Oolite Bulletins

Hey guys,

Fantastic game. I first played this on my Apple IIc many moons ago, and you've done an incredible job of bringing it into the 21st Century. I've downloaded it now about six times, and uninstalled it about five, as days tend to disappear when I start playing.

It's worse than crack.

Anyway, have some thoughts on a few issues fwiw...

1) YAW: Too easy. It's only a matter of time before someone patches it to their mouse and that wonderfully, wonky roll 'n' pitch flight dynamic gets tossed for point, click, and pulverize.

The game really loses something if you go that route.

2) Hacking. Only took me a few seconds to add about six billion credits to my account. If I can do it, ANYONE can. Yes it ruins the game a bit, and you have no one but yourself to blame. But its too easy, too tempting, and I am weak.

Some people need protection from themselves.

3) I only downloaded a couple enhancements, but apparently the SuperCobra was one of them. Anyway, the ship is kinda powerful ... don't you think? Seven energy banks? With better roll, pitch and speed than a Wolf?

It's just not right.

Anyway, just some stray thoughts. The game is awesome.

Best,
Fluxboy

(ps And while I'm grumbling, get rid of those navigation buoys. As pretty as they are, I feel the need to blow them up everytime I see them. In the old days, we lined ourselves up with the planet, and layed odds on whether our shields would hold up for docking. It built charactor.)

welcome! keep blasting away! and download some of the missions while you are at it. i'd be interesting in hearing what you do to them. ^^

The Super Cobra is a bit Over powered, but remember that any ship the player can have is also available to pirates and other NPCs. If you play with all the OXPs installed then there are some very nasty ships out there! To keep yourself honest don't buy a Super Cobra unless you also play with a lot of other Ship and Mission OXPs in. You should find the balance of power is then fair. The games writer (Giles) has described Oolite as Elite 1.5. Its meant to be set time-wise about half way between Elite and FFE, so tech has moved on since Elite and some of the classic ships are now starting to get a bit long in the tooth!

On the editing, its the ease with which the code can be modded that makes it possible for non-programmers to write OXPs. So you just have to resist temptation! It is much more fun to play honestly.

NPC Supercobras are so large that blasting them from 20k before they have the chance to do the same to you is a bit of a doddle, I find.

Hi Fluxboy and welcome.

It's early days for you yet, you'll find that while some ships like the supercobra and imperial courier are a bit uber, you'll also find that some of your opponents are too, so it all tends to balance out. The more OXP's you incorporate the more you will see the added variety and enhancements there are, not only eye and ear candy, but also the missions.

As far as hacking is concerned, yes it's easy enough if you know how, it can't compensate the sense of achievement you get by doing it the hard way.

Enjoy!

TGHC wrote:

Hi Fluxboy and welcome.

It's early days for you yet, you'll find that while some ships like the supercobra and imperial courier are a bit uber, you'll also find that some of your opponents are too, so it all tends to balance out.

I agree! Just went toe-to-toe with a pirate IC and nearly got pasted by it's three forward lasers.

Captain Hesperus

Hey guys,

Thanks for the feedback. Went and loaded up a bunch of OXPs and promptly strangled my RAM ... but was having a wicked time up to that point.

Just checked my system, and I only have 192 MB.

Oops.

Times change, huh? Back in the 80s, the entire Elite game for my Apple was about 40kb. Oolite's desktop icon, alone, is twice that size. I find this very amusing.

Just curious, does Oolite in Linux use less ram than in XP?

I was thinking of playing around with a microdistro like DSL ... let me know if this is folly.

Best,
Fluxboy

(ps And I still vote for some sort of light encryption for the saved game file. That would easily have thwarted me. But I do appreciate the open source nature of this project. It's a very cool philosophy.)

(pps My laptop is an old acer travelmate 2200, running at 2.8 GHZ with Windows XP. 1.65 runs on it fine with no OXPs if I turn the color quality down to 16 bit. FPS fluctuates between 30 and 60)

fluxboy wrote:

Thanks for the feedback. Went and loaded up a bunch of OXPs and promptly strangled my RAM ... but was having a wicked time up to that point.

The version I am using (1.68 PC) has a rather huge memory leak somewhere - it eats all my memory (512 MB) within five or six system jumps.

@ pepak: Have you reported that at the proper place?

Oh, reading again, you're using 1.68. I guess no bug reports needed for that anymore.

Unfortunately, 1.69 does in fact leak like a colander with a hole in it. This probably won’t be fixed for 1.69.1.

And I still vote for some sort of light encryption for the saved game file.

If I were filling in a questionaire this would be marked "Strongly Disagree".
There is no fun in cheating in a solo game. However having a plain text file means that in the event of problems, you can fix them.
Anybody who has had a Heretic save file corrupted and had to restart a level will agree. (Heretic for DOS initially had a severe problem with Save Files becoming corrupted)