Oolite Bulletins

Having fun with my new FALCON S
KESTREL even better, faster. Less cargo, though........but that's OK: I can try the PALLAS, FIREFLY, TEPIU, LAMPYRIS or INTERSTELLAR EXPLORER.
Clicking on the link doesn't take me to the Wiki, however -- it takes me to the "simple" box file sharing site. All that results is a headed (but otherwise blank) page with a little rectangle "loading"
............nothing happens
I can't click on anything & there are no instructions
I can wait all night -- but still nothing
Everything java seems to be up & running here -- any suggestions what might be happening there????????
Or am I being impatient/obtuse/anything..
Benulobiweed shipbuilders impressing so far -- would like to try more

What combination of computer and browser are you using?

Machine Model: iMac
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (3.3)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.7.8f1

Mac OS-X 10.3.9
(Also have 10.5.1 but don't use it)

browser = Safari [1.3.2 (v312.6)]

Since earlier post (above) I have successfully downloaded other box files (well, just one -- DEPOSED OXP -- but have got OXP's there before)

Thanks for your reply/details any help?

P.S. the other files still draw a blank, though!

Since I have neither a Mac nor Safari, I'm gonna have to turn this over to somebody in a better position to work out where the problem lies.. sorry..

best of luck!

That's ok .. any hints or comments appreciated

It just seems to be some files that are inaccessible: the one I got earlier was ok; but neither the Benulobiweed ships nor their sales office are available at present

Zbond-Zbond wrote:

Having fun with my new FALCON S
KESTREL even better, faster. Less cargo, though........but that's OK:

The Merlin is the same size as the Kestrel, but has usable cargo capacity! However, those ships are tinier than a cargo pod! Thus it's a bit like cheating to fly one. With a Merlin (or Kestrel) you can fly between the beams of dual-laser ships without being hit!

Screet

Yes, Merlin was on my list too, but it is at Box.net & not much seems to be available from there; the Merlin isn't, anyway.

However, the lack of cargo capacity is OK if the tiny ship is fast enough to manage quicker times between bullion contracts

Haven't tried zipping in between lasers yet .. .. maybe try with next Renegade Pirate? thanks for the suggestion.

Zbond-Zbond wrote:

Yes, Merlin was on my list too, but it is at Box.net & not much seems to be available from there; the Merlin isn't, anyway.

BTW: You can get all those ships with RS or OSE

Screet

Screet wrote:

Zbond-Zbond wrote:

Yes, Merlin was on my list too, but it is at Box.net & not much seems to be available from there; the Merlin isn't, anyway.

BTW: You can get all those ships with RS or OSE

It would be unplayable on his machine. 1GHz G4 with 1GB RAM is not a dream machine to play oolite on.

I would try downloading with Firefox. Or cleaning/resetting safari.

gorans wrote:

It would be unplayable on his machine. 1GHz G4 with 1GB RAM is not a dream machine to play oolite on.

If he takes out the flasher-ships (Condor and Constitution) i'd guess it could work. Probably as good as on a Vista machine with 2 gigs

I recently had "out of memory" when the app did reach 800 megs on a machine with 4 GiB and nothing else running!

Screet

Screet wrote:

I recently had "out of memory" when the app did reach 800 megs on a machine with 4 GiB and nothing else running!

Which is a phenomenon I have observed quite often with OS Vista and you can all stone me, but I still suspect that there is an eat-up-all-memory bug in Oolite 1.72.2 still.

Screet, do you have a 512 meg graphic card? A couple of days ago I read an interesting article that said: windows limits the max memory usable by a game to 2 gigs at most. Video card drivers eat into that 2 gig limit by buffering all the video card memory inside the main ram (xp & vista), plus vista adds its own video memory buffer on top of that ( resulting in 2 copies of the video ram inside main memory, each one totally unaware of the other ).

According to that, a 128 meg video card will result in out of memory at about 1850 meg in XP, 1700 meg in Vista, a 256 meg card would cause out of memory at 1700 meg / XP, 1450 meg / Vista & a 512 meg video card would force out of memory at 1450 meg / XP, 900 meg / Vista.

I'll see if I can track down that article, or something similar, & I'll post a link!

Kaks wrote:

Screet, do you have a 512 meg graphic card? A couple of days ago I read an interesting article that said: windows limits the max memory usable by a game to 2 gigs at most. Video card drivers eat into that 2 gig limit by buffering all the video card memory inside the main ram (xp & vista), plus vista adds its own video memory buffer on top of that ( resulting in 2 copies of the video ram inside main memory, each one totally unaware of the other ).

Yes, I did see the link to that article here on the oolite board and did read it.

However, Oolite typically crashed out of memory when it reached 1400 megs in the past, even with the 2*1 GiB ATI card. Now I'm using 2*896MiB nVidia and it appears that the memory limit from Vista practically did stay at the same size.

Furthermore, other games can and do use up to that 1400 megs limit...I'm not sure...maybe there's some stupid Vista bug which just kicks in sometimes. M$ really did create an OS that is far inferior than it's predecessor and I'm afraid that they won't fix those things with updates but hope that users will buy Windows 7 upgrades

Screet

Screet wrote:

Furthermore, other games can and do use up to that 1400 megs limit...I'm not sure...maybe there's some stupid Vista bug which just kicks in sometimes. M$ really did create an OS that is far inferior than it's predecessor and I'm afraid that they won't fix those things with updates but hope that users will buy Windows 7 upgrades

I would agree Screet.... IF the problem were consistently reproducible. I'm running on Vista. I've NEVER encountered an out-of-memory error, and I run upwards of 70 OXP's. Vista is superior to XP in many respects. Show me an XP box that can have it's video driver take a dump and have the OS recognize it, flush the driver, and re-initialize it without losing the user session.... You can't. XP would blue screen. Show me an XP box that can attach to multiple wifi networks, and accurately and automatically enable varying levels of network interaction based on the network's assigned security value... Again, can't do it. XP's NAC is no where as sophisticated.

You want to know what Vista's BIGGEST problem is?

Apple created a great advertising campaign.

Cmd. Cheyd wrote:

Show me an XP box that can have it's video driver take a dump and have the OS recognize it, flush the driver, and re-initialize it without losing the user session.... You can't. XP would blue screen.

That's wrong. I had exactly that happen without bluescreen on my XP X64 machine, as the ATI driver sometimes crashed upon initializing OpenGL.

Furthermore, with Vista and the ATI cards I sometimes had a garbled cursor in two-screen mode with the result that Vista hung up.

But the real problem of Vista is it's memory management. I've seen svchost take up over 500 megs...and there really is the issue that all graphics apps do require far more memory with Vista compared to XP X64

Screet