Oolite Bulletins

Oh dear... DH warned me that ‘writing’ Oolite fiction could become addictive... hey-ho!
Kaxgar, the tale of a lost planet in peril, can be downloaded here.

Been reading it for over an hour and a half now. A must read! Un-putdown-able!

Enjoying every moment of it.

One question though, what Galaxy is it set in?

One nitpick even before reading: I'd prefer the text to be black instead of blue. Would be better readable for me on both monitor and printout.

Also, either a bigger font or bigger paper margins would make it more readable. Lines which contain many characters and have little spacing to the following line make it harder for the eye to jump from the end of one line and hit the beginning of precisely the next line. This results in what is referred to in the German colloquial as Bleiwüste (don't know how the English put it).

That colour and font are my defaults… I use them for nearly everything.
Just change the font colour in your Adobe reader (accessibility options), to black on white, and use the zoom.

I'm not using Adobe Reader, but the Mac Preview application, which apparently has no option for changing the font colour in an existing document. But thanks for the hint. I've tried it now with Adobe Reader and found the setting. Works better for me.

And of course I can zoom into the document to make the font bigger. But then the paragraph becomes wider and the line-hitting becomes more difficult. My plea was for narrower paragraphs. I've read somewhere that for good typesetting there should only be about 65 characters per line. Counting a random line in your text I found about 110 characters.

But, as said before, it's only a nitpick of mine.

@JazHaz... I'm glad that you enjoyed it.
I presume that you found the answer to your question in the appendices.

Oh... and thank you for adding it to the Wiki.

A good story. I thoroughly liked it.

Now if only we could script all that stuff...

I've only read the first chapter so far but it's going well! I have similar nitpicks to Commander McLane re. the presentation (indents at the start of new paragraphs are your friends! ) but the story is carrying all that easily ...

I've used the blue font trick myself sometimes when I'd been going through black ink kinda fast from doing a lot of printouts. One gets used to it within a page or so.

Yeah, paragraph indents and maybe shorter lines would make it a bit easier to read.

But the story itself is the important part, and it was excellent! Characters were established soon after they were introduced, good use of descriptive language, plot seemed to be thought out well. I would have to say that the end felt a bit rushed, like you were trying to keep it down to a certain word length or maybe decided you'd already taken enough time with the build-up and it was time to push it forwards to the conclusion, perhaps.

Don't want to talk about the storyline itself too much, since it'd be a shame to give spoilers that might detract from enjoyment fun of others reading it. But it had some nice twists, and the way you've fleshed out items (like beverages) mentioned in the game adds to the fun of your stories.

In any case, it was a good story and I enjoyed reading it. From the quality, I would guess that you have written quite a bit before. Both of the stories I have read by you felt a bit too "polished" for them to likely be the work of a beginner writer.

Thanks guys… looks like it’s got to be Times New Roman 12pt black, with indents, if I write anything else.
(I hate indents, stopped using them in correspondence years ago… guess I’ll have to re-learn how to use them... maybe.)

Ganelon… that ending could so easily have been much longer, but it felt right to move it along, at the time.
Coyote was my first attempt at 'creative writing' since O-Level English, and that was a very long time ago.

El Viejo wrote:

… looks like it’s got to be Times New Roman 12pt black, with indents, if I write anything else.

Or you could mess with people's heads a bit. Start with black and then in a couple pages a very dark blue, and then gradually into lighter shades of blue. With the indents, you could keep making them smaller until by the last few pages of the document there aren't any.

Just to keep people on their toes and see if anybody notices, y'know?

Ganelon wrote:

Or you could mess with people's heads a bit. Start with black and then in a couple pages a very dark blue, and then gradually into lighter shades of blue. With the indents, you could keep making them smaller until by the last few pages of the document there aren't any.

Just to keep people on their toes and see if anybody notices, y'know?

I noticed!

An excellent piece of work (map zones creeping into the lingo (very cool)) one thing I would say is it might have been possible to squeeze some more out of the battle for Kaxgar. As it might have been useful for you creating a series of cliff hangers as you sweep between the 2 desperate situations.

But that's a style thing and quite frankly the story as it stands doesn't need it. A fine tale.

Well, El Viejo left some very tasty possibilities for other stories by mostly only showing the aftermath of the battle for Kaxgar. I just finished reading it through for the second time, and have been wondering if he might already planning more stories to fill in the history of Kaxgar or maybe the battle.

El Viejo's mention of the love of charts struck a chord, as well. Taping the game map up on the wall used to be one of the obvious signs of a serious spacegame geek. But smaller printable charts could be a cool idea for OXP missions. The player could end up acquiring a map to the lost "treasure of Captain <insert name here>" or whatever and the "map" would be just showing a handful of systems (5 or 6) with no name labels, so they'd have to look for that positioning of stars on assorted galactic maps to figure out where to go. Most of the stars shown might be drawn in black except one is in red (or otherwise indicated) so the player would know which of the places the treasure was. But only after they figured out what little spot of what galaxy they were seeing on the map in the first place. It could result in some entertaining pondering over the printed map and galactic star charts.

Ganelon wrote:

The player could end up acquiring a map to the lost "treasure of Captain <insert name here>" or whatever and the "map" would be just showing a handful of systems (5 or 6) with no name labels, so they'd have to look for that positioning of stars on assorted galactic maps to figure out where to go. Most of the stars shown might be drawn in black except one is in red (or otherwise indicated) so the player would know which of the places the treasure was. But only after they figured out what little spot of what galaxy they were seeing on the map in the first place. It could result in some entertaining pondering over the printed map and galactic star charts.

That is such a cool idea, Ganelon... if only I could script an oxp (I could write the back-story, though... hmmm).