added a player flyable version of the standalone krait OXP at my box.net page - only works properly with trunk (uses the new hyperspace_motor shipdata.plist key to stop players hyperspacing in ships that don't support it), I've reworked the engines model slightly and tidied up some bits of the texture too, although these may not show up if you play with the dizzy bundle (as the new and old model & texture file names are the same)
Accidentally discovered a nice shader effect to help sell a surface as being icy - setting the specular exponent to a value lower than 1 gives a nice 'glassy' shine to a surface, add a blobby looking normal map and you can get some nice effects as the surfaces move into the shadow.
Here i am out for a spin, about to hit an 'iceteroid'
oops, don't download yet, just noticed the splinter objects aren't centred properly, it makes them spin oddly ingame edit: fixed now!
Finally added a space potato Asteroids, Boulders & Splinters oxp Had a bit of a rethink after El Viejo's 'Great Moon pics' thread in Outworld ( https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=8515 ) and decided to junk all the weird glowy stuff and try something in the style of those photos, might put the most successful of the experimental asteroids out as a oddsteroids oxp or something a bit later
Last edited by Griff on Fri Nov 05, 2010 8:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Lovely work Griff, the 'roids and boulders look great.
I'm not so sure about the splinters, though... very nice, but they look a bit like monoliths in space:
I would advise stilts for the quagmires, and camels for the snowy hills
And any survivors, their debts I will certainly pay. There's always a way!
yeah, i think i'll re-do the splinters, for some reason i was under the impression that according the the elite manual the mining lasers were supposed to fragment the rocks into crystal shaped chunks, dunno where i got that from, a quick read on the manual on Ian Bell's website just says:
ASTEROID MINING LASERS
Asteroid mining involves the fitting of fuel scoops and special mining lasers to your ship. Ships which always carry them are known as "Belters". They search for asteroids and, on finding one, use the laser to fragment it into pieces sufficiently small to be taken into the cargo bay.
edit: Swapped the boxy splinters for some rounder, mini-boulder shapes
@ KW
The texture's aren't that sharp to be honest, that screen shot was taken when the asteroid was still quite far away, float up close to it and it gets quite jaggy, i suppose the only thing i can suggest is to make sure that you spend some time making sure the UV's are laid out on the map as efficiently as possible, if there's bit of the map that won't really be seen much by the player, you can always scale their UV's down to give more texture space to bits of the ship the player often sees, usually the back of the ship as you try and line it up in the laser sights
Last edited by Griff on Fri Nov 05, 2010 9:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
edit: Swapped the boxy splinters for some rounder, mini-boulder shapes
I thinks that splinters could have box shaped structures. It mainly depends on the material they were made of.
In recent years I was very active as "caver" in RL. (I also visited most of the big caves in your south-Wales). During this hobby we also tried to find new cave passages by exploding stones. The remaining small stones mainly had a box-like structure. Never rounded because rounding is a result of erosion.
In caves it is always limestone, but most crystalline will break with flat surfaces leading to box-like debris.
to be honest i think i prefer the new rounded splinters, it's more like how it is in the coin-op Asteroids The splinters are still sort of chunky and angular, i started out with sphere shapes, pushed the verticies around a bit then ran a polygon reduction script on them with some quite severe settings to make them more angular and boxy, something to try to really make the splinters boxy again is to edit the splinter template data in the oxp's shipdata.plist and change the smooth = yes; setting to smooth = no; splinters with smooth = no; in the shipdata.plist
i was thinking of the way that that Slate can be split up to make roof tiles when working on the original splinters, plus i misunderstood the Elite game manual, i thought it mentioned that mining lasers were supposed to break the rocks into chunks, but to get anything that doesn't just look like a squished packet of corn flakes with a stone texture wrapped around it takes lots of polys and proper normal map designing which can be a bit of a drag
Last edited by Griff on Sat Nov 06, 2010 12:33 pm, edited 3 times in total.
It's a classic! those vector arcade cames have a real charm to them, luna lander etc - lovely bass rumble from that cabinet when using the ships engine!
i used to love the atari VCS version of asteroids too, it must have been quite easy or something because i can remember managing to make games last for ages on that and i'm mostly harmless at most games
those new pics look lush, like they're thickly veined w/ silver or something - is it possibel to script "ore rich" asteroids/splinters that would look like that and give more ore/precious metals than a duller, normal one?
could never operate Asteroids in the arcade, but i liked the VCS version. i liked Asteroids deluxe in the arcade tho, it was a reflected image on glass over carboard rocks, giving a lush 3d effect.
Had a bit of a rethink after El Viejo's 'Great Moon pics' thread in Outworld ( https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=8515 ) and decided to junk all the weird glowy stuff and try something in the style of those photos, might put the most successful of the experimental asteroids out as a oddsteroids oxp or something a bit later
The splinters are still sort of chunky and angular, i started out with sphere shapes, pushed the verticies around a bit then ran a polygon reduction script on them with some quite severe settings to make them more angular and boxy, something to try to really make the splinters boxy again is to edit the splinter template data in the oxp's shipdata.plist and change the smooth = yes; setting to smooth = no; 