Oolite Bulletins

Hi,

I am new here. I played Elite on the C64 when I was 14. I never went Elite but I remember playing it once for 48 hours without going to bed. Oh, wait, that was when I was already at the end of my teens or at my early twens. I remember, because I was not eating anything, just smoking cigs and drinking Coke and trying to hold back some urge as long as I could so not to waste my time on toilet

I am a SciFi freak since I'm seven or eight. The best SciFi for me is the realistic one. The one which just transports you into another time, another place. It may be physically incorrect, by today's means, but should still be plausible. Favs are Neuromancer, Bladerunner, Matrix, StarWars (IV-VI), sixties StarTrek. Another SciFi, that I left me deeply impressed was by Marion Zimmer Bradley, I do not remember the title, but it was about generation ships, that would seek for inhabitable planets for centuries now, they had mutated skin physiogonomy and were unfertile because of the long exposition to cosmic rays on their generation ships. And now they have become redundant, since teleportation got invented and automated drones would seek for inhabitable planets and simply install tele-ports.

I run oolite on a 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook (2006) with Intel GMA950 and standard shaders on. It's playable, but as soon I have some dog-fights FPS may go down.

So, hello all!

I was reading the boards and playing oolite for the last year or so but now, that oolite has gone so far and become so much by means of all those fine OXP many of you created I begin wanting more

First:
Commander's Retreat
A personal space-station or some island (lol) on a beautiful planet. This would be even great to become a main mission, like a goal in the game.
A must: Being able to park a few ships over there. Today I came around the Caduceus Omega, but I want to keep my Alpha, too.
Also one could store amounts of goods over there, like gems, platin and gold, but anything else, as well.

Second:
More planet landing excitement.
What about a collaborative effort to populate space? A distributed client, that calculates and renders planet-surfaces, incrementally, up to a certain resolution first and then going more hires. Some of the model builders could create building blocks for cities, that get aligned mathematically/logically, so we get cities. villages, colonies, etc.

Third:
More realism!
Selctable option for Newtonian physics. Like if FF. When you fly too fast and do not start the reverse thrusters in time, you crash.
FuelScooping on suns is not realistic. Whoever flies so close to a sun gets evaporated. Fuel scooping should be gas-planets only.

Fourth:
Could it be possible to create a Collabra conversion script, or have Google SketchUp conversion for models?

Fitfth:
When the player died, why is it, that we don't get back to our last save game, but instead we get Jameson? I know, this was like that in the original, but come on...let's have that in the legacy/strict mode

Sixth:
An OXP repository, with incremental auto-updates. Just as the Firefox add-on mechainism works or some other application's plugin updates.

Seventh:
The code owners should make clear, that OXPs need to be licensed in certain ways. GPL, BSD, CC or similare. This should be legally binding for those, who want to create OXPs. This ensures long-time fun and adoption for later feature changes. You never know what the future holds. Code preservation.

Eight:
I don't know how you handle it already, but it would be nice to create some style-guide. To ensure compatibility of the background-universe and also to give OXP programmers some guidance. I just realized, that the latest FuelStation OXP designates the fuel-station/sats as 'F' in the advanced radar section. However, this was the standard for Factories. So I don't know, whether it's a factory or fuel-station, now. I liked the old way better, a little icon. Stuff like this.

Ninth:
Joystick support. Mainly those, which have been made for flight-sims. ForceFeedback anyone?

Tenth:
When game is in pause/inactive mode, CPU should be freed, game should stop calculations.

I got more, but I don't remember right now.

Hi amix and welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat(tm)

Good SciFi pedigree you have there - you're amongst good company here!

To (briefly) answer some of your questions:

One:

Seek out Oolite Extended by Lestradae - there you will be able to buy your own stations - but it will not happen in Oolite (probably).

Two:

You can land on planet's in a simple sense - try the planetfall OXP - and Oolite will (eventually) have procedurally generated planetary textures, sun glints on water, shader city glows on the night side etc - watch this space.

Three:

More realism is not Oolite's bag - we have planets that are only 30km across, the distance between planet and sun are only a few 10's of 100's of Km and ship speed is effectively only in a few 10's of m/s - if you want more realism/Newtonian Physics - you're playing the wrong game.

Four:

I'm sure this is possible - I recall some people showing models they've created in Sketchup, although whether they were ever successfully converted to a format useable by Oolite I don't know

Five:

Don't we go back to our last save? I must be on auto pilot then - I don't recall reloading my current pilot - how strange - not on a machine I can check this!

Six:

OXPs are scattered all over the Internet there is no way currently to hold them in one repository - are you offering several GB of online storage space?

Seven:

If you've been lurking for some time - then you will know that licensing has caused much pain in recent months - the community is getting there but it will take some time.

Eight:

The joy of Oolite is that anybody can create the Ooniverse the way they see fit in their game, so no style should be enforced (who would decide what this should be? Who has that right?). As for lettering in the A. Compass - there are only 26 letters of the alphabet to pick from (plus 10 numerals) - there's bound to be some overlap, icon creation is a relatively new thing, I'm sure as OXPs are updated the creators may consider it as a future enhancement.

