BBC Micro Elite Emulation....

[Commander Mick]

Asked this question on the Elite Dangerous Forums, possibly posted in the wrong place, but asked anyway.....

You know those of us who were long time backers for Elite Dangerous, managed to get free a download of a emulated Elite as it was for the BBC Micro. That is it's BBC Micro's Elite for the pc....

Anyway, I finally got it working and started to play it and then Witch-spaced to Zaonce,. Now while I got the Witch-Space tunnel pattern, it froze on me and I get message saying "NOT FOUND" on the screen. I So, tried it again, and the same thing happens and then I tried Witch-Spacing to Diso, and the same thing happened.....

I'd like to know if any of you out there who have the same emulation of this game have had the same Witch-Space issue with it and if they know of a fix for it?

[Griff]

I could have sworn i remembered something about users having to emulate the 'right model of bbc micro' for Elite to run successfully, I thought there was something about a 'maths co-processor' or something that broke the game if you emulated a version of the BBC micro that had one, but searching now on google just returns no hits at all and i wonder if i just imagined the whole thing, does it ring a bell for anyone else?

[Commander Mick]

Thanks for answering.....

I asked the same question on the Elite Dangerous Frontier forums and they directed me to topic when they were talking about this years ago and I eventually found out that it's common issue that doesn't appear to have any fix.

BTW, (Going off topic a bit...) I use your shader models (or are they just skins and textures?) in Oolite, but would love to know if there is way your can customise the decals? If your the same dude that does those?

[Griff]

ah glad you managed to get to the bottom of Elite crashing, i hunted around a bit more for info, i think i might have been thinking of the 'BBC Master' system or something, that was the only one that seemed to mention a second processor, but i couldn't find any more info about that breaking emulated Elite.

Yes there is a way to change your ship decals, it's just a single .png format graphic file that you can swap for your own .png, finding the file Oolite uses is a bit more complex now we're in the days of managed expansion packs though

i'm on Windows and if i install the 'griff ship bundle' from the Oolite expansion manager, if i open file explorer and navigate to:

C:\Oolite\oolite.app\GNUstep\Library\ApplicationSupport\Oolite\ManagedAddOns

i see the list of all my installed expansion packs in oxz format, the one we need to find is called oolite.oxp.Griff.Griff_shipset_decals.oxz


to open the oxz we need to change the file extension from .oxz to .zip

once that's done we can double click on the file and it should open up and let us look inside, in the Textures folder there's a png called griff_decals_player.png



...replace that file with your own custom decal png image, you'll need to keep the exact filename and filetype otherwise Oolite will not be able to locate your new decal as it's name is hardcoded in the 'plist' files in all the ship expansions

keep your new decal to a 'power of 2' resolution, this is something like 256x256 pixels in size or 512x512 pixels etc

once you're done replacing the png, make sure to change the file extension back from .zip to .oxz and restart oolite, the ship decal should have changed, if not, exit Oolite and start it again holding down the Shift key on your keyboard from the moment the program starts loading up until the spinning cobra title screen appears - holding down shift in this way forces Oolite to clear its cache and reload all it's known expansion pack files again and so it will see any changes we've made to the files

if you want to change decal sizes and positions on the ship hull, you'll need to locate the oxz for that particular ship in

C:\Oolite\oolite.app\GNUstep\Library\ApplicationSupport\Oolite\ManagedAddOns

change the file extension to zip as above, then open the folder and look for the shipdata.plist file in the Config sub-folder. open it in a basic text editor (not wordpad if on a PC as it mangles the file with hidden formatting data, notepad is OK to use, as well as notepad++ opensource text editor)

in the file there will be a list of settings for the '..-Player' version of the ship, look in the Shaders, Uniforms bit for the decal rotation and position settings:


what these settings mean
Decal1_Scale_Position = { type = vector; value = "0.396 0.39 8.5"; };
Decal1_Rotation = { type = "float"; value = 0.0; };

the 3 numbers in Scale_position are x-pos, y-pos, scale - scale is weird in that the smaller the number you use the bigger your decal is drawn on the ship, note that x and y pos refer to the ships texture image not the actual model mesh dimensions, I think in OpenGL, the bottom left corner of the image is 0.0 and opposite top right corner is 1.0, so an x y pos of 0.25, 0.5 is 1/4 of the way in from the left edge of the image and halfway up from the bottom, the skill is finding the right place where this would mean that the decal is actually drawn on the hull!

