Oolite Bulletins

Just read through the posts on why it'd be a bad idea to make it multiplayer. Signing in as a guy that in his youth did play Elite on an Apple IIe, and I think its what got me into software engineering. That, and Bards Tale. Long live the Burger.

That said; yes, an MMO is a nightmare of coding and infrastructure (and resources), but MMO is probably not what most fans of Elite want, to be honest. Or better said, if they think they want it, they don't.

It involves dealing with 15 year old basement brats, antisocial trolls, protocol hackers and the whole gamut.

What about, small steps.

What would make things interesting to me, is a live economy. Because to be honest, the market system of Elite/OOlite is terrible.

Some people like mining asteroids. Its not for me, but people do it. So what about an OXP that exposes a server (have to be TCP with transactions and locks, I'd probably go PostgreSQL given a choice), whereby miners sell their loot on it. Others buy it.

Others hunt down rough pirates for their blueprints. Or go on very hard missions for the uber blueprints to make great fittings/ships etc Others buy said materials to craft items, ships etc. Yes, its very Eve like. But its all station based, relatively easy to code, would require ppl to sign in to a 'server'. This first step doesn't involve dealing with the mechanics of sync'ing players movements in space etc. but I think does introduce a sense of 'life' to the world.

Given the numbers of players, I doubt it'd be a bandwidth killer. Of course it'd require a public server and database and potentially whatever the nasty Objectionable C language could connect to - should've be done in Java and JavaMonkeyEngine I reckon, but whats done is done.

I think it'd be a huge win, for a small gain.

Anyway, point is, a multiplayer market I reckon is low hanging fruit, and would be great to breathe some life into it. And for any budding com-sci student, a good exercise in what you'll find in RL. Apart from the objectionable C language, haven't encountered that in RL yet, but I'm not an [removed by moderator - don't do it again]

Hi, Atoning Unifex, and welcome to the boards! Friendliest this side of Riedquat, so they tell me. Not that I've ever been on the other side of Riedquat ...

The technical ins and outs are beyond me, but – speaking as someone who has no interest in the usual MMO trollfest – I am interested, in the abstract at least, in upping the interactivity of the game. I think that the game economy, as it stands, is too simplistic to be made interestingly interactive, though. But if it could be expanded – specifically, if that various generic headings could be made to contain unique (and wildly differentiated) planet-specific sub-types, e.g. Laveian tree-grubs, which could command much higher profit margins in certain selected other systems – then it could contain enough variation to make things interesting.

How this might be done, though, without massive amounts of hand-built coding (setting the prices for each unique product planet-by-planet) ... hmm.

Hi Atoning Unifex,

being the friendliest board and so on: please refrain from calling people names like [also removed for consistency] and just in general keep your language civilized.

Thanks,
-Maik

Yes, apologize about that, its a relatively friendly term in my circles but can appreciate it comes across a bit rude, was a bit tongue in cheek which didn't translate well.

Intent with the market idea is that it'd be player-driven, very much like Eve Online, but very much like every market system out there too - sellers sell things at a price, buyers pick them up if they desire. So a miner can find certain asteroids, or any other type of resource, in a corporate system, or perhaps some rarer, more valuable resources in harsher parts of space. They can then sell them, at whatever price they'd like, on the market. Could potentially interact with OXP's, in terms of mining moons, planets, large ice asteroids, etc.

Buyers, needing to fill orders to build new ships, space stations, weapons and so on, would then buy from the sell orders.

It'd add at least some interactivity, give people an incentive to mine, give others an incentive to delve into harsh parts of space for the schematics to build with. Witchspace and thargoids might offer some alien schematics and materials. The coding of the market system I don't think would be too drastic; that said, I haven't looked at database access from ObjC nor the networking or UI code. Can't imagine its too far from other languages. Kind of toying with having a crack at it. Kind of toying with a space simulation using JME, Blender and a JEE server atm, but atm quite liking the blast from the past that is OOLite.

Somewhere between Minecraft and OOLite I think there'd be a great space game. In that interacting with people really brings it up to another level (all the issues with co-ordinating MMO's aside), and a 'crafting' system again is a layered, addictive element.

Perhaps could have different levels of 'Elite'... make enough Cobras and you get the go-ahead to use the more advanced replicators offered by the Alastair Reynoldian spacesmiths of Lave.

It would be nice if player ships could be selectable/buyable/sellable via OXPs. Maybe include limits on where they are for sale/buy, such as same galaxy or even same system.
As-is, I don't know of ANY .js controls over what ships are for sale. Game randomly rolls up what ships are for sale and a lot of the time this includes NO ships (or passenger/cargo contracts) for sale.