Oolite Bulletins

First of all, like so many here I am a long time fan and devotee of Elite - followed the available versions and manifestations from my first experience as a teenager on the Apple //e in glorious green phosphor hidden-line-removal wireframe (as we wondered at it then ) I managed to haul myself to Deadly and then somehow didn't play again until I got PC Elite and dabbled with emulators of the original //e code and so on and so forth.

Years watching the web developments for successors to the best computer game I ever played.

Anyway; some time has passed - must be a few years and I discovered Oolite - magnificent naming - beautiful realisation of the game and having lurked here for a bit and dabbled in the Ooniverse I am once again hooked and addicted. I want to thank Giles Williams and all the developers for making this such a great GPL Project. ( I know I am banging on but I really feel compelled to say thank you formally!)

Now, I usually dwell in Linux (Gentoo) and yet have been playing on my intel MacBook Pro (my "work" machine ) and wonder if it is possible to run the linux version in X on the mac - I would prefer to stick to the linux build if I can since I will eventually be rebuilding my Gentoo on Intel Mac platform again and would normally reside in Linux...

Is there any reason why I wouldn't run 1.70Test on the Mac at the moment. I would love to play with the rich textures and also the wireframe mode from time to time and yet I can't see any notes that particularly warn me away from the test versions other than OXP incompatibility.

Anyway, just wanted to say g'day and well done mainly.

Probably be millions of other questions as time goes by. Great board BTW.

Will

The test builds have bugs. The release build (1.70) also has bugs. Take your pick. :-)

The test builds are “unstable” in the sense that their functionality may change, which primarily affects OXPs. In particular, most of the JavaScript and shader interfaces are completely different in 1.70 than they were in 1.67/1.68. This mostly means that experimental OXPs written for earlier test releases may not work properly.

As far as I’m aware, no-one has tried building the Linux one for X on OS X because, well, there’s no point. The OS X version is the original and best¹. You’re welcome to try, but you’re likely to hit problems rooted in differences between GNUstep and Cocoa. Still, the code shouldn’t be assuming that SDL implies GNUstep and vice versa, so if you feel like rooting out those problems, it’d be for the good.

¹Unless you want to use some sort of newfangled game controller thingy. But why do that? Mouse control rules.

Thank you most supreme one;

I have downloaded and am trying 1.70 for Mac at the moment and will hold off the linux build till I have a dedicated platform - too much stuffing around between the mac/mach/cocoa backend and what not when what you say is absolutely true.

I have been doing some searching to see if I am getting the best out of my graphics with 1.70 on the intel mac and yet I don't seem to have any different shading on the planets etc than in 1.65... I tried to Pause (p) and press t/T but never got any message. I guessed because this was a 1.6x method and setting detail and etc to full in the options takes care of it with 1.70?

Have I gone wrong somehow? The readme is 1.65; there is nothing I can see that I have to otherwise configure.

I hate asking questions like this because I'm sure it is in a readme or faq or on the wiki or BB somewhere - but what the hell I'll catch up soon enough

[edit]ahhhh; not in a shader enabled system ??[/edit]

The textured planet option is disabled in 1.70 for stability reasons. (That’d be the crashing type of stability, not the changing-behaviour type of stability.)

All Intel Macs support shaders. However, the effects aren’t very noticeable for the built-in stuff, except that asteroids look slightly smoother. With shader effects set to full your ship should glow if you fly around near the sun until your cabin temperature exceeds half the bar. There are a number of experimental OXPs that use shaders in more interesting ways, like this one, as seen on TV Youtube.

Alls well and I'm going great guns having settled on 1.70 (tried the shading in 1.65 and didn't feel it added anything I desperately needed so I settled for the latest release)

Having trawled through the list of OXPs I have settled on the following based on a desire to add variety and some additional scope to the game without making too many fundamental changes to gameplay.

I would be very interested to hear what you guys think of my OXP selection and of any possible conflicts with 1.70Test on my Mac...

I'm not sure, but I think it's advisable to only have one sound oxp installed, if so the best one is custsounds.oxp

well spotted - thank you!