Oolite Bulletins

Hello, just to tell you I've lost a bit of motivation lately, so I will probably not go back to this for a bit. The perspective of setting the document layout, dealing with various UI and so on look more and more tedious as I think about it. I will eventually go back to it, but not in the short term...

Quick update. I am now more or less comfortable converting models from OBJ to glTF and displaying them in WebGL. I have updated the welcome page (again : sound warning) to display a few more ships. http://grondilu.github.io/oolite/ https://i.imgur.com/nAGjqoC.png I'm not sure I'll do a proper librar...

This thing kept me awake tonight. Couldn't figure out why the alpha channel would not show up. Turns out it was the blender exporter that erased it :/ It works now : http://grondilu.github.io/oolite/test-cobra3.html Sorry I did not kept the earlier version of this page, so if you visit this thread i...

I finally managed to import the glTF format. I wanted to do it without any framework (I'm not too happy with anyone I've tried) so it was kind of hard. http://grondilu.github.io/oolite/test-cobra3.html glTF is a very interesting format. For one, it's designed by the Khronos group, the creators and m...

I'm struggling with converting the mesh into something that can be easily used in webgl, but meanwhile, I've fiddled a bit with CSS to create a welcome screen:

http://grondilu.github.io/oolite/

Warning : music is auto-playing and can be loud.

Hello, I figured how to import Oolite models in blender (importing models was quite a hassle and a major reason I had given up on this project lately). https://i.imgur.com/wxHNC4v.png I used two repos : https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite-assets https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite-binary-res...

Hello, so as you have probably noticed I lost interest in this project lately. It was getting seriously tedious and the limitations of WebGL were frustrating as it was clear I would never get as good a result as in the native builds of Oolite. However, apparently WebGL 2.0 is coming: http://i.imgur....

I kind of got something working : http://i.imgur.com/LUwSRDE.png?1 I pushed the result, it's here until I make other changes. As you can see here mars is in real size with a radius of 3.4Mm. It is seen from 30Mm. The line : mars.near = 1000 gives it a near field which is used by the camera to displa...

- having two separate rendering passes - one for everything within a hundred metres of the camera, and one for everything outside it. There are various complicated issues with how objects on the boundary of the rendering are managed which still aren't completely solved in Oolite. I should try somet...

Well, something very confusing happened. As I was switching to kilometer for the unit base, I divided the vertex coordinates for the mesh of the Cobra by one thousand, and I was hoping to see no difference whatsoever. I mean, normally when you shrink something, it should look exactly the same as lon...

I tried to set mars to scale, and got some nasty artifacts : http://i.imgur.com/pMtnvaV.png Interestingly enough, I can get rid of them by using the kilometer as a base unit instead of the meter. I think I may do that, since after all using the meter as a unit for a space game is a bit dumb, and I s...

Hello, I'm back :-) so I was not in the mood to go on with this project lately. I guess I was discouraged by the thought of all the things that have to be done. But I went back to it today. I wanted to try adding a planet and experiment with lighting. http://i.imgur.com/x4jDZdN.png I used a mars tex...

Sometimes you feel like getting rid of everything and restarting from scratch. That's basically what I've done. http://i.imgur.com/px3nuIl.png After long thinking, documentation reading and experiments, I've decided Three.js is a no-go. I will copy some ideas behind this library though, essentially ...

Bad news. Apparently Three makes lots of assumptions about point positions being defined as 3D vectors (i.e. w = 1) and not 4D projective ones. I guess that's why it's called "Three". What that means is that it's going to be tough to do what I did earlier, such as placing stars at infinity...

Still not quite giving up on this. Eventually managed to render the simple version of the Cobra III with Three.js: http://i.imgur.com/GsZuWrT.png?1 The toughest part was the texture as usual. The good news is that Three.js can ease the mapping of several textures on a single mesh. The mesh conversio...