Oolite Bulletins

I've been playing v1.65 Oolite for a while and it's great,
I was looking through forum posts and the general opinion seems to be that
the newer versions since the original developer left are better and maybe just as stable?

I'm on Ubuntu Linux and want to ask whether I should bother uninstalling Oolite so I can install a newer version.

Which newer version is considered the most stable?

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

Glad that you're enjoying Oolite. Generally the latest version is the best, simple because it squashes the bugs from the previous versions.

As far as 'running stability' is concerned the current development version 1.72.2 is at least equal, if not superior to 1.65. On top of that it contains a lot of features you could only dream of in 1.65, especially in the graphics department.

The only reason it is not called 'stable' is because since 1.65 a lot of new features have been introduced, namely the change of the scripting engine from plist (legacy-)scripting to JavaScript. And some of these features are still under construction and/or revision, therefore there is no guarantee that something that worked in let's say 1.69 will also work in 1.72, or the yet-to-be-expected 1.73. The scripters are therefore constantly revising their scripts, in order to keep them up to date with the current engine.

Once this process is over, the resulting version will be 'stable' (it is what we are referring to as the MNSR = Mythical Next Stable Release; 'mythical' only because this is an open source project, and everybody is working on it in his free time, so it is impossible to predict when we'll be there). But there is no reason at all to not install the latest 'cutting edge' development version.

Conclusion: Just have a look over at the Oolite-Linux forum for the instructions how to get and run the latest 1.72.2 version. And then: Lean back and watch with awe!

Welcome StirFried - I concur with everything the great Commander McLane said and as an Ubuntu user (7.10) I can confirm that Getafix's autopackager (which you'll find in the Oolite-Linux thread) works a treat.

Fantastic,

Thanks for the replies,I'm going in.

So the MNSR refers to a stable feature set, rather than a game that doesn't crash?

best wishes,
Oscar

ovvldc wrote:

So the MNSR refers to a stable feature set, rather than a game that doesn't crash?

Exactly. And Ahruman will tell you (read: has told everybody here several times) more profoundly than I can do in my layman's terms that in context of programming this is the only meaning of 'stable'.

Perhaps one addition: The other requirement for a stable release is backwards compatibility. Meaning: Everything that worked on the last stable release (1.65) has to work on the next stable release as well. Therefore, as long as features that were present in 1.65 were temporarily broken in intermediate versions (until they got fixed in a following version), these intermediate versions could not be considered stable.