Oolite Bulletins

I first played Elite on the Atari St. Nice colours and graphics, was pretty damn cool.

anyway, a neat feature was that when you went through the docking 'orifice' you went into a little bay which had parked ships in it - you saw the arse ends of adders, wolf's etc all parked off and engnies off..of course what was in tehre changed from system to system and sometimes there was nothing in there. I thought it added a nice bit of atmosphere.

I know its probably a lot of work for little reward, but hey if someone out there was bored...

Jack_H wrote:

a neat feature was that when you went through the docking 'orifice' you went into a little bay which had parked ships in it - you saw the arse ends of adders, wolf's etc all parked off and engnies off..

It really had that? Shame on me, I don't remember.

The original BBC disc version had this too...

There was some talk way back in the mists of time (maybe two years ago) about doing this in Oolite, but it was a very low-priority thing to implement, to the point where I don't believe it ever made it as far as Giles' todo list.

I think Selezen had big plans for this feature.

I'd completely forgotten about that feature on the BBC. I remember now
that the first time I managed to dock successfully, I was so impressed bythe view that I hit F0 to see it again and launched by mistake. At least I got some extra impromptu docking practice.

at that, maybe some sort of confirmation on launch would be useful

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

I think Selezen had big plans for this feature.

Did he?

I remember talking about it, but it'll mean some serious recoding of the docking routine, so it's a bit beyond me to do it. Mind you, maybe it's just a matter of replacing the docking model...

>_>

<_<

okay...
although you seemed quite taken by the notion of modelling the inside of a dock, if I recall correctly.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

okay...
although you seemed quite taken by the notion of modelling the inside of a dock, if I recall correctly.

Is there any way of making a 'cut sequence'? eg. As you enter the dock, rather than the docking 'rings', you see the ship cruise in and onto a docking platform, either from the pilot's perspective or from a third person's.

Captain Hesperus

like in freelancer?

maybe using the magical coffeescript...

the rings IIRC (doing alot of recalling lately) are models, so replacing them with a set of dock-bay models should be possible.

(If only subunits/specific object calls could be made to ROLES or NAME*-key)

Or even if the 'docking bay' doesn't work out, having animated blast doors opening.

Captain Hesperus

more like Frontier then. :p

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

more like Frontier then. :p

Dunno, never played it.

Captain Hesperus

had a short sequence of (insideship viewpoint) you being manuevred into a bay at the side of the docking slit. (plus some lowrez commercials on the walls promoting, among others, railroadtycoon.)
Only on stations and enclosed ports though, not atmospheric docking sequences and flybys.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

okay...
although you seemed quite taken by the notion of modelling the inside of a dock, if I recall correctly.

Aha! Now I remember - yeah, it went from a docking bay to the entire inner workings of a space station.

It's on my memory stick.