Griff's normalmapped ship remakes

[Thargoid]

Yes they can be shot off, at which point (or very soon afterwards) the ship loses a missile to fire as well.

As to this being NPC only, there are two reasons. Firstly as Griff aluded to, if a player ship docks with missing sub-entities then a (expensive) maintenance overhaul is offered in the equipment list, which will restore them but of course in this case is unwanted. It can be worked around (restore all sub-ents on docking and then strip the requisite ones off again on launch - the Vortex does this with its turret switch) but it's a pain in the backside.

The other reason is of course that the player can have many different things on their pylons, and a lot of them aren't missiles. So it would look very odd to have 4 huge missiles on the ship when it's armed with two fuel tanks, a Q-bomb and an extra energy unit (for example). The NPC version on spawning strips off all the populator-supplied missiles and restocks with its own (to get around the inbuilt randomness), but of course the player may well object to that.

Plus of course for most ships the effect is rather lost by where the front view point actually is compared to the missiles. Once the missiles have come out from under the ship then they are almost in the same place as for a normal launch in many cases, so the whole effort isn't so worthwhile. But on an NPC ship it looks the business, especially with the excellence of the modelling and texturing...

[Killer Wolf]

is it possible this new feature could add a missile turret/battery to the game? instead of a plasma turret have something like a Rapier station that would actually fire? i'm thinking this for stations only, definitely not ships.

[Griff]

blog post
I've managed a bit more work on the coriolis over the weekend, added loads of tiny windows to try and give it a bit of scale, but just realised that ages ago when i increased the height of the docking bay so the griff_anaconda could dock without scraping itself along the ceiling, the bay is now so big that it's almost impossible to crash whilst docking a cobraIII!, totally gutted, scaling the docking bay back down to it's proper size is going to distort the texture UV's , but i can't really leave the model with a super-sized bay, crashing on docking is part of the fun!

/blog post

[Ganelon]

Yeah... But that Coriolis looks too cool to not see some use as-is. Maybe higher tech systems tend to have stations with bigger docking bays, due to the higher level of traffic? Or maybe there's more than one station in some systems, and one is for the big ships, so docking anything as small as a Cobra could result in a fine.

[Disembodied]

crashing on docking is part of the fun!

I regard myself as something of a purist, but to be honest I think – for players who are new to the whole Elite/Oolite experience – docking is just a great big PITA. Experienced pilots can zoom in with no problem, fair enough, so to us it's not particularly challenging. Coming right at the end of run, the only thing a tricky docking manoeuvre offers is giving the inexperienced player a good chance to die while parking. It can seem a bit harsh ... maybe the time has come for a larger docking bay? I'm sure docking would still be intimidating for Jamesons: making it not quite so tediously fatal could be a good idea!

[Killer Wolf]

People are probably gonna fly up and go "ooooooh!" at the prettiness and crash anyways
gorgeous texturing.
Griff, the only thing i can think is to leave the outer mouth of the dock as-is, but choke it down w/ a narrower bit a few metres inside : it might actually be not to hard to do, using scaley tools on whatever modeller you use.

[Griff]

i can probably squeeze the docking bay a bit smaller without upsetting the rest of the station texture, i just don't want that circular bit to go all egg-shaped! maybe we could keep this version of the station at Lave, it's got a bigger docking port for learner drivers I'll stick some traffic cones around the enterance and a crumpled python half stuck in the wall

[Cody]

Hi Griff... I think I'm using the latest all-in-one shipset (if not, this may already be fixed), but I can't be sure.

The shipdata-overrides plist lacks an entry for the 'transporter-miner'... the Oolite default model was being used instead.
I've added the entry to my copy of the OXP and it now displays your model correctly.

Oh... that new Coriolis looks great, btw.

[Griff]

oo, well spotted El Viejo, i've added that in and updated the download, the zip now has a version number!, i've started us off at v1.1
Player fragment shaders now use the 'damage' shader uniform integer instead of the on/off throwingSparks bool to blink ship lights & engine glows - the cool bit is that the hull lights now dim as the ship gets low on energy, it probably needs a bit more tweaking but it's easy to test if you have an ECM, just keep firing it to drain your ship's energy

[Cody]

I spotted the wrong ship model, but it was Smivs who told me how to sort it.
Good news about version numbers.

[TGHC]

Hi Griff, love the little windows, begins to put the Corolis in perspective. Just a thought, why not make the docking bay have slightly eliptical/arched floor and ceiling to allow for the extra height, but maintaining the width. I know its not canon, but with some pretty bells and whistles added around it it might work.

[JJP]

Griff,

Wow, the station in your screenshot looks really nice! Am I correctly seeing the station is multi-coloured? If so, it would be nice if the colours for the station could be 'randomized' as per the colouring of your ships. Preferably with a colour algorithm that assures the same colour is used whenever you visit a certain system. I was thinking along the lines of using the fractions of the divisions of the planet number by tech level, government and economy for the RGB values

[Cody]

The kindly old Wiki wizard Smivs has added a pic of that lovely missile to your Wiki page, Griff.

[Smivs]

Less of the 'old' if you don't mind (I don't need reminding )

I added a pic to the 'Missile' page as well.

[Griff]

thanks for sorting out the wiki page Smivs!

@JJP
I hadn't thought of randomising the colouring on the station to be honest, i could certainly have a look into it, the only drawback might be that the station will need another texture map of some sort to control the effect and it's already rather texture heavy, the bits we can see in the screen shot above is two 2048 x 2048 maps, and the dock is another three 1024 x 2048 maps, i haven't even started work on texturing the rest of the station hull yet.

This 'Distance mapping' shader code by Ahruman looks really interesting: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=71920#p71920
seems perfect for adding a decal to a station using only a small decal texture