Oolite Bulletins

Would be nice to have the station docking system going offline due to maintainance or malfunctions. In that case the station should notify you so that commanders are on manual docking only.

This forces every commander to do a manual now and then. Also low tech stations should brake down more often.

I still manually dock now and then for the fun of it...

... and to keep in practice (you never know when the frackin... I mean docking... computer will get damaged).

I agree with your suggestion... but it shouldn't happen TOO often. It should be a fairly rare occurance (logically speaking). How often (should) a player be in that exact situation at that exact time...

Yes but it should be a possibility:

Something like:

'Commanders: our auto-docking system is out of alignment. We are repairing it at the moment. Plese dock manually. Fixes are made in about 1 hour.'

or

'A boy racer crashed into the docking bay. We are repairing our docking system' please dock manually'.

pagroove wrote:

Yes but it should be a possibility:

Something like:

'Commanders: our auto-docking system is out of alignment. We are repairing it at the moment. Plese dock manually. Fixes are made in about 1 hour.'

or

'A boy racer crashed into the docking bay. We are repairing our docking system' please dock manually'.

that last one might be fairly frequent if a certain Python is in the area...

Killer Wolf wrote:

pagroove wrote:

'A boy racer crashed into the docking bay. We are repairing our docking system' please dock manually'.

that last one might be fairly frequent if a certain Python is in the area...

Oi! I'm not that bad at docking!!

But KW probably is!

pagroove wrote:

Yes but it should be a possibility:

Something like:

'Commanders: our auto-docking system is out of alignment. We are repairing it at the moment. Plese dock manually. Fixes are made in about 1 hour.'

or

'A boy racer crashed into the docking bay. We are repairing our docking system' please dock manually'.

good idea nad not that rare.

i have put only maybe 4 hours in this game (ok a lot more when you consider i use time acceleration to cut the boring bits)

but so far i have witnessed 2 rubbish pilots crash to their deaths trying to dock..

you know, back in the day on the spectrum and the amiga I HATED manual docking, i was pants at it and seemed to crash as often as not, or at least damage my ship and lose cargo.

but, now it seems dead easy (so much so i havent bothered with docking computer as i enjoy doing it)

only died once so far and that was when i was rushing it trying to do it at 2x speed due to being moaned at stealing the tv.

either my co-ordination has improved (unlikely i "used" to consider myself good at elite) or, the increased frame rate or perhaps actually having an analogue stick rather than my old kempston pro/zipstick means i have much better control.

docking is a fear of the past

My favorite trick is docking with out rolling. You have to time it JUST right, but it's a blast flying up full speed at the dock and slipping straight in.

bigmike20vt wrote:

i have put only maybe 4 hours in this game (ok a lot more when you consider i use time acceleration to cut the boring bits)

Heh heh, wrong universe. You are perhaps referring to the "X" universe, where SETA drives are in frequent use. In Oolite, when you engage your Torus drive you are actually travelling faster. You can look at your clock to check that there is no time compression.

There is also time acceleration in oolite. Pause then arrow keys I believe.

lol, i was referring to a certain feline who is reknowned for stuffing his dock procedure.

Cmdr James wrote:

There is also time acceleration in oolite. Pause then arrow keys I believe.

Must be an OXP then?

Poro: It's a core feature. Try it. Pause the game, press right arrow twice, then unpause. Game goes very noticeably faster. Pause again, then press left arrow four times. Game goes in slow motion. You can press Shift+F and look at the value labeled TAF to see exact time acceleration/decceleration.

Why so it is

You know, I'd heard of this feature twice, and yet always assumed it was an OXP (since there is no sound effect or on-screen notification that anything has happened), and yet when I think about it... how would an OXP even do that if it wasn't programmed into the core game?

[Poro fetches a coffee to clear his head]