Oolite Bulletins

I was directed to the existence of Oolite through the Home of the Underdogs forum, so I decided to give the game a try.

I have experienced the original Elite on the Commodore 64 (didn't have a clue on how to play) and Elite Plus on my 386SX PC.

Well, I don't remember it being so enormously tedious.

It took me 2 hours of play to make it from Lave to Isinor, as per tutorial, after which I had made about 100 credits.

So in order to speed up the game to more tolerable levels (by getting the fuel injector) it would take about 30 hours.

I don't remember it taking that long to get from the warpgate to the planet. E+ didn't have fuel injectors, so that's not the reason. I didn't know about avoiding the spacelane back then, either.
On E+, I started from someone else's savegame, so that may have given me some sort of boost item/faster ship.

Perhaps the game just ran faster overall?

======= Here's where the faithful & evangelizers will immediately jump to the game's defense. Allow me to pre-empt the most common arguments:

! This game is old-school. It's supposed to make you think!

Defender is old-school. It still is one of the most frantic, andrenaline-inducing computer games ever made.
Oolite makes me think that I could be doing something more exciting with my spare time. Or that the programmer is having a joke on my behalf. Or maybe just play a game that's actually intended to entertain me.

Wait, it DID make me think. How about that.

! Elite/Oolite is a realistic space trading simulation, and this is what it would be like!

Hyperspace is a theoretical suggestion, not science fact. All models of wormholes/hyperspace I know of require anti-gravity or exotic matter to keep the wormhole open, and since there's no evidence of either, I cannot consider Oolite a realistic simulator.

Also, if Oolite really was intended to run in realtime, as the in-game clock seems to indicate, travel between galaxies would mean travelling faster than light.

Additionally, even very realistic simulators are still there to entertain -- that why nearly all of them have a time accelerator function.

! Just stay out of the space lane !

Yes, I know about that 'trick'. It still takes far too long from when the presence of the space station prevents you from Jumping to getting close enough to see the buoy. So it still slows down the game too much.

========== My suggestions / wishlist

What initially got me excited about Oolite was its customizability. (I downloaded quite a few .OXPs and tried them out)
If someone could tell me wether any of the following could be achieved through .OXP, I would certainly be willing to put in the time to make the game more appealing to impatient folk like me:

=== 1. Time acceleration

By pressing a certain key, you accelerate the speed of the game by a certain factor. I would dedicate the function keys (F1 - F12) to the different info screens and views, and use the regular number keys (1 - 0) for the time acceleration factor, e.g.

1 = 1x normal game speed
2 = 2x double game speed
...
9 = 9x game runs at 9 times the normal rate
0 = 10x

This doesn't diminish the value of the Fuel Injectors, since during time acceleration, your steering will be very touchy. For effective space combat , the injectors are still a tasty goal to strive towards. Plus thereafter, you'll still want a docking computer, this landing is an early game hurdle that I found interesting. Difficult, not boring.

=== 2. Give the player the injector/faster ship to start with

Not as good as 1. in my opinion. The main appeal of Elite is the "level-grind" without the abstract levels found in RPGs. Making moolah to pimp out your ride makes for a great motivator. Giving them a more advanced ride to start is less satisfying, like they haven't earned it.

=== 3. Send this whiner a savegame with the fuel injector

Least satisfying option, but if it shuts me up...

===========================

I hope I haven't been too critical of everybody's holy cow on this board. I think the value of Oolite, as I understand it, is to provide everybody the means to build the game they want to play. And if someone wanted just a "slavishly faithful" remake of the original Elite, there is option for those people as well.

Anyway, if anyone can give me some idea on how to implement 1. 2. or 3., please respond! Thanks!

To be honest you've described a lot of people's first feelings about Oolite very well.

