Oolite Bulletins

Many contributors mention loading Oolite with the SHIFT key depressed.

I have 70 or 80 OXP's installed, but have never loaded Oolite with the SHIFT key depressed. All the OXP's work.

I recently installed Pallas.oxp and see Pallas ships flying around in full colour emitting equally colourful announcements and so assume that this OXP is working (although there have been none for sale so far).

When I've tried depressing the SHIFT key, the game won't load anyway. On my iMac the SHIFTclick operation is intended to select more than one file (to open, or whatever) and doesn't do anything else; well I could select Oolite + (an)other folder/file(s) to open or something.

Is this normal?

Oolite works just fine if you don't press Shift on startup. Starting up Oolite with the Shift key pressed is required only when you are editing files inside Resources or OXP folders. For normal gameplay you do not need the Shift key.

The reason we require Shift pressed when you are fiddling with files in OXP folders is that Oolite must rebuild its cache every time you change an OXP file in order for the changes to be "seen". If you don't do this, then Oolite starts up with the information that has already in its cache, which of course means that you cannot see any changes you might make.

The way it works is that you press Shift and keep it pressed until you see the Cobra in the intro screen. At that point, the game cache has been rebuilt and any changes you have made inside OXP folders have gone in. Also note that holding down Shfit is not needed when you are adding or removing entire OXP folders. Oolite is clever enough to see that the AddOns folder structure has been changed and will request an automatic data cache rebuild in such case.

Thank-you for that instant response.

I take it that when files have NOT been edited, as you describe, then the SHIFT key is superfluous, and does nothing? In any event, I haven't edited anything, and the SHIFT key only PREVENTS Oolite from loading.

Does SHIFTclick do something different on a pc? On a mac, SHIFTclick is equivalent to right?click on a mouse with 2 buttons (or left-click if right-clicking is the norm: I don't know which mouse button is normally used where there are 2+).

You are not required to SHIFT-click, but press SHIFT immediatly after clicking, and hold it until the first intro-screen appears (or the message about rebuilding the cache appears in your logfile, if you happen to have that opened next to your game window).

But the whole operation is really only necessary for OXP-developers while fiddling with plists or scripts.

By shift click they mean holding the shift key down then selecting the oolite icon to load/start the game, not clicking the touchpad/mouse button. Hold the shift key down until you see the cobra spinning...
But as commander mcLane says, unless you have edited a ship plist or description list then you don't need to.
All it does is flush the memory cache.
If you had edited a file in a oxp then started without flushing the cache then you would revert to the previous (un-edited) version of the file.

Not sure if you need to flush when replacing oxps with a newer version, wouldn't do any harm though.

ps I'm also a mac user
Macbook Pro

Yes that makes sense, thankyou.

..fiddling with plists or scripts..

I anticipate this activity in the near future; the comments (above) are appreciated: feel post Q's re. how to do so looming..