Oolite Bulletins

Hi,
I played Elite on a BBC Micro back in goodness knows when! One of my first gaming memories!

So finding Oolite so many years later is very exciting!

I'm about to dive in and get playing, but I want to know if there are any "essential" addons that I really need before starting. Nothing to add loads of fancy upgrades and things but just things that you may not want to start a new game without!

Many thanks for your input and efforts!

Pete

Hi kneecaps, and welcome to the ‘friendliest forum this side of Riedquat’.

Often asked question… several threads sort of cover it.
It depends what you want… I’m probably not the best to answer this, as I keep it simple:

System Redux oxp for beautiful planets, though the built-in planets are pretty good.
Griff ship set oxp… really classy ships, but they need full shader support from your GPU.
Fighter HUD oxp as an alternative to the standard… there are several huds available.

None of the above affect gameplay in any way… it’s still the vanilla game underneath the eye-candy.

I also use:

Target Reticle… a slight aid to targetting.
Target Autolock which speaks for itself.

Beyond that… the ‘game’ is your Ooniverse.

Hi, Kneecaps! Welcome to the friendliest board this side of Riedquat. There aren't any essential OXPs: the game will work perfectly well on the "vanilla" setting. What OXPs you want to install depends on what sort of universe you want to play around in.

For a new commander, in an unmodified Cobra III, it's probably easier to think about what you might not want to install right away ... steer clear of putting in dangerous ships like the Rattle Cutter (or, frankly, even the Iguana, Cat or Wolf II), or anything that beefs up the Thargons, until you've got more iron on your ass. Similarly you'd probably want to leave out anything like e.g. Anarchies or Deep Space Pirates until you've got a bit of experience and equipment. Starting off, the best things you can have are, IMO, extra trading opportunities – OXPs like Your Ad Here, Commies, and Dictatorships all add in extra stations with various pricing standards, where you can both practice docking and maybe pick up a good deal or two.

The Ore Processor gives you another mechanism for making money (if you fit a mining laser, though, don't put it on the nose!). The Fuel Tank is, I think, an essential extra: it's often a (literal) lifesaver in the event of a witchspace misjump, and when you get injectors on your ship it's a really useful addition too.

You can find some more useful discussion and links etc. on this thread.

Thank you both very much for your pointers. I shall try the addons and get started !

Cmdr Cheryd and the Thargoid, have you thought about personally rating the OXPs you link to for their suitability for the type of experience a pilot has? You could rate them this way:

* - Green pilots (this OXP is safe for everyone)
** - Competant pilots (This OXP should be a challenge to most pilots, but it my be too much for Green pilots)
*** - Elite pilots (Only the best should install this OXP)

So most graphic enhancements and trading add-ons should fall under the * rating, but many new missions and ship enhancements may incur higher ratings.

Besides, a ranking after combat skills doesn't really say that much. Most OXPs have nothing to do with the player's combat skills. Farsun.oxp, for instance, simply moves the suns to a more distant location in the system. Whether you install it or not has nothing to do with your combat, but simply with whether you like the new alternative sun-position, or not.

Or, another example, installing a shader-heavy OXP has not very much to do with your combat skills (well, it might, if the shader-heavy ship also happens to be an über-ship), but with how well your machine copes with the use of shaders, and whether you are willing to tolerate the drop in frame rate.

Therefore a ranking solely after combat skill actually doesn't give a reliable recommendation at all.

Thargoid wrote:

Seriously it's a nice idea in theory, but in practice trying to rate things beyond "OK for everyone (doesn't make the game any more deadly)" and "maybe trouble (adds things that could kill you)" it gets too subjective.

Which is why I suggested that it would be a personal recommendation, rather than a generalised agreement. After all, you host the OXP site, and you would have a good idea about most of the OXP's you host. I figure that you would have a lot of experience in Oolite. I would have no problems if you recommended OXP's, saying these OXP's could enhance a new Jamieson's experience, while playing those OXP's should wait until you improve your skills, and playing these OXP's will give you the full Oolite experience. I don't think anyone would have any problems if you put on your page your recommendations, and I think it would help a lot of new players.

Commander McLane wrote:

Besides, a ranking after combat skills doesn't really say that much. Most OXPs have nothing to do with the player's combat skills. Farsun.oxp, for instance, simply moves the suns to a more distant location in the system. Whether you install it or not has nothing to do with your combat, but simply with whether you like the new alternative sun-position, or not.

I think I did say that OXP's that enhance the looks and the feel of Oolite (like the example above) are suitable for all players, but on the OXP download Wiki there are some OXP's that say that you should be an experienced player to play them.

Therefore a ranking solely after combat skill actually doesn't give a reliable recommendation at all.

But on the other hand it's either that or no ranking at all. The only other 'ranking' that could be measured is your 'wealth', but that's even more unwieldy.

