Oolite Bulletins

My views on a multiplayer Elite.

Firstly the game has to be set in a persistant universe, where the player is not the centre of the universe.

Everything the player does has repercussions for the game. The economics work properly, if a player brings in a lot of goods to a planet then that affects the prices for all other players.

Players could earn enough to buy their own space stations, cities, and even planets. A player could discover an uninhabited world and colonise it. Offer jobs to other players. Offer mining rights to other players.

Set up mining operations mining resources for sale to other players. Set up processing facilities for the mined resources to produce alloys and components. Set up manufacturing facilities to use the alloys and components to build equipment upgrades and ultimately their own ships to their own designs.

Also would like groups of players to set up a corporation and for the corporation to own the bigger ships like frigates and behemoths etc. These bigger ships can't be flown by one person, they need a crew. One player as a pilot, one player as navigator, another to handle trading and cargo, and all the rest to man turrets or fighter escorts.

One problem with multiplayer is the game time. Hyperspace jumps have to be instantaneous, ships have to be insanely fast if the game isn't to be boring because of all the waiting.

One thing I would like to have in a space sim is the ability to buy multiple ships and have them automatically move goods between different systems. A trading company in short. You would probably have to hire escort fighters too.

JazHaz wrote:

Also would like groups of players to set up a corporation and for the corporation to own the bigger ships like frigates and behemoths etc. These bigger ships can't be flown by one person, they need a crew. One player as a pilot, one player as navigator, another to handle trading and cargo, and all the rest to man turrets or fighter escorts.

The corporation could pay its members share dividends according to how much work they have done, minus any damage they have caused (by accidently shooting their own ship lol), taken out of the profits made by the big ship.

Lucidor wrote:

One problem with multiplayer is the game time. Hyperspace jumps have to be instantaneous, ships have to be insanely fast if the game isn't to be boring because of all the waiting.

Why is that a problem? The Torus jump drive works for Oolite.

Oolite currently populates a solar system with NPCs everywhere. Take out the populating routine, and replace the NPCs with real players and it could work fine.

JazHaz wrote:

Why is that a problem? The Torus jump drive works for Oolite.

Calendar time (as used for contracts, and to make travel times make some sort of nominal sense, possibly) in Oolite is non-linear. Watch the clock when you jump or dock. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.

First and foremost, in any multiplayer game, I'd like to see an absence of sociopaths ... this would only be achievable by having effective police presences in lots of systems. If it just becomes a n00b-shoot then there's no point: I can have more fun in a single-player game.

Disembodied wrote:

First and foremost, in any multiplayer game, I'd like to see an absence of sociopaths ... this would only be achievable by having effective police presences in lots of systems. If it just becomes a n00b-shoot then there's no point: I can have more fun in a single-player game.

There's an idea for another player path, become a police officer! Get promoted by the amount of offenders and fugitives you bring down, or get demoted by killing clean players.

JazHaz wrote:

There's an idea for another player path, become a police officer!

Ah community policing in the hands of sociopaths. Seriously, this is very hard to do in the long term. In the short term, citing EvE as an example, I've participated in short term activities to police systems against rogue players. It is fun, but not for very long.