Oolite Bulletins

would it be a neat idea to allow players to specify what ship first appears on the title screen via an oxp or would this ruin that iconic 3d spinning cobra moment OMG OMG we all remember from playing Elite on our 8bits?

I thought this was hard-coded to be the 'player' Mk III Cobra. It's a nice idea but I'm not sure how it could be implemented, and as you say, that spinning Mk III is truly iconic. Perhaps somehow the loading save file could be interrogated so that the actual Player's ship is shown rather than the Cobra. Probably can't be done. In fact thinking more about it you have to select the 'player ship' when you Load Commander and the game's already started by that point, so, no, that wouldn't work.

I also think that the Cobbie is the iconic ship for the opening screen. I wouldn't want it to be replaced.

I've never actually paid attention but does Oolite cycle the standard ships on the opening screen? IIRC the Atari ST version of Elite cycled through all the standard ships (starting with the Cobra MKIII of course!).

Maybe as a compromise the screen could start with the Cobra MKIII and then cycle through all standard and OXP ships (if you really felt like sitting there all day watching).

It does show you all other ships after you answer 'N' to 'load previous commander Y/N ?' and before you 'press space commander'!

Same thing happens just after you die... switching between restricted/unrestricted play...

When you start the game, press 'No' for 'load new commander' and it will cycle through all the standard ships except the Viper Interceptor and Constrictor. I don't know why it doesn't show these...well I do, they're not in the demoships.plist. I did add them for Smivs'Shipset.
OXP ships will be added providing a Demoships.plist has been included in the OXP.
That's how I added the two missing ones from the standard set.

Pardon me for digging up and attaching a lightning rod to an old thread, but, is this demo-screen ship parade still a feature of Oolite? I can't seem to get it to start and the menus as described seem to have changed since last this thread was active. I'm not referring to the ship library menu item; the demo-screen would be the game cycling through a display of the ships, stations, et-cetera, just for the show of it. Does Oolite still have this ability and if so, how do you access it?

Layne wrote:

Pardon me for digging up and attaching a lightning rod to an old thread, but, is this demo-screen ship parade still a feature of Oolite? I can't seem to get it to start and the menus as described seem to have changed since last this thread was active. I'm not referring to the ship library menu item; the demo-screen would be the game cycling through a display of the ships, stations, et-cetera, just for the show of it. Does Oolite still have this ability and if so, how do you access it?

Basically, the functionality has been moved to the ship library menu. It would be nice to have the demo-screen still working on the opening screen, though.

I too would like to see a random śtart model selected from the pool of available items.