Oolite itself uses combat kills as a measure of ranking, so why not use it? Yes, it's pretty general, but it's also a rule of thumb as well. If you're Harmless, (unless you are an experienced player starting a new character) it's fairly certain that you have only basic flying skills. By the time you hit Competant, and you crack the first mission, I think it's obvious that you have a fair deal of flying and combat skills under your belt.

Yesterday I went and downloaded a few OXP's to enhance my currently vanilla Oolite experience. I've just ticked over into taking the Constrictor mission, so it was a good time to do it. What did I download? OXP's recommended on this very thread. Even if you don't take up the ranking method, putting up a section for recommended OXP's on OXP download pages I think can only help the Oolite community. I am sure that people would have no problem with Cmdr McLane's personal selection of OXP's.

Sydney2K wrote:

Yesterday I went and downloaded a few OXP's to enhance my currently vanilla Oolite experience. I've just ticked over into taking the Constrictor mission, so it was a good time to do it.

There are even some very simple mission OXP which should be installed and played before taking the Constrictor mission. See at the Wiki missions page everything that is marked "for beginners" and takes place in Galaxy 1.

Sydney2K wrote:

What did I download? OXP's recommended on this very thread. Even if you don't take up the ranking method, putting up a section for recommended OXP's on OXP download pages I think can only help the Oolite community. I am sure that people would have no problem with Cmdr McLane's personal selection of OXP's.

Actually that's exactly what I am planning on my Wiki user page (or a subpage of it). My own personal recommendations. Because you're right, of course. I am one of the players with some experience, I know a lot of OXPs, and I have made some very conscious decisions on what to install and what to de-install again.

However, I haven't mentioned my main criterium yet. It has nothing to do with skills level or CPU/GPU burden, but with ELITE-ness. There are some OXPs out there which are beautiful in themselves and highly recommended by others, but in my personal opinion they break Elite's/Oolite's backstory, therefore I would never install them myself and would not recommend others to install them (perhaps even recommend to not install them). Galactic Navy is such a case. And it has nothing to do with how suitable it is for new or old commanders, or which kind of eye-candy it adds, but is purely due to the fact that I personally think that the basic idea behind it is a false assumption about (or interpretation of) the nature of GalCop as an organisation. Therefore I disagree with basically everything derived from that basic idea, and thus with the whole OXP. Many people here enjoy it, but I think that it transforms the Elite universe into something which is no longer the Elite universe, so I'm not interested.

I will put together my personal OXP recommendations as soon as I get some time to do it. It's going to be the recommendations of a player who thoroughly enjoyed ELITE and is thriving to recreate and enhance this game, but not eager to transform it into something else.

Someone mentioned hardware capabilities, and that's a good point worth expanding on.

Oolite is a single-core game, that is, it uses only one CPU core for everything. A multicore CPU won't help you out much there, except to take the load of the OS, joystick, audio proccessing, ect. Regardless, Oolite will pick a core to use all by it's lonesome.

On GPUs, Oolite seems to work best with Geforce 4, FX, and later series that support OpenGL and shaders fully. There's been some reported problems with ATI and Intel GPUs, and it generally boils down to dodgy driversets that offer partial OGL support at best. Even with Geforce you can have dodgy drivers - the latest version isn't always the best for your hardware setup - and you may have to experiment with older driversets to find the optimum.

I played Oolite for years on a single-core Athalon machine with a Geforce FX in it, and it could handle all but the most shaderfied oxps without a framedrop.
I recently upgraded to a dual-core Athalon/nForce/Geforce 7 series machine, and it does considerately better - although a system monitor app tells me that Oolite is loading only one core.

Your Milage May Vary. Good luck.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

Someone mentioned hardware capabilities, and that's a good point worth expanding on.

Oolite is a single-core game, that is, it uses only one CPU core for everything. A multicore CPU won't help you out much there, except to take the load of the OS, joystick, audio proccessing, ect. Regardless, Oolite will pick a core to use all by it's lonesome.

On GPUs, Oolite seems to work best with Geforce 4, FX, and later series that support OpenGL and shaders fully. There's been some reported problems with ATI and Intel GPUs, and it generally boils down to dodgy driversets that offer partial OGL support at best. Even with Geforce you can have dodgy drivers - the latest version isn't always the best for your hardware setup - and you may have to experiment with older driversets to find the optimum.

I played Oolite for years on a single-core Athalon machine with a Geforce FX in it, and it could handle all but the most shaderfied oxps without a framedrop.
I recently upgraded to a dual-core Athalon/nForce/Geforce 7 series machine, and it does considerately better - although a system monitor app tells me that Oolite is loading only one core.

Your Milage May Vary. Good luck.

I'm still playing Oolite on a single core Athlon (2800+) and FX gfx (5950 ultra)...

A Quote from Cmdr Wyvern:
"Someone mentioned hardware capabilities, and that's a good point worth expanding on."

Uhm... "here"? °points at topic° This is about OXPs.

Not to mention that "addon" is kinda the opposite of "essential".