Unique Stations, shipyards.....

[Thargoid]

To some degree you already can do it, but it takes a little scripting. I'll PM you a link to something currently in final beta-test that you may enjoy as an example

[Eric Walch]

In any case, I believe there's a way to create an oxp station with closed docking ports, and make them open only if the player receives docking clearance... there should be a ready made example in one of the OXPs Eric updated a while ago if I'm not mistaken!

There is just one drawback with it: Oolite explicit suppresses collision detection in the z-direction of a dock. Meaning: you can just fly through such a door. So the effect is only cosmetic.

And Cobramark has seen the doors in action when I read his message correct. With 1.74 this will probably seen more often as you now can explicitly stop the carrier with a "shift-L" and not only by activating the docking computer. And I timed the delay of opening to the most likely time it takes a player to actually manoeuvre himself in front of the port of the halted ship.

[Killer Wolf]

well given the testing i've done on docks it is entirely possible to crash wehn trying to enter, so two ways off the top of my head might be :
- have to dock sub ent modelled as a closed box and when docking permish is granted replace it w/ a proper open-ended box.
or
- create a door model and place it in front of the dock slot, and "destroy" it when permish is granted (assuming you can remove something w/out an explosion effect)
?

[Thargoid]

well given the testing i've done on docks it is entirely possible to crash wehn trying to enter, so two ways off the top of my head might be :
- have to dock sub ent modelled as a closed box and when docking permish is granted replace it w/ a proper open-ended box.
or
- create a door model and place it in front of the dock slot, and "destroy" it when permish is granted (assuming you can remove something w/out an explosion effect)
?

First one you can't do - you can remove sub-ents but not add them on again (at least without swapping the mother entity for a new one with them attached).

Second one is possible (the bug station in TCAT has such a door) but it's a pain trying to get the rotations in-synch when the station is spinning. I gave up on trying to do it with the aforementioned station.

[Killer Wolf]

boo. i asked McLane about that, cos i was wondering about swing-winging my new creation. tch. can we have it as a new feature in trunk?

i thought the subent door would take the spin attributes of the mother no prob? don't the exiting Cori's have sub ents that do this?

[DaddyHoggy]

boo. i asked McLane about that, cos i was wondering about swing-winging my new creation. tch. can we have it as a new feature in trunk?

i thought the subent door would take the spin attributes of the mother no prob? don't the exiting Cori's have sub ents that do this?

Having looked at this very thing this morning - the current Coriolis has subentities - flashers, the dock and arc details, the arc details positions seem to be defined via quarternions, but unlike flashers and the dock, they don't have any positional co-ordinates, at this point I put a pair of underpants on my head, stuck a pencil up each nostril and went <wibble> a lot. These all clearly do rotate with the main station though - however from your description I thought you were suggesting placing a completely non-associated "door" over the dock which could be destroyed (and yes you can destroy stuff without explosions now) which by-passes the need to (re)create a mother and its sub-entities.

[Commander McLane]

@Thargoid, maybe not via js, but there is a way of assigning different markets to different stations via .plists...

http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Shipdata.plist#market

It might be buggy at the moment though... if that's the case we probably have to collectively wait until 1.74.1...

Now that's a nice addition! How could it escape my attention for so long?!?

[Thargoid]

boo. i asked McLane about that, cos i was wondering about swing-winging my new creation. tch. can we have it as a new feature in trunk?

i thought the subent door would take the spin attributes of the mother no prob? don't the exiting Cori's have sub ents that do this?

In the TCAT case it is a separate entity, not a sub-ent (as I wanted it to vanish and return). I guess you could maybe do it as a moving sub-ent by "opening" it by moving it inside the station volume or something.

If it is a sub-ent then yes it should take on the main station's rotation etc.

[Eric Walch]

i thought the subent door would take the spin attributes of the mother no prob? don't the exiting Cori's have sub ents that do this?

Having looked at this very thing this morning - the current Coriolis has subentities - flashers, the dock and arc details, the arc details positions seem to be defined via quarternions, but unlike flashers and the dock, they don't have any positional co-ordinates, at this point I put a pair of underpants on my head, stuck a pencil up each nostril and went <wibble> a lot. These all clearly do rotate with the main station though - however from your description I thought you were suggesting placing a completely non-associated "door" over the dock which could be destroyed (and yes you can destroy stuff without explosions now) which by-passes the need to (re)create a mother and its sub-entities.

Yes, it is not that difficult as position and orientation values of subentities are all relative to the mother. So, when shifting it a few meters in the x-coordinate or rotate a few degree around the z coordinate, it will still rotate correctly with the mother.

Probably Thargoid tried to rotate an independent entity in sync. Only than it could block a ship. When the door is defined as subentity or even is part of the main mesh, you can just fly through. (See the buoy repair facility or the old dredgers were you have to just fly trough the hull to end up in the dock. The current dredgers have a separate subentity as door, but you can still fly through it when you want. )

[Thargoid]

Yes, as detailed above.

The door is in support of the mission, so wouldn't exactly be a lot of use if it was transparent to ships At least the player ship, transparency to outbound defense ships would have saved a lot of coding