[Commander Mick]

So, I could actually have a mugshot of myself covering one of the panels of my ship if I wanted. Though it looks more involved than I thought it would be, I'll look into getting that done sometime....

Thanx

[Commander Mick]

I think did everything you told me to, except when I replaced the word zip with oxz . It still looked like a zip file and the description still said compressed (zipped folder.) and this is what I got when I restarted Oolite.

(img) https://ibb.co/pdJs2Bs (/img)

Where did I go wrong?

[Griff]

i think something has happened to the file name for oolite.oxp.Griff.Griff_shipset_decals.oxz and oolite can't find it anymore.
Are you on windows 10 Commander Mick? If so, can you open the

C:\Oolite\oolite.app\GNUstep\Library\ApplicationSupport\Oolite\ManagedAddOns

window like before so we can see the full list of expansion packs, then briefly toggle this 'File Name Extensions' tickbox - as shown in the screenshot below (clicking the image will open it bigger) - you get it by first clicking View from the menu at the top of the window:


With the file extensions ticked, check that windows hasn't gone and named the file
oolite.oxp.Griff.Griff_shipset_decals.oxz.zip

if it has, rename it to remove the zip bit so it's back to oolite.oxp.Griff.Griff_shipset_decals.oxz
then you can toggle off the file extension tick box to go back to how your Windows settings were before then try launching Oolite again

[Commander Mick]

Thanks, that got it working, but I guess photos don't turn out so well in this game.....

https://ibb.co/P4nDcpP

https://ibb.co/tJq2zHs

[Griff]

Hmm, that's really strange, is there anything written in the log file?

Check that the replacement decal graphic has the same filename as the original one, oolite's only going to look for a graphic file called griff_decals_player.png unfortunately without going through all the ships changing the player decal filename reference in shipdata.plist

[Commander Mick]

Looking at the log file....

Looks like there are quite few errors in the log file and it does say the file your talking about wasn't found, not sure if that was because of the problem I was having or if it's still not working the way I'd like it to...

https://ibb.co/88hkD76

I'll have another look a the file in question to see if it's got exactly the same name.

[Cholmondely]

Looking at the log file....

Looks like there are quite few errors in the log file and it does say the file your talking about wasn't found, not sure if that was because of the problem I was having or if it's still not working the way I'd like it to...

https://ibb.co/88hkD76

I'll have another look a the file in question to see if it's got exactly the same name.

Looks identical to my Galactic Navy latest.logs! What's with these ball turrets?

[Commander Mick]

It's now been fixed.....

https://ibb.co/TPcDM4G

https://ibb.co/JQV3Hw5

https://ibb.co/54fmJHs

https://ibb.co/ygQfT91

When I again found the png file inside the zipped file, I found that it was written down there twice. Don't know why, but it was and just renamed it.

It's nice trick btw and that's my face on the ship now. I'm just calling it another way to I.D. your ship.

[Cholmondely]

It's now been fixed.....

https://ibb.co/TPcDM4G

https://ibb.co/JQV3Hw5

https://ibb.co/54fmJHs

https://ibb.co/ygQfT91

When I again found the png file inside the zipped file, I found that it was written down there twice. Don't know why, but it was and just renamed it.

It's nice trick btw and that's my face on the ship now. I'm just calling it another way to I.D. your ship.

You're one of those humans? I thought you were a lobstoid, like the rest of us!

[Griff]

Ha glad it's working!

[Cholmondely]

Ha glad it's working!

Well done, Sir!

I've taken your advice, shortened the sentences for people using Google translate and put it up here: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Decal

Please tweak away if and as you see fit...