Oolite Bulletins

Just found oolite while searching for info on Elite 4. Looks amazin but I want to play with a lot of extra ships and missions and this is causing me grief.

I'm a totally computer retard but thought it was simple enough - did manage to get the timed rings at lave to appear. Although I have only download a couple of extras - assasins, rings and blackmonks - it has broken the game! I get a weird hud as a pointer that won't let me buy cargo unless I go to small screen and much worse when I jump to another planet it crashes my mac and I have todo a hard restart (hold power down) not good at all.

So what am I doing wrong?

What would make life a lot easier was if you could just download a version of the game with all the decent missions - ships etc all sorted for you. is this possible?

Hi and welcome to the friendliest board this side of Reidquat!

To take your questions in order:
1/ I'm not sure, as I don't have a Mac, but there are some known issues with certain models of Mac. They have been dealt with, but you do need to be running the very latest test version of Oolite. Are you running 1.72.2.1? There are plenty of Mac users on this board who I'm sure will be along to help you shortly...

2/ This would be difficult because a) there are well over 100 OXPs available. b) choice of what OXPs to include is very much a personal thing, not to mention playing-style will affect what OXPs you want to use. c) a lot of people play on older hardware which cannot cope with some of the more graphically intense OXPs. d) it would make for some massive download sizes, which is not good for those with slow connections, (there are still only a handful of countries in the world with decent broadband). e) because of all the above, there would need to be a dozen or more different installation packages, then you would need to duplicate them for Mac, Linux and Windows.


Having said the above, my first guess would be to try removing Assassins, as LittleBears other excellent OXP, RandomHits has recently been shown to have problems on some Macs. The cause has been identified, and it's possible that something similar could occur with Assassins. If so, there are others here better qualified than me to help resolve the problem.

For that matter, you could test for which OXP is the problem by removing all OXPs and adding them one at a time until the problem happens again.

Hope this helps...

Thanks for the reply.

Just checked and I'm running 1.65 thought I had downloaded the most recent one I could find from wiki. Will have another hunt later for most recent download.

100 extra downloads is quite daunting for a noob. Are there some all time favourtites out there !

You can download the latest version from the forums, here.

As for OXPs, it all depends on what your system is capable of, what sort of player you are, and what you want. For a beginning pilot I'd advise against putting in too many top-end ships: it's bad enough being in a more-or-less unmodified Cobra III without getting attacked by Wolf Mk IIs, Iguanas, Cats, Tigers and Rattle Cutters too.

For some extra trading options and a bit of in-system variety I'd suggest Your Ad Here, for the Convenience Stores; Commies and Dictatorships, for the various extra stations and local colour; UPS, for some beginning low-level transport missions; some of the station OXPs, again for variety; the Fuel Tank OXP, for the sheer convenience; maybe the Ore Processor, if you want to try a bit of asteroid mining. Oldships makes a few more ship types available, without being overwhelming. When you start working your way towards an iron ass, you can install newships and others as you like. You can start trying Galactic Navy (with Behemoths and, say, Thorgorn Threat) as you get harder, as well as Random Hits for extra job options.

For mission OXPs, it's worth checking to see what galaxy the missions are set in: no point in having, say, Assassins installed if you're in Galaxy 1!