Oolite Bulletins

If none of the younger contributors is up for it, I will take on building the Mac version - I may well have a lot more free time in the future - I may be getting early retirement, just in time for my bus pass in March!! That would be great, thanks! Unfortunately I can't give you any help getting th...

The JavaScript engine I'm using is the same one used in FireFox - it should be fine on a Mac. The problem is I can't do a Mac build because I don't have a Mac.

Things are going well. I have a good amount of the standard scripting methods available now, including mission screens. JavaScript-based OXPs now co-exist alongside OOS and PLIST OXPs (which are actually the same thing), and can share mission variables with them. When you get/set a mission variable ...

I'd love to do the suns, but I'm hopeless at graphics programming. The difficulty with the planet textures was getting the library that generates them linking with the Obj-C, but using the textures it generates was pretty easy. It was a fun hack, but there is a performance hit, and it makes the game...

Well, the point is that the game is already written in Obj-C, so that isn't going to change. It was unfortunate for us Win32/unix people but made sense in the context that Giles wrote it on a Mac, where Apple decided to make it the default development language. Putting Obj-C and C++ code in the same...

Hi, As you'll have noticed, I'm playing with the Oolite code again. Don't expect any gameplay enhancements, new equipment, or graphics and sound improvements - that's just not my area. Someone else will have to take up the challenge of extending the core engine. I try to understand the flight code e...

OK, I relented. I'm pretty tired of those messages too, so I decided to take a look and if it took less than a couple of hours I'd built and posted a new gnustep-base.dll that doesn't try to validate the XML PLISTs. Get it here . This will be used for any future Win32 installers. Anyone using 1.65 o...

With javascript, can we do things like write to the filesystem? This for example could mean a global change in market prices following an event using commodities.plist (or is this file only read once at startup?). I don't plan to allow writes to the filesystem or the modification of default game fi...

Hi, As a fun hack I've embedded the Mozilla SpiderMonkey scripting engine into Oolite. It seems to work, so now I need to know if anyone would use it. Anyone who's written an OXP is probably already comfortable with the PLIST scripting, but it's always bugged the hell out of me. OOScript was an atte...

Not without creating a custom version of the gnustep backend shared lib, which is what I think Winston did for Linux.

I use Notepad++ . It is an excellent free programmers editor and so does matching of opening/closing punctuation. I think most people use the style with lots of braces rather than XML. There is meant to be another choice called OOS but it is broken at the moment. I've checked in a fix but as no-one ...

A Yahoo group was created back in the day, when the TOG was started, where people could upload their work in progress etc: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/TionislaGY.

It makes mention of another more generic group but I don't have a reference to that.

I'm almost sure it will be video drivers. It sounds like the OpenGL calls are being done in software rather than on the video card.

Try some other OpenGL games or demos and see if they run full speed or not.

Then go to the nvidia site and download and install the latest drivers.

To keep the OXP ships but stop the mission wasting processing time once it is done, you could just rename the OXP's Config/script.plist file to something else.

This way the script won't be found and executed but all the ships will still be there.

Trouble is, if you use solid rings like in X2 it is just dumb. And the scale is all wrong for real rings. Everything in the Elite universe is very small compared to real life, and rings in propertion to the planet would be pretty small. So rings made of rocks you'd be through in a couple of seconds,...