It does take a while to get going, and it isn't a kill-crazy thrash through the universe (until you get into some high tech level anarchy and ooooooh boy are you gonna have fun), and I believe the satisfaction that you get once you can afford the shiny pieces of kit that allow speedy flight and docking will be mitigated somewhat if you want to rob someone else's hard work.

However...we are not here to judge (well, some of us), so to answer your questions...

1) There is no time speed-up option so to speak, are you avoiding the space lanes enough though when jumping intra-system ('j' key)? Try going for about 30 secs off the space lane before turning round.

2) Spend a bit of time flying to Leesti (it's quite close to Lave), sell the Cobra MkIII, buy a Cobra MkI and trick it out with said shiny kit, including fuel injectors, upgraded lasers, etc.

3) If you are going to *ahem* cheat *ahem* - do it properly. Find your save game in the Oolite folder, open it with WordPad, search for the word 'credits' and when you see the number immediately after that, you'll know what to do. But it's your loss....many a seasoned veteran looks back to the days when he started out and shakes his head with a rueful smile.

So I recommend you go with option 2), it'll take a little bit of time out of your life but at least it keeps you playing realistically.

However you have underlined a point I made about people who are new to Oolite and find the initial hard yards you have to put in a bit offputting if they aren't expecting them. As such i've been working on a 'Beginners Guide' that along with linking all the info already on the Wiki, it will close the expectation gap. Once RL subsides for a few hours I'll get it sorted.

I will almost certainly include the down-trading of the Cobbie MkIII for the non-purist who puts bloody adventures of death over cowardly trading.

So, give the above a try and enjoy Oolite. And don't worry - if I'm honest, there's nothing I enjoy more than sacrificing sacred cows.

CTK

Thanks for the reasoned reply, Chili. I was expecting people to pounce on me. But there's another suggestion I thought of... the main reason you can't get stuff done in a reasonable amount of time is because of mass locking.

=== 4. Tweak the mass-locking mechanic

Now, if you removed mass locking entirely, then the player could just weasel out of every space battle once he started losing. Though if he did, he wouldn't get the kill or the reward, so it could still be balanced. This would be worth investigating by making a build in which mass-locking was disabled and see if it made the game too easy/exploitable.

However, I noticed I would get mass locked by ships outside my range of vision. As long as they were anywhere on my scanner, they would slow me down. I would twiddle my thumbs while I waited the distant blip to finally drift off my scanner so I could inch closer to the station.

How about this idea:

Imagine two concentric circles in the XY plane around your ship.
Now rotate them through the Z direction to make two concentric spheres.

Objects outside the big sphere are out of scanner range.

Objects within the big sphere and outside the small sphere (in the 'mantle') are in scanner range. They will appear as color-coded blips on your scanner, but will not mass lock the player.

Objects within the innermost sphere are in close range.
You can use the R key to identify them.
You are mass locked by powered objects (ships, buoys, stations) that fall within this region.

This would give the following improvements:

* You could navigate the spacelane if you wanted to save fuel, since you could choose to avoid getting too close to another ship. Currently, skipping the space lane is a big V-shaped detour.

* Dodging the blips would be something fun to do, instead of avoiding them entirely.

* Approach to the station would be much quicker, and the interesting, challenging part -- docking.

Calibrating the metrics of the game for maximum enjoyment and optimal challenge would mean trying out many different radii of the inner sphere. (I think it should be about the distance at which the buoy becomes visible)

=== More thoughts on mass locking

I would have mentioned this earlier, but what if only hostile units could mass lock the player? It would work... but only from a gameplay perspective... it would make no sense to the player in context of being an engineering property.

Perhaps a variant rule is worthy of investigation -- player cannot jump while being attacked, because the energy output required for the jump is being diverted to the shield charger.

Now that I think about it, shields are a pretty 'magical' contrivance in themselves, like hyperspace. So you aren't actually mass-locked... it's the relative proximity of the shield technology of powered crafts that prevents hyperspace technology to be used within that distance.

