oolite/Doc/FAQ.TXT

Oolite-Linux Frequently Asked Questions
=======================================

Note: Long answers to questions about installing and gameplay can be
found in README.TXT and PLAYING.TXT respectively.

General questions about Oolite for any platform
-----------------------------------------------
1. What's the point of the game?
To fly from planet to planet, buying and selling goods, shooting pirates 
or committing acts of piracy. There's no goal other than perhaps to achieve 
the rank of ELITE.

1.1. I'm still confused, how do I play?
Have a look at Ian Bell's Flight Training Manual for the original BBC Elite, 
some of Oolite's control keys are different from the original, so be sure 
to read it alongside the Oolite PLAYING.TXT file..
( http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/ )

1.2. What do the various colors represent on the radar?
White - unpowered items that can't mass-lock the in-system drive.
Green/Yellow - navigation buoys.
Yellow - powered craft.
Red - powered craft identified as hostile.
Green - space stations.
Green/Red - thargoids
Purple - police
Blue/Red - police on intercept
Red/Yellow - active mine (about to detonate)

1.3. Why are the ships so slow? It takes up to half-an-hour to get to the 
spacestation when you enter a system!
Oolite is a simulation game — one based on a game design that comes from 
a time before 'twitch' gaming. That said, there are plenty of ways to speed 
up your game and cut that journey time dramatically. For the full story 
read this post on the Oolite Bulletin Board.
( http://aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=301 )

1.4. My keyboard doesn't have a particular key used by Oolite, what can 
I do to change the keys?
Oolite reads a key configuration file called keyconfig.plist that (from v1.40) 
you can find at /AddOns/Config/keyconfig.plist (previous versions of 
Oolite can also read this file but you have to create it first). You 
can open this file in any text editor and change the ASCII values of 
the keys used to suit your own preferences.

2. Does it work on Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)?
Yes, from version 1.20 to version 1.51 Oolite works with Mac OS X 10.2.8.
There are still has some problems with Speech Synthesis and handling 
events in full-screen mode though, so you're advised not to use those 
options.
Keeping Oolite compatible with 10.2.8 has been a task with diminishing 
returns for me, and from v1.52 I will only be supporting Mac OS X 10.3 
and higher.

3. Is there a port for the PC or Linux?
Yes. Some people are working on this, porting my code to GNUStep and SDL. 
You can find links to their work under 'Ports' in the nav-bar to the left

4. I have a question not answered here, where can I get help?
At the Oolite Bulletin Boards, the Elite Bulletin Board System, or by 
emailing the author.
Oolite BBS: http://aegidian.org/bb
Elite BBS:  http://www.alioth.net/cgi-bin/bbs.pl?siteId=1&action=show
Author:     <oolite@aegidian.org>
Linux port: <dyls@alioth.net> / <dajt@...>


Linux Specific Questions
------------------------
1. Why does Oolite use GNUstep?
Oolite was written for the Macintosh and was at 'production level' for about
a year before the Linux port was started. Mac OS X is essentially what
NeXTstep/OpenStep became when Apple bought NeXT. Oolite was written in
Objective-C using Cocoa (the Macintosh Objective-C libraries). GNUstep
provide the same Objective-C classes that are used by Mac OS X for building
utilities and applications.
To not need GNUstep, Oolite would have to be totally rewritten from scratch.
There was a project early on to make a Win32 port by converting objc to C++
automatically, but the project seems to have vanished. It is likely that
the mechanical conversion of objc to C++ would be the easy bit - then
you still have to re-implement Cocoa/GNUstep as C++ classes; a task
of truly epic proportions.
Even if it was practical, it would mean that any new features implemented
for a C++ version of the game would have to be backported into the ObjC
version of the game on the Mac, a much more troublesome task than the
simple code merges that are possible now, as the GNUstep code and
Mac OS X code are 99% the same.

2. What are the positives of using GNUstep?
A well developed object oriented library for Objective-C, plus the just mentioned commonality with the OS X code base which forms the
root of Oolite.
Oolite probably also has the distinction of being the only proper
GNUstep OpenGL game :-)

3. What are the downsides of using GNUstep?
Most Linux users don't have GNUstep installed. This is easily solved with
the dependency pack that comes with this Oolite binary installer, but it
does mean Oolite uses a bit more memory than you'd expect if the game
was written just with C and SDL/OpenGL, and the performance probably
takes a bit of a hit because Objective-C uses more 'real' message passing
than languages like C++. However, I do have a 5 year old laptop I do 
tests on, and it runs fine on that.

4. What distros will Oolite run on?
Hopefully any distro that came out within the last couple of years
with a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel.
The package you have now is known to run on:
- Gentoo
- Fedora Core 2
- CentOS 4.1
- Ubuntu 5.04
- Debian Sid (Sept 2005)
- Knoppix 3.7 (with the 2.4 kernel)

5. What dependencies do I need?
Aside from X, you'll need accelerated OpenGL. The game plays well with
relatively modest accelerated 3D hardware - the frame rate is acceptable
on thte Radeon Mobility M6 on older laptops, and I've found it playable
on HP/Compaq 'business' PCs such as the d510 which has cheap integrated
onboard Intel graphics. Of course it plays VERY well on my development
system with is a P4 with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200.
Aside from that, you shouldn't need any additional software dependencies
since most of the libraries are part of the dependencies pack that's
included with this package.

6. Where can I get the source code for the game?
You can get the full game source from the following two places:
FTP:  ftp://ftp.alioth.net/oolite (look for the 'src' tarballs)
HTTP: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de

You can also get the latest source by anonymous SVN - see
http://oolite-linux.berlios.de for more details.

Source code (mainly tarballs) for the dependency pack can be found
at ftp.alioth.net/oolite-depends-source

7. What about other (non x86) architectures?
Sadly, I don't have any non-x86 architecture systems I can install Linux on
to build the game. However, binaries for other architectures are always
welcome - please contact <dyls@alioth.net> if you've successfully built
and run the game on non-x86 platforms. You shouldn't run into endian-ness
problems as it already runs on macppc under OS X, but I've heard the odd
report that building GNUstep on 64-bit archs failed - but if you have
an amd64 system - please try and build it and let me know the results!
(Additionally, last time I tried to build GNUstep on Fedora Core 4 it failed
due to an internal compiler error in gcc 4)