Probbly not a bug, just me being thick, but....

Killer Wolf · Post by **Killer Wolf** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 12:57 pm

1) are the laser positions reversed? been meaning to ask this for ages - i have to place the Starboard laser w/ a positive X value and the Port w/ a negative : my ship's on the Z axis facing forward and that mens the Starboard is in the negative X range.

2) are the exhaust sizes correct? i've sized my ships against existing ones so Milkshape's scale seems correct, but when i measured my Cobra's exhaust width and put that into Shipdata, it came out way too wide - i had to reduce it by almost 50%.

Post by **Kaks** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 1:59 pm

1) No.

You're at 0 looking forward: +1 z is in front of you, -1z is behind you. +1x is to your right(starboard), -1x is to your left(port), +1y is above you, -1y is below you.

2) Don't know, I worked on the exhaust code a while ago, and I didn't notice any doubling.

~~It's possible you might be mixing up radius & diameter.~~
Edit: It might well be a bug, the documentation is pretty clear about what's what.

In any case, it'll have to stay as is until MNSR. Were we to change the way it works, it would mean all the exhaust sizes for all the other ships in all other OXPs since before 1.65 would need to be changed, which would be a job and a half, and make the next stable incompatible with the old stable.

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 3:51 pm

IIRC the exhaust dimensions are somehow capped. For instance you cannot make an exhaust plume that is wide and long. The Generation Ship exhaust plumes were supposed to be wide and long, but they are wide and very short. IIRC there is a hardcoded cap for width * length. Someone (Eric?) once dived into the code and explained it to me. There must be some conversation about it somewhere in a thread.

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 4:11 pm

Doesn't length also depend on speed? I would have said that would be the crippling factor for a generation ship - not the dimensions but the fact that they aren't the fastest things in existence...

Commander Smivs · Post by **Smivs** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 5:29 pm

Commander McLane wrote:
IIRC the exhaust dimensions are somehow capped. For instance you cannot make an exhaust plume that is wide and long. The Generation Ship exhaust plumes were supposed to be wide and long, but they are wide and very short. IIRC there is a hardcoded cap for width * length. Someone (Eric?) once dived into the code and explained it to me. There must be some conversation about it somewhere in a thread.

This bears out something I found recently while working on the up-coming 'Liners' OXP. The liner is 1500m long and I wanted to give it a suitably big exhaust, and couldn't. It's ended up with a short fat exhaust, which actually looks OK. I think my original intention would have looked a bit silly.

Post by **Eric Walch** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 7:23 pm

Thargoid wrote:
Doesn't length also depend on speed? .

I never noticed in the code that the Z- value in shipdata is used. As far as I could see the length only depends on speed. Maybe length from shipdata was used in some very early versions of Oolite?

Pluisje · Post by **Pluisje** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 7:43 pm

as is says on the wiki.

exhaust

x y z width height length

length in meters, how long a plume is on z axis. (This value is in current Oolite versions ignored. Length is now derived from the ships speed)

Killer Wolf · Post by **Killer Wolf** » Mon Nov 22, 2010 12:07 pm

cheers for the info. all my modeller's coordinates are on axes, never twigged to me that Oolite would redefine stuff from, in effect, the pilot's perspective.

as for plumes, i made very long signature ones for the Dominatrix, 4m square by 200m long, didn't seem to hit any probs.