Those guys at Home of the Underdogs were right... Oolite does make you think... about game design.

All interesting ideas, with an absolutely HUGE but...

...Oolite was designed to be a 21st Century upgrade of the original, and it was agreed very early on and is consistently maintained that the major tenets of gameplay will not be altered (another one of those sacred cows?). Changing the mass-locking is a pretty substantial alteration to the fundamentals of Oolite.

In all honesty, once you get your fuel injectors and a bit of experience under your belt, you'll see why mass locking is critical in terms of gameplay. Even if you could turn it off I don't think you would, once you start to get into it. If every ship could just fly around ignoring the other, it removes a lot of the fun...

Keep plugging away, you'll see what I mean.



CTK

Hi marco. Welcome to the game!

Yep it does have a slow start! More so than Elite as the space lanes are busy meaning you get mass-locked a lot. As you've discovered without fuel injectors the game is really slow, to the point of being almost unplayable. Fuel Injectors are effectively time acceleration. On injecters it takes about 3 mins to travel from the witchspace entry point to the planet. And even if your bugging out of every combat, you still have to avoid all the blips! If you also install the Fuel Tank OXP then for the price of a few credits (and using a missile slot) you always have enough fuel to use your injectors. Also in an Anarchy those blips are a lot more interesting as the shoot at you, but at the start of the game with no upgrades visiting them would be suicide and you have no real option but to stick to the safe (and therefore boring) systems.

To give you a quicker start in the game (without cheating), you could install The Bank of the Black Monks OXP.

These money lending monks can be found in all systems with tech level of 10 or more. They will helpfully lend you 20,000 Credits. Enough to get you some injectors, basic upgrades and captial to trade with. Naturally they charge an absurd amount of interest and will send hit men after you if you default!

If you follow the link on my signature it will take you to the download link. This OXP is meant to get you "over the hump" without making the game too easy. Its a really good game ONCE you get started, but without basic equipment it is almost unplayable. Its worth sticking with though as once you do have the basics the gameplay is very satisfing with hundreds of missions and other stuff to do. Stick with it and it will reward you, but take out a loan! Most of the features you are asking for are in the game, its just you can't afford the stuff that lets you do these things yet.

A list of all OXPs and download links is here:-

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP

I have a few things to add.

There is already code to adapt mass locking according to mss (or maybe size, I forget) of objects. I think at the moment this is only for really big things like stations, but it would be easy (not sure if its a good idea, but should be easy anyway) to reimplement mass locking in general. I think I would prefer this, but it does not really fit with the elite way. I might (no promises) make some changes in my development version, and see how it plays, this will not be changed in oolite main, but I might be able to give feedback on if it is a good idea, maybe it might become an option you get set (I doubt it).

The first 100C are the hardest to get, as you cannot afford to buy expensive stuff to trade. The next 100 should be easier, and pretty soon you have a few hundred and can buy the usual computers/furs combination to earn 30C a tonne or so. Depending on how you like to play, you might like to get a fuel scoop quite early. Travel with a small amount of expensive cargo, and you can often pick up some freebies either from pirate you kill, or just stuff floating about.


I would not downgrade the ship, as people have been discussing elsewhere, it costs you a huge amount to trade in ships, you lose about 25% of the value, minimum. Which is a lot on a 100K cobra This might be different on the version you are playing, but on 1.70 it is pretty pointless as you lose so much. You can sell the missiles you get for free though, to get, erm, another 70Cr I think, and I hate missiles.

There isnt much point starting with a faster ship, the cobra 3 is already one of the fastest normal ships, and the faster ones are mostly not good for trading, so you will be "trapped" in a sense.

