Oolite Bulletins

Hello

I'm a newcomer to Oolite but an old hand with Elite. Back in the 1980s I had Elite on my Acorn Electron and subsequently on my Amiga 500. Many is the long hour I spent playing them. I tried Frontier and FFE but found them both disappointing due to the obsession with newtonian physics instead of gameplay. I've also tried out Eve Online but the combat system there is unsatisfying.

I've been playing around with Oolite and I have an immediate question. I'm using the latest 1.72 test version and I got a bit greedy (cough) and downloaded all the OXPs and installed them. The problem now is that my Jameson, fresh out of Lave, is getting his bottom kicked by a bunch of Mamba pirates who jump me once I come out of witchspace in Zaonce. My police rating is clean and all I'm carrying is some food bought with my first 100 credits. As Zaonce is a corporate state and should be relatively safe I'm assuming I'm being jumped by about 5 Mambas because of an OXP. I need to remove this OXP temporarily until I can get something a bit better than a pulse laser but I can't ascertain which OXP is doing this. Ideas?

On a connected subject, I spent about 3 years from 2003 onwards writing an Elite-a-like game using the Darkbasic Pro game language. I therefore have a pretty solid grasp of 3d maths and the sort of game design that a game like Elite uses. I'm wondering if I can contribute in a meaningful way to the coders who are improving Oolite. I know some C but I've got no experience of Objective C so I'd need to get my head into this area and find a decent IDE (presumably Visual C won't work with Objective C?). I'll download the source and take a look at that but my immediate question is to ask whether there are any docs summarising the architecture/design of the game, i.e. how the different .m files interrelate, what the coding convention is for the variables/arrays, etc.? When looking at someone else's code, particularly any code that does not have a lot of remarks, I find it easier to read docs first before diving into the code.

Cheers

Philip

Welcome!

Your story sounds familiar (I too grew up with Elite on my C64 during the 80s and then Frontier during the early 90s on my A500)

The mamba producing OXP sound familiar - it's one of the pirate ones methinks.

The dev team seems to like new blood - I never got to grips with DBPro (I wanted to use it for animated characters for a different application) so good for you!!!

Once again, welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat (tm)

d3fxyh wrote:

I'm wondering if I can contribute in a meaningful way to the coders who are improving Oolite.

Probably. Optimisations & bug fixes would be preferred right now. (Or at least that's what I'd prefer. Making some method parameters pointers-to-const would be good, but that needs some testing.)

I know some C but I've got no experience of Objective C so I'd need to get my head into this area and find a decent IDE (presumably Visual C won't work with Objective C?).

If you know some C++ basics, you'll have a better idea of what it's about, though it is, shall we say, somewhat different. (I prefer to think of it as Objectionable C. But then I prefer C over C++…)

No real idea about Visual C, but I'd think not, what with that being M$ stuff and ObjC being (somewhat) associated with MacOS. I use a terminal, joe, debuild, dpkg and gdb

I'll download the source and take a look at that but my immediate question is to ask whether there are any docs summarising the architecture/design of the game, i.e. how the different .m files interrelate, what the coding convention is for the variables/arrays, etc.?

I think that you'll pick that up by reading the source and the make files.

When looking at someone else's code, particularly any code that does not have a lot of remarks, I find it easier to read docs first before diving into the code.

The code could do with a few more comments, I think…

I very much doubt that you will be able to use Visual Studio for building Oolite. I recommend you download a ready-made prepackaged development environment, which can be found in this sticky thread. This should give you an easy way to build the game on Windows and you can take it from there. You will just need a text editor of your preference and you should be ready to hack. My personal preference for editors is UltraEdit32, but it has the slight drawback of not being free. Others have recommended Notepad++, which is good and free.

Thanks for all the helpful comments. I've downloaded Notepad++ and I'm already impressed with this - a nice editor. I've also downloaded the gnu compiler and have begun having a nose through some of the source (I chose not to use the helpful pre-packaged development environment as for various lengthy and boring reasons I can't easily re-map a partition on one of my HDDs to D:\). The syntax of Objective C is a little bit different than I am familiar with so I'm going to buy myself a book on this language (probably the one by Stephan Kochan) and get myself up to speed. When I feel like I'm familiar enough with the code and the language to make a contribution, rather than botch something, I'll re-surface and see what people think I can usefully do.

d3fxyh wrote:

Hello

I'm a newcomer to Oolite but an old hand with Elite. Back in the 1980s I had Elite on my Acorn Electron and subsequently on my Amiga 500. Many is the long hour I spent playing them. I tried Frontier and FFE but found them both disappointing due to the obsession with newtonian physics instead of gameplay. I've also tried out Eve Online but the combat system there is unsatisfying.

I've been playing around with Oolite and I have an immediate question. I'm using the latest 1.72 test version and I got a bit greedy (cough) and downloaded all the OXPs and installed them. The problem now is that my Jameson, fresh out of Lave, is getting his bottom kicked by a bunch of Mamba pirates who jump me once I come out of witchspace in Zaonce. My police rating is clean and all I'm carrying is some food bought with my first 100 credits. As Zaonce is a corporate state and should be relatively safe I'm assuming I'm being jumped by about 5 Mambas because of an OXP. I need to remove this OXP temporarily until I can get something a bit better than a pulse laser but I can't ascertain which OXP is doing this. Ideas?
Philip

Is it the "Tigers" attacking you? They normally send a message first and then attack typically in small pirate fighters with orange and black tiger stripes (witht he odd python around as well). I think its the "hotrods" oxp that introduces the tigers clan who for unknown reasons are hostile to the player, they only attack you so many times before they become just normal pirates.

If it isnt orange and black striped ships then its not the "hotrods" tigers. and it will be down to another oxp.

It's not the tigers. I removed various of the piratical OXPs and I must have removed the correct one as I'm no longer plagued by them.

I've spent some time this week learning how the plist files work. I've also spent some reading into some of the source files. It's very interesting to see another implementation of the C language but with somewhat different syntax.