But I guess a few buggy ones might have got in. RE texture not found (see below)

I hadn't thought of only loading galaxy specific missions for the galaxy your in. Thats a such a simple way to minimise memory use and load time that I feel like an idiot for having overlooked it!

Rxke wrote:

gabbakeisen wrote:

texture not found in any directory errors.

Probably the Linux case-sensitivity.
Some people are a bit errr careless with that, because they can easily get away with it when writing for Windows.

That could explain the texture ones then, For a workaround I guess its just a matter of searching for the texture and then renaming it with the case used by the oxp.

Again thanks for the help

LittleBear wrote:

Ahh the old "sudden crash to windows / virtual memory bug"! Successive versions of PC Oolite have reduced this bug, but its still there. The Alpha released in January 2006 was almost unplayable due to it. None the less of course I did play it, as the game is just do damm addictive!

I have this problem on my PC from time to time, usually though only once every 5 or 6 hours of play, so its not too bad. The new version 1.67 seems a bit more stable than 1.65, but it is still there. I suspect the problem is made worse by certain OXPs. Charlies ships are immensly cool, but I guess all the lights and wirling sub-entries do push Oolite to it limits!

Gareth3377 wrote:

Additonally Orbs OXP crashed my computer after sending a stream of Q mines at other ships.

After having scrutinized Orb.oxp I can tell you that the current version on Charlie's site is quite buggy. So it can help a lot to take it out and wait for a new version.

Rxke wrote:

Probably the Linux case-sensitivity.

Fixed up navy starships oxp. copied const.png and renamed CONST.PNG and then played for 3 hrs without a crash. Combined with the removing of non current galaxy oxps this seems to have made things stable.

Sorted mate!

Get after them thar thargoids