It shouldnt take too long to get to the station, I think without injectors it takes me an average of about 15 minutes, or about 2 or 3 if I am careful/lucky, plus docking time. The biggest delay is (without injectors or docking computers), it takes forever to get to, and into a station.
The general advice to jump (j) away from the space lane for 10 seconds or so, then towards the planet is good. You will meet very few ships out there. You still have the delay for docking though. I think a docking computer is the best "speed up" for gameplay, as you can get in right from the edge of the aegis saving minutes of flying at normal speed and then carefully docking slowly (takes me about 10 minutes I think all together from when the S appears).

Another way to speed things up early on, i.e. to get some better kit straight away -- without mortgaging your soul to the Monks -- is to install the OXP M-Pack (rusties). This makes older, slightly used, ships available for sale in the shipyards. You can trade in your shiny new Cobra III for another ship with a few dings and scratches, and pocket enough change to equip it with a docking computer, fuel injectors and maybe another new toy or two.

LittleBear and Disembodied make good points, Elite wasn't (and Oolite isn't) a 'get rich quick' game. It would take many, many hours of dedicated play to get anywhere with Elite, but Oolite is a somewhat 'softer' option, since there are more ways of making money (UPS, Random Hits, Assassins, the various native cargo and passenger contracts). If it's the brevity of equipment that most irritates you, then Commies.oxp and Dictators.oxp both offer stations that sell equipment at knock down prices.

As for two hours from Lave to Isinor, I can make it in forty minutes (real time) in a rusty Python doing less than 0.2lem, so I can't think where you are getting two hours in a Cobbie 3 at 3.5lem.
I think you misunderstand the idea of the 'Witchspace Beacon'. It is not intended for outward travel, it is what a ship's navigation computer homes in on after jumping from another system. You can enter Hyperspace *anywhere* in-system as long as you are about 5km away from the native stations (it's a bit further if you have the Transhab or Torus stations).
Time acceleration (a.k.a. StarDreamer) is more well-known in Frontier: Elite 2 and Frontier: First Encounters. I don't think there would be an easy way to implement it in Oolite, not that it would be a popular option.

Captain Hesperus

If you install rusties and use some of the money you make from trading in your new Cobra MK3 for an old Cobra MK3 to buy a docking computer, and perfect the trick with avoiding the trade lanes, you will travel from station to station in 3 minutes or less (using the time speed up you get with instant docking SHIFT+D). Also you might have been doing the wrong thing to avoid the trading lanes. When you get it right, you hardly ever encounter anything.

Hi, marco75, and first of all welcome to the boards and of course to this great game!

Just to add my personal idea of speeding up:

1. As some other people have done as well, I would recommend not to downgrade your ship. Keep your CobraIII, it's pretty much the best allround ship that is out there.

2. Indeed, the first 100 credits are the hardest to earn. As you get more capital to trade with, you can fill up more of your hold and increase your profit.

3. Just in case you are under that misunderstanding, I want to reinforce what Hesperus said: The witchpoint buoy is for inbound traffic only. you can jump out of the system again almost as soon as you have left the main station. (The security distance is 10 kilometers, not 5, as Hesperus suggested. Practically that means you only have to reach the station buoy, and can start your countdown 15 seconds before doing that. Even more practically: In a CobraIII, launch, go full throttle, dive a little bit to avoid collision with the buoy, wait two seconds and press H.)

4. In my opinion, if you want to speed up, don't buy Fuel Injectors first. Even before that you should have a Docking Computer. This allows you to dock instantly, as soon as you arrive in the station's aegis (you see the "S" on your HUD), by hitting SHIFT-D. This one, together with avoiding the corridor and using the jumpdrive (J), makes things really fast (you were complaining about the long time it takes to approach the station, weren't you?). And you can still buy Fuel Injectors later.

5. The other item you should get as early as possible is the Fuel Scoops. It allows you to fill your hold with cargo "on the fly". And if you sell something you hadn't bought in the first place, your net profit increases.

6. Finally allow me to give you an OXP-related advice as well. If you install Anarchies.oxp and visit a Salvage Gang (also to be found in non-Anarchy systems, so don't be afraid), you may be able to purchase valuable equipment, like Docking Computers, Fuel Injectors, Fuel Scoops and others, for a real good price on its second-hand market.