Nine:

What system - only the Mac seems to lack Joystick support - I play Oolite on both Ubuntu and Windows (XP and Vista) - it seems to work fine with both my Thrustmaster Firestorm 2 analogue gamepad and a Saitek X52 Pro (which is definitely one for the flight sim enthusiasts). Force Feedback? Why?

Ten:

Again, what system? Under XP I've not noticed it eating clock cycles when paused and minimised - I've never checked under Ubuntu - I'm sure the devs will know more...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Hi amix and welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat(tm)

Thanks DaddyHoggy.

You can land on planet's in a simple sense - try the planetfall OXP

I have

- and Oolite will (eventually) have procedurally generated planetary textures, sun glints on water, shader city glows on the night side etc - watch this space.

That would be great!

More realism is not Oolite's bag

Why not? Would be nice. It adds so much athmosphere.

we have planets that are only 30km across, the distance between planet and sun are only a few 10's of 100's of Km and ship speed is effectively only in a few 10's of m/s

Lol!

- if you want more realism/Newtonian Physics - you're playing the wrong game.

Didn't you enjoy the way it was in FF?

Five:
Don't we go back to our last save? I must be on auto pilot then - I don't recall reloading my current pilot - how strange - not on a machine I can check this!

It says (at the Game Over screen): Press Space Bar. When pressed it loads a default Jameson.

OXPs are scattered all over the Internet there is no way currently to hold them in one repository - are you offering several GB of online storage space?

No, I don't have that storage. But I think, that with some effort, there sure might be a way to do this. Examples may be Sourceforge, GoogleCode, berlioz.net and such. Of course, this is not the same as an own repo with a dedicated admin. But those locations could be recommended for OXP developers. They offer a consistant, permanent space. If the devs announce their need for a hoster, maybe someone will jump in?

Seven:

If you've been lurking for some time - then you will know that licensing has caused much pain in recent months - the community is getting there but it will take some time.

Right. This is why I mentioned my thoughts on this. To ensure freedom in the future it would, at least this is my view onto it, be needed, that the oolite code itself allows only using its API when certain licenses are being used for OXP. It wouldn't be possible any other way, IMO.

Eight:

The joy of Oolite is that anybody can create the Ooniverse the way they see fit in their game, so no style should be enforced (who would decide what this should be? Who has that right?).

This joy is gone quickly as soon the number of OXPs and their inconsistancies among each other create a chaos in the game.

As for lettering in the A. Compass -
there are only 26 letters of the alphabet to pick from (plus 10 numerals) - there's bound to be some overlap, icon creation is a relatively new thing, I'm sure as OXPs are updated the creators may consider it as a future enhancement.

I thought about that letter-limitation. Not sure how the code is in this regard, but the UTF-8 charset allows for several thousand letters. This means, that in these charsets there are a lot of symbols possible. I am sure, there may be one open licensed charset, that gives the latin alphabet plus symbols. Even without this, the Black Monks could have a '$' sign, a production facility could have ® (though, there is more types, than just one), then there is the spade and some more (which are symbols of the standard charset, just to give some examples, that 26+10 is not all we have ) )
http://www.decodeunicode.org/ has examples of all of them.

Currently I get 'F' for fuel-stations and Factories and 'B' for Black Monks and Bars. I have played the last two hours after updating my OXPs and this was really (!) crushin enjoyment, when I wanted to go to the bar and ended up at the monestary, several times, becasue, somehow, either it changed order, or I got confused by cycling through all the possible stations.

That is why I offered something like a style-guide. What is your concern about a central place in the Wiki, where such things like these get cleared out? We could have a register of such letter over there. Plain, simple, and it does not destroy the joy of a free OOniverse.

Same for planet names. Just look at the problems we have now because of some renaming and repseccing of planets happening. People have created fancy maps, but these are not representing changes in some of the OXP. So, this would need a styleguide. A central location (the Wiki) where such things get defined. I do not think, that this will make the gameplay worse. I think it will make it better. There is years to come

If I understand the audience of oolite correctly, people enjoy to create a parallel universe. The descriptions of OXPs are often held in phantasy-realistic fashion. This would be greatly enhanced by some fixtures. And this is happening now, by resorting to the same compay names, personae and so on.

Nine:

What system - only the Mac seems to lack Joystick support - I play Oolite

I thought I'd mentioned it...yes, I did. I run oolite on a Mac.

Force Feedback? Why?

Why not? Of course, only if it is little work to the programmer. I do not consider force-feedback a killer feature. It is fun for those who have it.

Ten:

Again, what system? Under XP I've not noticed it eating clock cycles when paused and minimised - I've never checked under Ubuntu - I'm sure the devs will know more...

Mac.

amix wrote:

Didn't you enjoy the way it was in FF?

Heh heh, that issues tends to... split... people's opinion.

P.S. I also notice that I have to reload my pilot when I die within the game, on the linux version that is.

