Oolite Bulletins

hello everyone i used to play elite on the bbc micro, now im trying to get the right download for vista what i have crashed soon as i leave the space station..


heyep!!!

Hi Magma, welcome to the boards! I'm not sure if I can be of much help (actually, that's not true: I'm positive that I can't be of much help ) but you might find some clues here. It does trail off a bit into general bad-mouthing of Vista but there might be something of use: see the first post by another_commander in the linked thread.

Edit: one nugget of information is provided in the linked thread by Frame:

Frame wrote:

make sure your freind have the latest vista compatible drivers for his GFX card...

also make sure he has the latest chipset drivers for his Motherboard

im running Vista Ultimate With an Nvidia fx5200 that runs oolite perfectly ATM... where as i havent got around to switching back the ATI X800 XT to test if it works with Vista since my last driver updates to the windows driver system..

thanks disembodied!!!

gave up on using oolite on vista to complicated, i have pinched my girlfriends laptop now using it on xp..

only thing is its very slow and the acuracy is very bad

help again pls

Hi Magma and welcome. Oolite should run better than that on XP, what sort of spec is your GF's laptop.

what do you mean that the accuracy is bad?

It's not meant to be a port of Elite and it's not meant to be a simulator.

It's meant to be a fun game that draws heavily on Elite (in all its early flavours) and adds some stuff that the creators/this forum think make it better.

Hmm... I think Magma's probably referring to the accuracy of the lasers, not the accuracy of Oolite as an emulation of Elite, or as a space simulator! At least that's my reading. Probably an issue connected to the slowness/low frame-rate of the game on Magma's laptop.

Magma: if you've got a lot of OXPs installed, and the laptop isn't hugely powerful, that might be causing some of the slowdown. Try the game with no OXPs running and see if that makes a difference.

ah yes, sorry, ho-hum. busy day at work so I'm on a slightly shorter fuse than normal. Sorry!

I do find that if you hit something at max range the beam ends a good few pixels below the red flash on the target where you've hit it. It would be easier if these coincided but I guess it's just that the beam is too narrow to see 20km away so you only see the first 10km? We're already stretching physics to have the beam visible at all (it wouldn't be) so we should be thankful for small mercys

Of course, if the framerate is very low (as sometimes happens when my PC starts something else up in the background) then it's almost impossible to hit anything!

Running Oolite on a 3-year-old emac, I get slowdowns (Oolite 1.65) as well, but only in two situations:

1) If a ship is exploding someplace, my system pauses. If I can SEE the ship exploding, things often get REALLY choppy until the explosion is finished.

2) Whenever I hyperspace or exit a station, it can take several seconds before I arrive, and things are usually choppy for a few seconds after arrival. This is entirely dependent on the OXPs I have active.

As an aside, if I happen to catch sight of a deep-space dredger exiting a station (which is sort of like watching a mouse give birth to a water buffalo), the game crashes on my system.

As for accuracy, my beam laser NEVER seems to hit in the center of the cross-hairs, let alone meet the red "hit" splotch. It's always significantly to the left and slightly downward. I'm adjusting!

Muffy.

I had a good experience last night involving long-range shooting. It was a great demonstration of just how complex and interdependent the Oolite world can be.

I was tootling along, in towards the station, when I was mass-locked by an Anaconda. I sat back and waited to overhaul it, but noticed that it seemed to be following an odd flight pattern. I turned towards it to see what was going on, and watched it loop up and over and around. "Hmm," I thought, "that's odd...". Then in came the comms message: "Help! We are assailed by brigands!", and in popped another little yellow dot -- an Asp, pursued by flickering purple cop-beams.

Being the good citizen that I am, I locked onto the Asp -- an offender -- and zapped at him. He bucked and twisted, caught between me and the police. As I homed in on him, I watched as he turned from "offender" to "fugitive" -- a result of launching a missile at the cops. Then he lit up his fuel injectors and headed for deep space. As he dwindled to a dot, one of the cops came screaming past me in hot pursuit, his own injectors flaring. I zapped some more and -- as the Asp disappeared totally from view -- finally popped him at the very edge of my scan range. More luck than marksmanshp, but the bounty was gratifyingly high and there was even a bonus of a couple of cargo canisters left behind. And both the cops and the Annie were nice enough to thank me for my trouble.

No great trial, not a classic combat by any means -- but the way the ooniverse interacted around me, the way the whole episode was an organic whole, felt great. I wasn't important: not in the way that most games make you important, by insisting on turning you into the prime mover and actor in the whole game-world. If I'd just turned a blind eye and trundled on, the ooniverse would have ticked along on its own. It was one of the most absorbing pieces of gameplay I've ever had, because it didn't feel like a game.

