Oolite Bulletins

I want to start by saying a big thank you to everyone involved in putting Oolite together, it is a tremendous achievement and you have made one old gamer a happy man - this was one of my two favourite games from back when I owned a ZX Spectrum and I have been looking for a replacement ever since. As an aside I found Oolite from an article on bit-tech (which I'm not allowed to link) so hopefully a few more will follow me here.

Now, down to noob business. Of course I have a few questions, and I have searched through the forums but couldn't find anything which really answered them and with the wiki offline I'm a bit stuck for help.

Eye candy
I have a decent rig (E8400 processor, ATI HD4890 gfx card on 10.3 drivers all under Win7) so I was looking at OXPs to make things look a little better. I picked up Famous Planets 2.0, Griffs Ships compilation by Ms Sma, System Redux and Your Add Here thanks to a search through Google's cache of the wiki. I also got hold of Neolite's ships as that was mentioned in some posts but I've been switching it with Griff's as I'm guessing they are mutually exclusive. I thought Griff's was supposed to be the top quality version, however when I used 'v' for an external view of my ship it was a dull flat grey. Also the dodecahedral space stations appear just as a flat greyish pink. Both these models actually looked better when I had Neolite's ships installed. The standard space station looked the same either way. Am I missing something?

Controls
I found the sensitivity of the controls a bit too much. I only had to look at the mouse and I would head into a barrel roll and simply tapping the keyboard for yaw, pitch or roll would make it feel as though the ship was being steered by an overly enthusiastic drunken gorilla. Is there a way of adjusting the sensitivity somehow? Or should I just man up and go buy a joystick? While I find docking easy enough combat is nigh on impossible - line up behind the bad guy, match speeds, just need to centre the crosshairs, left a bit, no no no now right, oh godammit back left again, now up just a touch, no you twitchy piece of balsa wood now down a bit etc etc etc you get the picture. Which finally brings me on to...

Combat
I'll start by saying I am no twitch gamer, but I do play my fair share of FPSes so I'm not a complete mug. However after a few hours of doing the honourable thing and running away I finally managed to build up enough cash by the usual furs/liquor/computers trades (slaves? Where did they come from? They can't be mine officer ) to buy myself a new shiny beam laser, an ECM, an advanced targeting reticule thingy and the witch fuel injectors. I won't be Harmless for long, oh no, come and get it universe, Mostly Harmless here I come! So, I get jumped by a lone pirate in station range and this time I'm ready for him. He's driving a Fer-de-Lance but I get on his tail, spend about 10 seconds twitching about (see above) and finally get him centred and it's "pew pew pew, eat hot, erm, coherent light sucker". Three or four hits and he starts his evasive manoeuvres but eventually I line him up once more and rinse/repeat. This goes on for about 20 minutes, he doesn't get a single hit on me in this time and he is showing no signs of going down. I then remember my old tactics of coming to a dead stop, waiting for him to start a loop for his attack run and start shooting at him then. Seems to work like a charm, get a few hits but before he's even close... lasers overheated. I keep at this for a few more minutes and then a buddy of his shows up and the pair of them show me the space bar. I tried a missile but that was just immediately ECM'd . I guess the short question after the long story is would you expect the Cobra MKIII with beam lasers to be able to take down a lone Fer-de-Lance? Should I just give up and remain Harmless until I can afford Military lasers and be able to waste money shooting ECM hardened missiles?

First of all let me welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat!™

Palmski wrote:

Eye candy
I have a decent rig (E8400 processor, ATI HD4890 gfx card on 10.3 drivers all under Win7). I thought Griff's was supposed to be the top quality version, however when I used 'v' for an external view of my ship it was a dull flat grey. Also the dodecahedral space stations appear just as a flat greyish pink.

Sounds like you haven't got Shaders switched on. The gfx card you have probably should be able to run Shaders, though not 100%, one of the others will probably be able to confirm. Check the Game Options to set either Simple or Full. Full is best, or Simple if your frame rate drops.

Alternatively check your logfile to see if Oolite is setting Shaders correctly. (Find it in ../Oolite/oolite.app/Logs/). The game saves two logs, Latest.log and Previous.log, for your last and previous sessions.

Palmski wrote:

Controls
Is there a way of adjusting the sensitivity somehow?

Not sure. One of the others will be able to tell you....