Hi Marco75 and welcome.

As the other guys have said, there are several ways to speed up the early part of the game, however the best solution IMHO is avoid the traffic!

I've just travelled to Isinor with a new Commander Jameson in 16 minutes by avoiding the space lanes. Three jumps, manual docking and including launching from Zaonce without buying fuel and having to redock, so it should be possible to do it in about 15 minutes total.

In Oolite there is a space corridor between the witchpoint and and the space station, where all the usual traffic occurs, to avoid this, when you hyperspace to a witchpoint fly off at 90 degrees away from the corridor using the jump drive for about 10 seconds or so, then turn towards the planet and you should get an interupt free journey. You will also find that the navigation beacon is directly opposite the docking port of the Coriolis so if you stop very adjacent to the beacon you are lined up perfectly to manual dock.

Hope this helps

I applaud the idea that you do not want to change the basic structure of the game and that too many changes can take the game far away from the original. However, I think that some things need to be borne in mind.

I say these things as someone who has recently started playing the original BBC version of elite on Beebdroid on a Nexus 10 alongside Oolite.

Oolite appears to be significantly slower than the original for what I suppose are be two main reasons:

1) There is more traffic
2) The space station scale and its effect on mass locking has changed (increased) significantly.

I have just played from a starting position: Lave to Zaonce to Isinor. The whole journey took just short of 30 minutes, doing what I could to avoid the space lanes.

Of particular interest is the fact that it now appears to take about 5 minutes to get to the space-station from the point that the station mass locks your ship.

If I compare that to the original elite on my tablet, the same starting journeys will take more like 10 to 15 minutes.

It is possible that my tablet is running the original too quickly, but combat does not seem to bear that argument.

If someone can attest to the points above being incorrect, then fair enough. I've not looked at the code, and maybe my memory isn't good enough to clearly assess the speed of the original game.

However, if the points above are accurate then I would suggest that the balance of the original game has already been affected and that some work could be undertaken to re-address it. Also that the original idea stated above (mass lock on a smaller sphere) would counter-act the effect and help bring the game back in line with its original balance.

bobalicious wrote:

Of particular interest is the fact that it now appears to take about 5 minutes to get to the space-station from the point that the station mass locks your ship.

Hi & welcome Bobalicious.

I suggest you are being mass locked by the planet, not the station. Are you flying to the planet then aiming at the station. Try finding the station before you are near the planet and aim directly for it.

It should take you about 90 seconds to reach the station from the edge of its mass lock if you start from a dead stop. If you are flying at full speed with the taurus drive it's around 30 seconds as you have a lot of momentum to loose.

The Torus to Sun Drive OXP also produces a bit of a boost to the Torus drive between witchpoint and planet.

Venator Dha wrote:

bobalicious wrote:

Of particular interest is the fact that it now appears to take about 5 minutes to get to the space-station from the point that the station mass locks your ship.

I suggest you are being mass locked by the planet, not the station. Are you flying to the planet then aiming at the station. Try finding the station before you are near the planet and aim directly for it.

Thanks, advice appreciated and point taken = I'll try to adjust my playing style to match.

However, this doesn't really address the underlying point - I have to change my behaviour significantly in order to play Oolite, but the argument against doing things like changing the extent of mass lock is to not change the game dynamics from the original.

It appears that the dynamics have already changed and the game is more boring to early players as a result. Unless a developer can categorically state that my points below simply aren't accurate then I can't see how the argument makes sense.

1) There is more traffic and therefore flying directly to the planet / station results in more mass locks.
2) If you fly directly towards the planet then fly to the station, the time taken from mass lock to docking is significantly higher than it was in the original.

I say all this with the utmost respect - the implementation is really nice, there is clearly a great community around it and you can't argue with a free (and ad free) game! But still...