Oolite Bulletins

I'm just collecting my thoughts on the first mod I'd like to try to build. I still have to go through the threads and familiarize myself the moding details, so this is just a concept thread.

Has anyone suggested building a ShortWave Radio that would allow people with an Internet connection to chat in-game? There are one of two ways I could do this. I could build a back-end to hook into the Oolite IRC. Or an easier, more robust system would be to access an online mysql database. That would allow messages to be filtered based on what Galaxy you're currently in.

Even though this is a single player game, in-game socialization is about 90% of any MMO traffic. If it is done with mysql, I have some nifty maintenance scripts that provide Western ISO to UTF8 conversion to support most languages without the garbled characters.

I like Oolite being single player and my interaction is this forum.

There's a vast array of IMs and Skype like apps that would allow players to chat/talk to each other while they played BUT as you can't exist in the same Ooniverse - what's the point?

No worries. It's good to know the consensus before I spend time on it.

I'd hardly consider my single voice to be a consensus, but generally I think you'll find Ooliters are a singular bunch when it comes to playing the game, but very friendly/interactive on the forum...

I think DH is probably right, inasmuch as we are all a bit isolated within the game, but it sort of has to be that way as a single player entity.
The forum is an excellent means of communicating generally, but having said that, it would be nice to be able to 'chat' to others in a more direct way as well.
The problems here are that, again as DH pointed out, each 'Ooniverse' is unique and isolated, so even if you found another player in the 'same system' it would not be the same...different selection of ships, different things going on etc.
And just finding another player 'live' may not be easy, as we are spread around the globe (different time-zones) and in practice I suspect that very few people are playing at exactly the same time. Indeed when you look at the time some of us spend here, it's surprising we get to actually play the game at all.
Still, it's a nice idea, and might be worth further thought.

Were Oolite multiplayer, each dock/launch would add 10 minutes to 1 player's gametime. And each hyperspace jump would add typically 1 hour to nearly 2 days to their gametime. It could not be done "realtime" period.

I've always maintained the only way Oolite could exist as a multiplayer would for a subset of systems (possibly some of the anarchies) to be declared combat zones with dense asteroid fields for ships to weave through (space is big and empty and therefore dull) where players met simply to fight - but even this has many many problems - the ones off the top of my head are: Recoding Oolite to allow this (and that's a stopper right there - but let's pretend of a wee while longer), methodology for allowing the ships to interact without overloading network connectivity (something like DIS - which works for flight simulators in RL(tm) ), the min/max set of OXPs that players enter the system with otherwise players don't see the same Ooniverse (at the very least - can't see the other player's ships at the worst), methodology for it not becoming a game simply of "my ship is bigger than your ship" i.e. OXP ships created simply for combat, no balance at all...

I could go on, but I don't think I need to. The idea of a multiplayer oolite is a nice idea, right up to the point you give it any kind of thought and then the cons far outweigh the pros...

If everyone was launched from the same main station at the same time (meaning some people's clocks would have to be increased to the same time), then even still the system populator would have to make everything identical on each system.
...And then keep it all synchronized.
It'd be a nightmare even to do such a narrow setup.

Ooniverses actually being the same would only be necessary if one was actually going for multiplayer. But since the Ooniverse is such a vast place, it would be very reasonable to assume that most of the time, there'd be nobody else in range to chat with.

The disadvantage to using an external chat program or whatever is that multitasking breaks the immersion, and some of us definitely prefer to play in full-screen mode. So some sort of an optional little chat could maybe be cool. One wouldn't have to answer or even turn it on or install it if one didn't want it.

Oolite *is* a game with some definite long hauls in it, almost any way you want to play it. Some equivalent to a shortwave radio for occasional chat could work, without actually making the game multiplayer. I know a lot of people think multiplayer would be cool, but it's not what I play Oolite for. If I wanted to be highly social, I wouldn't be hopping in a ship and aiming it's nose at the stars. LOL

But I like sometimes seeing other players *seem* to show up via the Personalities OXP. It's neat to see what their ship looks like or to feel like you've seen/met them in a sense. I had to adjust the frequency of such contacts way down in my copy so it only happens once in a great while though. As a "once in a blue moon" thing, it's highly cool, but too often and it gets tedious.

If such a shortwave had messages from the player's system mixed in with any messages from other player's in their own Ooniverses, the illusion could be good.

"Calling all ships, Calling all ships.. Be advised that there is a renegade viper reported in the spacelanes. It is armed and considered extremely dangerous.. Main station, over and out."

Whether there actually was such a viper or not doesn't matter, it'd give the feeling of there being something like a functional communications network running from the player POV.

Personally, what I think would be cool would be VOIP. I'd run the VOIP through another soundcard so engine and game sounds would be on the speakers and I'd put on the headset for communications. But I doubt there's enough people in the community interested enough in that sort of thing to make I worthwhile. I'd say it's the "druthers" for immersion factor, though.

I wasn't thinking multi-player at all. What I was proposing was just an in-game chat feature that one could purchase in-game, install on the ship and turn on/off like the radio mod.

Just think about it as ET phoning home.

The OXP would run an http query (JSON) every second that would poll a mysql database to see if any new messages are there and print them to screen. The same query could be used to update the database with a new chat.

That's the 5,000 foot view anyway. All the mods that I've installed have really added a lot of life to the Elite Ooniverse. I wouldn't want to do anything that spoiled the atmosphere.