Palmski wrote:

Combat
I guess the short question after the long story is would you expect the Cobra MKIII with beam lasers to be able to take down a lone Fer-de-Lance?

Yes you should be able to. You need to shoot in bursts. Also fit a rear laser and use that whilst your front laser is cooling down.

Hi Palmski and welcome.

As JazHaz says, you need shaders set to full, your rig should have no problem with that.

One answer (applies to Griff ships only): your player ship has no colours by default… you need to set them yourself.

In the Config\shipdata.plist of your chosen ship, find the player section. A few lines down in the uniforms section there are two lines: PaintColor1 and PaintColor2, each with three values… RGB. Set them anywhere between 0.0 and 1.0 and keep tinkering until you get the colour you want.
Don't forget your custom decal, covered in this thread.

Enjoy

BTW, do not edit any plists in Notepad... Wordpad is fine, but Notepad++ is best.

JazHaz wrote:

First of all let me welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat!™

Thanks, it certainly seems a good community you've got going on here.

JazHaz wrote:

Sounds like you haven't got Shaders switched on. The gfx card you have probably should be able to run Shaders, though not 100%, one of the others will probably be able to confirm. Check the Game Options to set either Simple or Full. Full is best, or Simple if your frame rate drops.

Alternatively check your logfile to see if Oolite is setting Shaders correctly. (Find it in ../Oolite/oolite.app/Logs/). The game saves two logs, Latest.log and Previous.log, for your last and previous sessions.

Shaders are definitely set to "Full" and the card should handle it - I can play most 3D games with everything turned up to 11. I'll check the logs when I get home, perhaps there will be an answer in there. Is there anything specific I should be looking for?

JazHaz wrote:

Yes you should be able to. You need to shoot in bursts. Also fit a rear laser and use that whilst your front laser is cooling down.

Damn, I was hoping it wasn't me, I'm sure I remember combat being easier back in the day and taking things down with pulse lasers. More practice required clearly! I could never get the hang of rear lasers though, left is right, up is down? That way madness lies... still it can't hurt to try.

I'll give the ship customisation a go as well, looks like fun.

Palmski wrote:

JazHaz wrote:

Yes you should be able to. You need to shoot in bursts. Also fit a rear laser and use that whilst your front laser is cooling down.

Damn, I was hoping it wasn't me, I'm sure I remember combat being easier back in the day and taking things down with pulse lasers. More practice required clearly! I could never get the hang of rear lasers though, left is right, up is down? That way madness lies... still it can't hurt to try.

Cooling problems get worse with military lasers, however they do do more damage. Get military lasers as soon as you can afford them.

Yes the rear lasers do reverse the controls needed, but you can get used to them the more you use them.

I'm thinking though the problems you have been having is perhaps you haven't been hitting your target enough? You should hear the hits and see a red flash on the ship when you hit it.

Palmski wrote:

I'll give the ship customisation a go as well, looks like fun.

AFAIK If you have editted your save file to use the Griff cobra then this applies. If you haven't you may still be using the standard cobra.

As El Viejo said, do not use Notepad to edit Oolite's files as this buggers up the files due to it not using CR/LF's correctly. Search for Notepad++ which is a shareware replacement Notepad program.

EDIT: find Notepad++ here: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net

A Fer-de-Lance is quite the opponent, when you start out, so don't feel bad about it.

JazHaz wrote:

I'm thinking though the problems you have been having is perhaps you haven't been hitting your target enough? You should hear the hits and see a red flash on the ship when you hit it.

I'm definitely both hitting and missing and I can see the difference. I was getting 3 or 4 hits before he started manoeuvring out of the way and my twitchy keyboard made it difficult to line up any more shots until he decided to fly straight again, as he did eventually. I imagine by that point his shields had regenerated enough to make the whole exercise fruitless

JazHaz wrote:

AFAIK If you have editted your save file to use the Griff cobra then this applies. If you haven't you may still be using the standard cobra.

Sadly no, not done that. Explains that one! I take it the instructions for doing so are on the wiki Thanks for all the tips....

@Rxke thanks for the encouragement, I'm sure I'll get there - currently contemplating purchasing a joystick if all else fails. If only they would just sit still and let me shoot at them damnit!

haha, yes, FDLs are tricksy things, for sure. Try picking a fight with some Cobra Mk1s to get your kill rating up

Or a python: big and not too fast. They may even spill some cargo for you to scoop (wait, you probably don't have fuel scoops yet...)

