Oolite Bulletins

Please don't hate me Ahruman!
I find it very distracting when you're taking a bit of a pounding, the moments hectic and you're just trying to line up on the dastardly feind who's giving you his best, when the screen floods with info about whats been damaged all over your sights.
A) Is there any way to turn this off?
B) Is it possible to OXP in showers of sparks and/or flashes/short circuit sounds to inform you of damage instead?

I would rather check exactly what has been damaged when I find enough of a space in the punch up to look at the info screen.
Or perhaps a Damage button that lists said ailments at the side of the screen.

Not high priority I know, just been pondering it.

id suggest that these informations in regard to system damage should only pop up at the very top of the screen as they are as ZygoUgo write, very annoying to have popping up into the midst of a fight...

There need be a more stable way of giving the player ship-information, also I think damage comes way to fast.

On the c64 version I rarely lost a piece of Equipment. They couldn't get damaged though.

In Oolite, once the shield is gone, equipment starts getting damaged almost at once which is very annoying... but I guess very realistic and thus not very fun.

However given that Equipment can only be fixed at stations with the tech level required to purchase it, it makes little difference for the rich player whether his equipment is damaged or destroyed... so for me damage equals getting equipment destroyed...

Frame wrote:

However given that Equipment can only be fixed at stations with the tech level required to purchase it, it makes little difference for the rich player whether his equipment is damaged or destroyed... so for me damage equals getting equipment destroyed...

Except if you play with the Repair Nanobots oxp in.

Frame wrote:

id suggest that these informations in regard to system damage should only pop up at the very top of the screen as they are as ZygoUgo write, very annoying to have popping up into the midst of a fight...

...and that's a general problem, not only with damaged eq! There should be no messages at all overriding my view when I am fighting - they could much better be placed at a side of the screen in a semi-transparent window, like the communications log. If such an additional thing would be added, I suggest to have a damage overview similar to that of the comm log, without requiring the user to switch views to status report in order to verify what got damaged or removed.

Messages shown on screen and in the log (which automatically becomes visible for new messages anyway) are buggy in my eyes, as I see them twice.

Switchging views should only show the message for the last view, not something like
"front view"
"port view"
"aft view"
"front view"

...but then, that's just my opinion on that.

About the damage happening very early: I did get the same impression. Apparantly, it does help to have a lot fo cargo on board, as that is taking the damage quite often. That's strange because if there were no cargo aboard, the shot would not be able to damage anything!

As soon as one of my shields is shot through, I either move into a position where they cannot hit the damaged shield or cloak and wait until the shields are reloaded or I've run out of energy. Quite often a few seconds are enough.

Maybe that would not be such a big problem at all if the energy banks would actually be drained in order to reload the shields faster! I don't see the sense of a big energy reserve if it's entirely useless to protect the ship with it! Furthermore, I've flown ships with shield enhancements freshly installed - and it took them several minutes of flight (more than a milk run!) to have their shields reach full strength. Thus, I suggest to reload shields faster if enough energy is present (similar check as with the cloak for auto-off).

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