


Since the game structure is intended to be ‘open–hooded’, objects and events that take place in Oolite are easily modified without need of programming skills. Numerous modifications for Oolite have expanded the gameplay by adding in new missions, new equipment, new ships, new trading locations and new open-ended career opportunities such as courier or hitman. It is not necessary to complete or even begin any of these missions to play the game, however. There are a small number of built-in missions in the game, inherited from Elite, where the player is given specific tasks to perform. This rating begins at "harmless" (no kills), then "mostly harmless", and culminates with the "deadly" then "elite" rankings. The player can also seek to trade in his or her ship for other models with different characteristics and capabilities.Įach ship the player destroys, of any type or class, adds to the player's Elite rating, a ranking based on the number of kills made.

Money earned or otherwise acquired can be spent on fuel for the wormhole engines (known as "Witchdrives"), ship maintenance and new equipment. Players can also elect to carry paying passengers or special cargos to specified destinations. It is also possible, with the right equipment, to mine asteroids for ores and other materials. If the player's ship is equipped with a scoop, this cargo can be salvaged for later resale. Although no bounty is awarded for destroying non-pirate ships, when a ship is destroyed, some of its cargo can survive the explosion. Players can become pirates themselves, attacking merchantmen and other ships. Money can also be earned by destroying pirate ships and collecting bounty. Players can earn money by buying goods in one star system and transporting them to another to sell at a profit. Money and Elite rating are the only built-in forms of "score" in Oolite. There is no set goal or objective in the game. Most combats are dogfights and the ships exhibit non- Newtonian flight characteristics, being immune from the effects of inertia and gravity. Oolite spaceships' principal armaments are lasers and missiles. During this stage of the journey the player can encounter other ships, and combat can occur. The player must then pilot their ship from the entry point, through "normal" space, to the station. Although players can create outgoing wormholes almost anywhere within a system, assuming their engines have sufficient fuel to do so, ships always enter a new system at a considerable distance from the target planet. Each system contains only one inhabited planet, with an orbiting space station players choose the destination system by the name of its planet. The player is the pilot of a spacecraft, capable of interstellar travel to other nearby planetary systems using wormholes generated by the ship's engines. Like Elite, Oolite is a first-person, open-ended, single-player space trading and combat simulator. Current test version is 1.74 which was released on the 13th June 2010.Ī ship exits a Coriolis station Basics There have been several test releases, with most notably the addition of JavaScripting capabilities to write missions and shader support. On 27 February 2007, the project was relicensed under the GPL and after a lag, development continues by the community. In October 2006, after releasing the stable 1.65 version, Williams announced he would stop developing Oolite after implementing updated OpenGL shader functionality.
Oolite gameplay mac os x#
Most ports include the same functionality except for the Mac OS X version which includes additional support of native Mac OS X features (as integration with iTunes, Spotlight and Growl support) Ports are also available for SGI IRIX and FreeBSD on Intel architectures.
Oolite gameplay windows#
In March 2006, the Windows GNUstep port was released.
Oolite gameplay for mac os x#
In July, 2004, Oolite was developed by Giles Williams for Mac OS X and released but remained in active development for a long time afterwards.īy September 2005, Mac Oolite had reached v1.52, and a Linux port was released, closely following the Mac OS X developments since.