FDLs, Cobras, Pythons, any ship really: if you get too close to them they start in with the whole evasive manoevres routine, and they become a swine to get between the cross-hairs.

I use a keyboard, and find it just dandy - much better than mouse control, or ajoystick (but ymmv, and everyone has their preferences)

re. eye candy, I think you have most of the cool stuff already.

echo the comments on your first post: hooray for Oolite!

Welcome Palmski-
I won't rehash all the above, but will comment on something. Mind you, this is purely personal opinion, and by no means the most popular, merely my own... That said - GET THE JOYSTICK! Not that it's required, but it makes the immersion that much better (IMHO). I have two setups (neither exactly cheap), one by CH Products and the second is a Cougar HOTAS. Love them both, but mainly use the Cougar. You don't have to go that expensive though. Plenty of cheaper sticks available that perform admirably. But they do make a difference in gameplay, I feel.

Hi Palmski, and welcome!

Mouse control is tricky.. as you've found, if you get even a little flustered, things go all to pot very quickly.. I prefer keyboard over mouse, though a joystick makes life much easier, in my opinion. If you do use a mouse, make liberal use of the right button.. it instantly zeros the pitch and roll.

(Get a joystick with lots of buttons and a hatswitch.. you can map about a dozen different functions to them. )

Palmski wrote:

JazHaz wrote:

AFAIK If you have editted your save file to use the Griff cobra then this applies. If you haven't you may still be using the standard cobra.

Sadly no, not done that. Explains that one! I take it the instructions for doing so are on the wiki

Umm.. the instructions are not on the Wiki, so far as I know.. but it's not hard. Search in your game-save for these lines: and change it to read: or, if you prefer the 'weathered' look: P.S. re "Griffs Ships compilation by Ms Sma"... I can't take credit for the compilation.. Griff does all the work, I just provide web-hosting for his all-in-one package.. for some reason he thinks that's enough reason to put my screen-handle in the filename..

P.P.S. re "Ms Sma"... as you are doubtless aware, the citizens of the Culture can change gender if we choose.. shortly before the unfortunate accident which brought me to the Ooniverse, I had transformed into a male for my next SC mission.. now I seem to be stuck with it.. Skaffen-Amtiskaw, as you can imagine, thinks it's quite funny..

I'm a joystick maven myself, and fly with an X52. If you're finding keyboard controls far too twitchy, then grabbing a good joystick is the way to travel.

I recommend buying the best stick your budget will allow. Oolite has a center drift problem with some cheap controllers, and with no way to tune axis sensitivity ingame, that's a problem that is here to stay.

hej Palmski, welcome to the Ooniverse.

... currently contemplating purchasing a joystick if all else fails.

Myself I steer with a gamepad, works perfectly for me. It has 12 buttons, so most critical functions fit there. (did cost no 10 euro)
Also, with a gamepad/ joystick, you won't have this "over"-steering effect as with the keyboard's arrow keys.

With a gamepad or joystick you can toggle "precision mode" on/off. Then the analogue stick movements will translate to like only half the action - good for far distance sniping, or docking.
So I do not get this comment from Cmdr Wyvern.

... and with no way to tune axis sensitivity ingame

I needed a while though to decide which functions best mapped where on the gamepad.

- Get yourself a witchdrive fuel injector, it will enable you to flee if necessary, or to close in on enemies real fast.

On Wiki down / asking questions : it is a dilemma - to me a lot of the fun in Oolite was/is finding things out in-game. Like this :

lfnfan wrote:

if you get too close to them they start in with the whole evasive manoevres routine

Have fun.

Myself I steer with a gamepad, works perfectly for me.

snork, which gamepad are you using? I've been thinking about the Logitech Dual Action gamepad: http://www.logitech.com/en-us/gaming/co ... evices/288 but if someone has something else that works...

Cheers.

I use a speed-link Strike SL 6535.


But I am sure to have read about Logitech Dual Action thingies working well with Oolite around here.
(Don't know if gamepads / joysticks yet work in Mac OS + Oolite)

Sweeeet! Thanks, I'll check that one out... No worries on the Mac... don't have one... yet...