Windows	Linux	OSX
		OSX is not supported for v1.92

Oolite can be heavily customized via expansions. These modify the gameplay, add ships, improve graphics - the possibilities are almost endless:

Please join the Oolite Bulletin Board, a friendly community of Oolite fans and developers!

Installing Oolite

You can download the latest version from here.

Windows

The Windows NSIS installer is named OoliteInstall-XXX-win.exe where XXX is a version number. Double click the downloaded file to run the installer.

Linux

Linux has Flatpak and AppImage versions. The Flatpak is named space.oolite.Oolite_XXX.flatpak where XXX is a version number. Many Linux package managers support Flatpak so you should be able to double click the downloaded file to install it.

The AppImage is named Oolite_XXX-x86_64.AppImage where XXX is a version number. Download this file to where you would like it stored, make it executable and run, for example by typing

chmod +x Oolite_XXX-x86_64.AppImage
./Oolite_XXX-x86_64.AppImage

Playing Oolite

Information about playing Oolite can be found here.

For more information, see also oolite.space and Elite Wiki.

Building from Source

We welcome developers to work on Oolite! If you wish to build the project from source, please follow the instructions below. Note that the scripts require sudo for activities like installing dependent libraries built from source and for installing packages on some Linux distros. If you run into difficulties, you can seek help on the Oolite Bulletin Board.

API documentation is available here.

Git

The Oolite source is available from GitHub. The first step is to install git if you don't already have it installed as it is required to obtain and build Oolite. With Git installed, check out the Oolite repository:

git clone --filter=blob:none https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite.git
cd oolite

Windows

After installing git and checking out the Oolite repository, double click Run Me in ShellScripts/Windows or run in a command prompt:

ShellScripts\Windows\setup.cmd

This will install MSYS2 which provides various MinGW environments. You will need to enter the install location for MSYS2 and whether you want the Clang build (recommended) or GCC build.

The Clang build uses the UCRT64 environment, while the GCC build uses the MINGW64 environment.

Linux

After installing git and checking out the Oolite repository, run the following to install required packages (you can replace sudo with other methods that escalate privileges if you prefer):

sudo ShellScripts/Linux/install_packages_root.sh

Next run the following to build the GNUstep libraries needed by Oolite:

ShellScripts/Linux/build_gnustep.sh

Run the following to install the Mozilla JavaScript library needed by Oolite:

ShellScripts/Linux/install_mozilla_js.sh

By default, the above two commands will install to $HOME/.local, but you can supply an argument system or build to specify /usr/local or the project build folder respectively. When installing to /usr/local, sudo is used by default, but you can supply a further argument to specify an alternative like doas.

Building Oolite

Next run this in your Bash or MSYS2 prompt to build Oolite:

ShellScripts/common/build_oolite.sh release

The completed build (executable and games files) can be found in the oolite.app directory.

Subsequently, you can clean and build as follows:

make -f Makefile clean
make -f Makefile release -j$(nproc)

You can run a test from your Bash or MSYS2 prompt as follows:

make -f Makefile test

On Linux, you will need to run this beforehand: source /usr/local/share/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh

On Windows, this is set up be default in the shell: source $MINGW_PREFIX/share/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh

Other targets are release-deployment for a production release and release-snapshot for a debug release.

Other Linux Make Targets

This target builds an AppImage for testing which can be found in build:

make -f Makefile pkg-appimage -j$(nproc)

The target pkg-appimage-deployment is the production release, while pkg-appimage-snapshot is for debugging.

This target builds a Flatpak which can be found in build:

make -f Makefile pkg-flatpak -j$(nproc)

Mac OS

Intel-based Macs can run old builds of Oolite, but current Macs are unsupported. It is hoped that they can be supported in future.

Objective-C

Oolite is written in Objective-C although there is also some C and C++ code in the codebase. It was originally coded on Mac, but was ported to Windows and Linux by way of the GNUstep runtime which provides a similar API to what is available on Mac. Objective-C is supported by modern IDEs like CLion and Visual Studio Code. The language can be easily picked up by programmers familiar with C or C++ with which it is interoperable.

Troubleshooting

• If you get compiler errors, you can try compiling with:

make -f Makefile release OBJCFLAGS="-fobjc-exceptions -Wno-format-security" -j$(nproc)

Contents of repository

Oolite for all platforms can be built from this repository. Here is a quick guide to the source tree.

• DebugOXP: Debug.oxp, the expansion pack that enables console support in debug and test release builds
• Doc: Documentation (including user guides)
• ShellScripts: Scripts to build from source on Windows and Linux
• installers: Files used to create various installers
• Resources: Game assets and resource files for Mac and GNUstep application bundles
• Schemata: Plist schema files for the OXP Verifier
• src: Objective-C and C sources, incuding header files
  • BSDCompat: Support for BSDisms that gnu libc doesn't have (strl*)
  • Cocoa: Files that are only compiled on Mac OS X
  • Core: Files that are compiled on all platforms
  • SDL: Files that are only compiled for platforms that use SDL
• tests: A mixed bag of test cases for manual testing and ad-hoc code tests.
• tools: Various historical tools for preparing files.