Re death:trunk handles that differently now, as mentioned in the second half of this post:

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=88385#88385


amix, you might want to check out OE, they're organising themselves as we speak, but hopefully they'll have a full release in the not too distant future, about at the same time as Oolite releases its next version.

oxp version control is a nice idea, but IMO it can only happen if there's a central oxp repository, to keep a million and one security concerns at a minimum.

amix wrote:

when I wanted to go to the bar and ended up at the monestary

Black monks are never in anarchy systems and Bars are never in systems that are not anarchies. I think.

Don't know about fuel stations. I have the oxp installed, but I've never seen one.

Ah yes, I forgot to mention it, but fuel stations don't use 'F' in 1.73 & above, but a fuel pump icon instead. You're not by any means restricted to ascii (or a subset of UTF) anymore, anyway.

amix wrote:

What is your concern about a central place in the Wiki, where such things like these get cleared out? We could have a register of such letter over there. Plain, simple, and it does not destroy the joy of a free OOniverse.

I recently created such a list of ASC target letters on the Wiki. See here: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Advanc ... onal_Buoys

It's not complete as yet, but anyone with wiki access can update it.

One problem that I note (see Kak's reply above) is the fuel station icon. The Wiki has graphics uploads disabled currently so I don't know how to note that on there. So I have just put "(fuel pump icon)" for now.

Kaks wrote:

Ah yes, I forgot to mention it, but fuel stations don't use 'F' in 1.73 & above, but a fuel pump icon instead.

(OT) I like to mention again here that the Fuel Station OXP I use (version 1.24) still use the "F" in both 1.73.4 and the 1.74 trunk at my system, so you might see those, too.

Corny wrote:

Kaks wrote:

Ah yes, I forgot to mention it, but fuel stations don't use 'F' in 1.73 & above, but a fuel pump icon instead.

(OT) I like to mention again here that the Fuel Station OXP I use (version 1.24) still use the "F" in both 1.73.4 and the 1.74 trunk at my system, so you might see those, too.

Hehe I was going to say the same, but as I no longer use the oxp, I thought I might have been mistaken. Thought that Kaks is usually right!

amix wrote:

I run oolite on a 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook (2006) with Intel GMA950 and standard shaders on. It's playable, but as soon I have some dog-fights FPS may go down.

Yeh, you did mention it - I just forgot I'd read it!

Re: Newtonian Physics - sorry but Frontier sucked in this respect - I want a fun game - not an actual space sim - combat with Newtonian physics is as dull as a muddy puddle (and leaves a similar taste in the mouth)

One of the things that really made Frontiers duller than dishwater, was the annoying physics engine. Sure, it was realistic, but reality is boring!
Unless I'm playing a flight sim, then I'd rather fun and gameplay came first, and realism second thanks.
When I did play frontier I quickly went out and bought a ship with turrets, so I had a chance to actually shoot stuff, since the controls and physics engine made real dogfights almost impossible. That sidewinder would buzz you, pop off a few innacurate shots, and disappear to the edge of scanner range. And it would repeat this for anything up to half an hour until enough lucky hits took it out.
DULL!
Half the time I'd just give up, and go make a coffee. Normally when I'd returned, the pirate had messed up, and rammed his ship into my clipper and exploded harmlessly against the shields. But if he left any loot behind, it was unrecoverable, because by the time I'd sorted out the divergent vectors, it was gone.

allikat wrote:

One of the things that really made Frontiers duller than dishwater, was the annoying physics engine. Sure, it was realistic, but reality is boring!
Unless I'm playing a flight sim, then I'd rather fun and gameplay came first, and realism second thanks.
When I did play frontier I quickly went out and bought a ship with turrets, so I had a chance to actually shoot stuff, since the controls and physics engine made real dogfights almost impossible. That sidewinder would buzz you, pop off a few innacurate shots, and disappear to the edge of scanner range. And it would repeat this for anything up to half an hour until enough lucky hits took it out.
DULL!
Half the time I'd just give up, and go make a coffee. Normally when I'd returned, the pirate had messed up, and rammed his ship into my clipper and exploded harmlessly against the shields. But if he left any loot behind, it was unrecoverable, because by the time I'd sorted out the divergent vectors, it was gone.

Yup! That's how I remember it.

Frontier Combat: 1) Buy ship with turrets 2) Fit mining lasers to turrets 3) Wait to be attacked 4) Pause game 5) move turret (!!!) over target and press fire 6) unpause game 7) wait required recycle time of laser and repeat from stage 4 until pirate is dead.

Alternative was to fit a big ship with 30+ shield generators - and although manual said shields weren't good at protecting against physical damage disprove this by ramming back to base atoms every single ship that attacked you.

If you want a physics simulator with spaceships, you might want to try Vega Strike.
It's a good example why Oolite in its comparatively simplicity is much more fun to me...

Lucidor wrote:

amix wrote:

when I wanted to go to the bar and ended up at the monestary

Black monks are never in anarchy systems and Bars are never in systems that are not anarchies. I think.

Hmm... I am in Ascension (Galaxy 1, most outer planet in roght bottom corner, may have been installed or modified by an OXP. It is an Anarchy with tech-level 16) and I have both monks and a bar. And it seems, that the order, in which they appear in the radar changes. But I am not sure on that, yet. Need to investigate.