Disembodied wrote:

No great trial, not a classic combat by any means -- but the way the ooniverse interacted around me, the way the whole episode was an organic whole, felt great. I wasn't important: not in the way that most games make you important, by insisting on turning you into the prime mover and actor in the whole game-world. If I'd just turned a blind eye and trundled on, the ooniverse would have ticked along on its own. It was one of the most absorbing pieces of gameplay I've ever had, because it didn't feel like a game.

You have truly been converted to the Oolite Brethren, you have seen the light my son, rejoice, go forth and spread the word.

Hic

hi guys..

no the games lovely i was on about the accuracy of the lasers, which was slow due to the way i dont have the requirements to run the game..

my girlfriends computer spec is as follows..

TOSHIBA

PC
XP
intel (R) Celeron (R) M CPU

430 @ 1.73GHZ

448 MB of ram

mine is..

an Acer Aspire 5630


Vista

Intel (R)Core(TM)2CPU T5500 @ 1.66GHz 1.67 GHz
1014 MB memory

32 - bit

sorry for being such a divvy at computers but i find it hard to understand exactly what programmes i need but i love the game Elit so i will persevere..

thanks

Hi Magma

Ok the Toshiba is going to struggle with a celeron (slug) chip and lowish ram.

The Acer has a much better chance if you can get past the vista issue, and get a clean install. As said before have a look at the thread links for vista they may help you out.

If you are running Norton on your Acer along with vista it too is a memory gobbler, but 1 gig should be sufficient.

I'd be inclined to try and get it running on the acer, if you can you will be truly stunned at how really good Oolite is when it runs properly.

Oolite will run well on pretty poor systems like mine! Check your video drivers are up to date as this often causes slow running.

Oops, yes I forgot that well reminded LB.

Muffy St. Bernard wrote:

Running Oolite on a 3-year-old emac, I get slowdowns (Oolite 1.65) as well, but only in two situations:

1) If a ship is exploding someplace, my system pauses. If I can SEE the ship exploding, things often get REALLY choppy until the explosion is finished.

2) Whenever I hyperspace or exit a station, it can take several seconds before I arrive, and things are usually choppy for a few seconds after arrival. This is entirely dependent on the OXPs I have active.

Yes, that's indeed the two most resource-consuming situations.

On 1): If a ship explodes, debris is created. If it's a big ship, it's a lot of debris. Up to tens of thousands(!) of small parts that have to be created, given a trajectory and sent to that trajectory. Enough reason for a hickup on older systems.

If you hit shift-f while in flight, in the upper left corner of your screen you will get some numbers displayed. The first row shows the current framerate the game is able to produce (FPS = frames per second). On a high-end system that's around 100, but 25 to 30 are enough for smooth gameplay.
The second row shows the number of objects (Objs) and collisiions between them (c) currently in the system you're in. Usually there are anything between 60 and 120 objects in any given system, and possible collisions between them have to be calculated, which takes processor resources and slows down the framerate. If any object explodes you will see a sudden increase in both objectcount and collisions (the debris), followed by a slow decrease (debris colliding with each other or exploding and vanishing again). If e.g. a thargoid carrier is blown up, the object count can reach a sudden (and short) peak of well above 20000(!). This is the moment when your system seems to freeze. Then it falls back to a couple of hundred objects (that's all alloys you can go and scoop!) and the framerate increases again from an (unplayable) 2 or 3 to a playable rate, though not as high as before, because your CPU is still quite busy to move all these alloys around. (In order to minimize this effect, Ahruman has limited the number of debris produced by large explosions in version 1.69, or was it 1.68? So after 1.65 you won't have this trouble again.)
The third row, to complete this overview, tells you your current co-ordinates in your current system.

On 2) Many OXPs create a lot of things either when you enter a system or when you leave the main station. They add ships, stations, large asteroid fields or whatever. This again takes time and processor recources. That's what causes the brief freeze on entring a system or exiting a station. (I say "brief", but in fact e.g. LittleBear has had entering-system freezes of up to 15 seconds(!) when he playtested Assassins.oxp, which adds an awful lot of entities to some systems.)

Once everything is in place, the game continues with a playable framerate again, because keeping things in place is not as resource-consuming as creating them in the first place.

So all of this is totally and completely normal. The general framerate will of course be higher (and the drops less dramatic) on high-end systems, but Oolite will still be playable on older systems.