snorks in space! (noob w. old hardware, gamepad, questions)
Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 10:18 am
damn, too long post. 
I bolded some for quick scan.
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hej, fellow pilots
First my
to you Ooliters.
Works out of the box, stable, resizable window and whatnot all. Once again, open source software wins.
Makes me feel like an idiot not having found this way earlier than just this weekend.
Thank you, I have already been having lots of fun with it these last days.
However, I do have some questions or troubles I hope you can help me with - or clarify there is nothing that can be done, other than upgrading my PC
(due anyway, as soon as Westmere notebooks are available at reasonable pricing)
I am not a gamer, but still insist on playing with gamepad, just the flying and fighting that is.
To me it is much more immersive and thus FUN. And it works reasonably well.
And it keeps me from going insane over keyboard controls on a qwertz keyboard layout.
I am playing Oolite 1.73.4 on Winows XP (fairly few processes / services running) on an old DELL workstation :
a dual Pentium2, 1 GB RAM, Geforce2 GTS w. 64 MB RAM (no shader model nothing), ok P-ATA HD (5,400 rpm, should get defragmented, I know).
Game settings : 1280x960 in fullscreen, details = on, detailed planets = usually off.
Here are my help requests to you other pilots:
Last but seriously not least : Thank you, Flying_Circus
for introducing the snork ship (oxp).
And as slick it is as one would expect from its name. yay!
So good, I don't mind the ugly typo in the name.
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* leaving the jokes about "turn DEP off" for someone else. ^^
I bolded some for quick scan. -----------------------------------------------------------
hej, fellow pilots
First my
to you Ooliters. Works out of the box, stable, resizable window and whatnot all. Once again, open source software wins.
Makes me feel like an idiot not having found this way earlier than just this weekend.
Thank you, I have already been having lots of fun with it these last days.
However, I do have some questions or troubles I hope you can help me with - or clarify there is nothing that can be done, other than upgrading my PC
(due anyway, as soon as Westmere notebooks are available at reasonable pricing)
I am not a gamer, but still insist on playing with gamepad, just the flying and fighting that is.
To me it is much more immersive and thus FUN. And it works reasonably well.
And it keeps me from going insane over keyboard controls on a qwertz keyboard layout.
I am playing Oolite 1.73.4 on Winows XP (fairly few processes / services running) on an old DELL workstation :
a dual Pentium2, 1 GB RAM, Geforce2 GTS w. 64 MB RAM (no shader model nothing), ok P-ATA HD (5,400 rpm, should get defragmented, I know).
Game settings : 1280x960 in fullscreen, details = on, detailed planets = usually off.
Here are my help requests to you other pilots:
- some things are slow.
Turning off detailed Planets helped significantly, but still ...
DeP off *:
Load game - 13 sec.
F7 - 4-5 sec.
2xF8 (first time) - 10 sec.
hyperspace - 9 sec. - from (3,2,1,)0s until the rings appear on screen.
(with DeP=on the times passing are 23 / 10-11 / same 10 / 16-18 seconds.)
Funny enough, detailed planets = on does not seem to slow down the game otherwise, in flight /combat I do not feel any slowdown.
Reduced detail on/off does not influence this, nor does reducing resolution from 1280x960 to 1024x768.
I wonder might it help to play Oolite from RAMdisk ? Any experiences with that ? Any other ideas how to improve this ? - Because of the above : Is there any way to load a game without the default new game having to be loaded first ?
- Sometimes (rare) game controls foul up - like I suddenly couldn't jettison cargo anymore (d key).
Loading a game or restarting the game did fix this (I think), but is there a cure without reloading ? I mean me beeing a noob I just did particularly well in blasting up a serious pirate gang, this time even without in the process having zapped all the cargo pods.
And then all the goods flying around and I can't pick them up because some food or minerals are stuck in the cargo bay.
Or is it a feature ? During fight I hardly am able to read any messages about what went broke, lost or sth. . - gamepad issue :
Sometimes an analogue stick axis won't do anything until I use the other analogue stick first.
I don't know why, maybe it has to do with mixed gamepad-keyboard useage.
Typically this would be yaw = 2nd analogue stick horizontal axis.
I have to use first analogue stick first (roll/dive), for yaw via gamepad 2nd analogue stick being available again.
Can I do something about it ? Need I avoid doing something ? - Music vs. SFX sound volume to me is disbalanced. (I am using Hawkesounds.oxp)
If I set the volume so that the sounds won't annoy my neighbours, then the music is hardly noticeable.
Any known fix for this ?
Yes, really, when arriving on delivery point the other side of the galaxy, or my rank going up, then I do want the Danube Blue playing next (auto)docking.
- Why did I receive ~34,000 credits on passenger delivery when the expected pay was 17,600 ?
It was in a mixed passengers situation and does not happen that way on a reload.
Was it because I was 5 days early, on a 33 days limit ?
Or maybe because I originally had 2 passengers to Zaleriza, but the one (27 days limit) left me at Xeenla, just two jumps before Zaleriza, because of me failing to deliver in time.
I went on to Zaleriza without dying/ reloading before arriving at Zaleriza station. And to my surprise got payed almost double as much as promised, almost as much as if I delivered both passengers in time.
On reloads (last jump before Zaleriza) I get payed a bit more than what was agreed upon, but never near as much as that first time. Wondering
- How can I re-read received messages ?
As said, during fight I hardly have the nerves for this - What did who say when I destroyed my first Thargoid warship ? What got lost or broken from fight or bad docking ? And so on.
Last but seriously not least : Thank you, Flying_Circus
for introducing the snork ship (oxp).And as slick it is as one would expect from its name. yay!
So good, I don't mind the ugly typo in the name.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
* leaving the jokes about "turn DEP off" for someone else. ^^
And Oolite runs at all? I'm amazed! 
