Oolite Bulletins

This might not be in enough people's interest, since it wouldn't involve shooting things or making massive credits.. But on the other hand, I doubt it would risk unbalancing the game or making a bad break with canon.

It would be nice if there were restaurants, bars, hotels (either space or dirtside) to add some dimension to other aspects of life on the Ooniverse. Basically some places for players who are doing ok to spend a little of their CR in as a little break between flying and fighting and buying and selling. They wouldn't necessarily be in every system, and any given system might not have all of them, but sprinkled here and there through the Ooniverse they could add a bit of colour and variety.

We have OXPs for convenience stores, casinos, "Random Hits" has seedy bars, and that is all good. It adds to the feel of the Ooniverse being a busy and interesting place without interfering with gameplay when all you want to do is fly, shoot and trade. But some planet descriptions do mention tourist attractions, some of the fiction mentions taking a week or two "dirtside" as a short vacation before or after a big mission.. It seems reasonable that occasionally a commander with a few spare credits might spend some for a meal in a restaurant or a bar that doesn't happen to be seedy or to have a hot bath whether in the artificial gravity of a station or down on the dirtside. It could give some more variety for passengers wanting transport.

I think this would be a very sensible and logical addition to FamousPlanets.oxp. After all, we should expect some tourism to famous destinations.

Alternatively, it could serve as a hook for a planet-description based OXP. Have tourism locations in systems whose descriptions mention tourists. The quality of service may depend on the inhabitants' attitude, whether they have an excited love, or an ancient loathing of tourists.

Ganelon, what you're suggesting is very similar to some thoughts that I have had.

I remember reading of a huge effort being put into the Tionsila orbital graveyard.

I was thinking it would be great to 'adopt' a system and put in tourist attractions....

On a related topic...is there any sort of "Hello World!" tutorials for OXP creation?

Bugbear1973 wrote:

On a related topic...is there any sort of "Hello World!" tutorials for OXP creation?

Not as such, I'm afraid, just the info and advice on the Wiki. And here on the BB of course...the Expansion Pack thread can be a mine of useful advice.

Bugbear1973 wrote:

I remember reading of a huge effort being put into the Tionsila orbital graveyard.

I was thinking it would be great to 'adopt' a system and put in tourist attractions....

As long as we're mentioning already existing tourist attractions, let's not forget the Tianve Pulsar.

Smivs wrote:

And here on the BB of course...

Well it's great that this community is so active. One of these day's I'll get some time to dig into the code...

Cheers

The Tianve Pulsar is one of my regrets of G1. I had meant to get out there to see it, but the Constrictor mission came up and I ended up in G2. Well, it'll be there still when I've seen all 8 galaxies.

The Tionisla Orbital Graveyard was just an amazing thing to see. In years gone by, playing Elite, I'd always kinda wished such places were actually in the game. One kind of half expected them to be, if you read the Dark Wheel before playing much. LOL But in Oolite (after installing the OXP for it), there it was! Really something amazing to see.

It would be great if each galaxy had just a few such unique tourist spots... It wouldn't need to be more than a few per galaxy, even just one or two would be worth making a bit of a detour to see and fly through.

Oolite actually has quite a lot of things to see. Sometimes I take a break from cargo runs and bounty hunting or whatever to fly a few turns around a biodome or pull up alongside an escorted cargo convoy to just cruise along with them "in formation" and maybe take a screenshot or two. Or "orbit" a moon or planet at low altitude for a little bit, just sightseeing. It may not be gameplay in the sense of credits or points or objectives, but it is play in a pure sense. It is just fun.

Space is big, and part of what I think some of us want is to see some wonders. And there's things I haven't ever seen yet, like the ghost ship of Peter Jameson or a Stellar Serpent. (I saw some video footage of a Stellar Serpent on youtube, but there's vids of Bigfoot there too, not the same as seeing them yourself.) But every time I fire up the game and hit f1, I have to wonder what I'll see or (since I recently installed the Personalities OXP) who I may meet. It is as much of the game's "addiction factor" as the fast action packed gameplay.

Oolite does not disappoint in this regard, especially not with the OXPs. But if a world is described as basically a luxury resort planet or if it has a notable volcano that is mentioned in the news or whatever, it would be nice if there was something there to see. G1 had a couple such places, and if there were some well known sights to see and places to visit in each of the galaxies, then having flown the eight galaxies would have more of that quality of "I've sailed the seven seas" for players.

Please understand this is not a compliant in any sense of what is already there. Just a wish for more.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything (coz we never do that here) but Ganelon's post did make me all kind of nostalgic and recall my early experiences of Elite and how in my imagination there was always so much more there than ever present in the game. However, it was because it was such a great and immersive game that my imagination choose to "fill in the blanks".

Anyway, the real reason I wanted to post was because of all this talk of exploration and just sight-seeing in a game just for the sheer hell of it made me think of another game I used to play and do just that. I think Damocles (Mercenary 2) is probably the best ever game in terms of completely failing to undertake the real objectives of the game and simply wander about instead just exploring and looking for cool stuff. I played it on the Atari ST, and even though plain old 3D polygons were pretty bland, it was still just amazing to go around checking out buildings. I even set myself up with some furniture (movable 3D objects) in an apartment and you could always tell when I was getting near my "apartment" because they game started to crawl with so many 3D objects in close proximity.

Ahh the good old days!

I suppose this is sort of like SecondLife, only these days it doesn't quite have the wow factor... "Oh, that's nice... par for the course".

I 'd like to suggest a custom F-'page' for stations, besides the standard mission-popup and mission-hints F-screen.

One that can be coded in oxp's to represent leisure/social locations such as bars, restaurants, cantinas, saunas, etc.

A "Do you really want to enter [location]? Y/N"
would be prudent for some less than savory locations where one might be arrested or otherwise inconvenienced by getting shot, stabbed or robbed.

---
As for spending money.
I'm still occasionally thinking of racing opportunities.

Besides racing personally, perhaps one could place bets.
The hard part is to make it more than the hoopy random chance... some tips provided to a player by intership comms, randomised hints when docking at a station with races on or by 3rdparty methods such as 'hyperradio' or 'snoopers' could add a bit of speculation, foreknowledge and RPG to the experience.

Technical question:
Would a spectator view of a realtime race by NPCs be possible? While docked?
An alternative would be creating small movies of racing events and doing a similar thing as the Snoopers oxp.

About the technical question: using some of Svengali's techniques you can make a ship move in very specific ways onto a mission screen, instead of just rotating in the middle of the screen. You could combine his technique with a new trick: you coud have 1 'ship' made up of one adder as the main body, and 2 other adders as its subentities, placed some distance away... 3 for the price of 1!

You should then be able to change the relative position / angle of the subentities (relative to the main entity) with a timer to get them move past one another while showing the same mission screen, and also reskin the main & subentities adders dynamically via js to show different skinned ships with the same actual model.. You can then have different 'camera shots' with different static backgrounds between them (again triggered by a timer). That should do for starters!

The other bit: 'do you want to visit this & that place' can of course be done with mission screens. If you name your oxp appropriately - zzzzzz.oxp or something - you might well be able to have it execute last, giving 'real' mission oxps the opportunity to show their mission screens first! )

Kaks wrote:

About the technical question: using some of Svengali's techniques you can make a ship move in very specific ways onto a mission screen, instead of just rotating in the middle of the screen. You could combine his technique with a new trick: you coud have 1 'ship' made up of one adder as the main body, and 2 other adders as its subentities, placed some distance away... 3 for the price of 1!

The only drawback with missionscreens is that the entities have no speed - means they have no (or are not showing?) exhausts .-)

But Kaks is absolutely right - a lot of things are possible. -> examplevideos.zip (3.3MB) Flashplayer required.

hmm.
IIRC one can have a special mission screen pop up at any time and under all sorts of conditions, the ones I specified above would even be pretty mundane.
when docked
and no mission screen
and say...tradingscreen is selected.
what type of socialplace would be present could be determined while docking according to type of dockable, type of system, reputation etc.
even a list of possible places togoto could be.

Still to be useful a lot of content would be required.
rather than:
== The Bruisian Brawl ==

a drunk local tells you a tale of a random planet, apparently
Divan is well known for its parkingmeters and love of ancient sitcoms. (i.e. a random planet description)

Something interesting needs to be added as well:
"At Divan they would pay a million bucks for these Bob Saggit Special betamax tapes...unfortunately I have no ship as I could use the money for my spawn mother, who has recently fallen deleriously ill! Anyway I need some monies fast and you look like an enterprising type, would you buy these tapes from me for the sum of C.2500?" [Y/N]

But this could be too much like that first internal mission we all trigger.
Maybe fairly simple descriptions only for ambient would be more usefull.
Or a cooperative oxp in the style of YAH would be the answer; everyone adding locations and interesting encounters in a shared framework.