Ship building

[Killer Wolf]

Many thanks Charlie. i guess i was mi-reading some of the tutes out there - thought you had to unwrap the thing at once, but it appears that you can select a group, unwrap that, move it about and repeat until all the groups are unwrapped.

what kinda resolutions do you work at? the UV map i exported was summat daft like 5ppi. i'm used to working about 300ppi,, but i'm assuming the monitor-generic 72ppii would be about as high as you'd wanna go??

cheers!

[Charlie]

Glad to be of help - I've tended to leave the whole dpi thing @ whatever the defaults are...

I tend to select my textures for Oolite by pixels ( smaller the better given some of Oolite's frailties & for those with older systems )

1024x1024 - practicabe max
512x512 - big
256x256 - standard
128x128 - small
64x64 - blurry

Bigger objects as expected benifit from larger textures, but realy big ones tend to improve with lower-res textures!

I haven't had probems with non-square textures but don't often use.
Safest to stick to power of 2 with size - I believe.

PS
Worth mentioning that Oolite is not picky about texture size.
I've been in the habbit of doing complex textures big for ease & testing, then resizing down in PSP progressively while not noticable in-game.
No need to re-do the model, just replace the texture! ( only seems to work with square textures )

[Killer Wolf]

Okay. i'm testing one of my ship variants in game. she's set up as a Viper replacement, and has Roles "interceptor viperc escort" (i *think* i put escort in there, i've a sneaking suspicion this plist i'm looking at (at work!) is an old version), scan class of POLICE, route1patrolAI. it's been all good so far, i've seen them trawling about, flying in formation w/ Vipers, and stumbled across a few dogfights where they've been kicking pirate ar$e. but, last night i was flying into Xeesle, got a wad of traces that turned red, ID'd one and it was my ship marked as "offender". how come a POLICE ship becomes offender? did it start off as an escort and shoot the wrong thing? would that becoming Offender alter its habits/AI??

i was geet conflicted about having to shoot up one of my own babies, but then i got a missile off the windscreen and a Krait did it's usual dogfight-while-injecting and rammed me into oblivion so i was saved the dilemma! :-D

[Charlie]

Oolite picks ships ships @ random to populate systems based on a number of criteria:

Roles:
Police - um yes...
Escort - it's not just the police that use escorts. ( hence your unexpected baddy )

Scan_Class:
Not only affects how others behave to your ship but also what Oolite picks a ship for.

.AI.plist:
Can also affect the uses your ship is put to by Oolite. ( What could a ship with that AI concevibly end up doing... )

It's worth mentioning that Oolite tends to regard your .Ai.plist as 'optional'!
This can be both useful and a pain!
It will assign an alternate AI appropriate to the role it has picked for your ship - if the one you have given it won't do, it seems.

All this can be quite useful if you want your ship to do different things, ( Oolite just does it! ) but can result in some very unexpected results if you don't choose your combination of AI, Role, and Scan_Class very carefully.

:-
Police Ship?
Scan_Class: Police
AI: One of the ones with 'police' in the name
Roles: Police PoliceInterceptor ...PoliceEscort????

I've tried to use this 'peculiarity' to my advantage in some of my .oxp's - I remain utterly useless @ writing script.plist's ( I can never get the brackets to match up so the d*mn scrips never work )
So I've resorted to playing silly-buggers to get close to what I want. ( I hope Oolite continues to be developed, but occ worry I'm relying on what may be considered bugs )

[LittleBear]

Think the Cops turning bad is due to giving them the role escort. Pirates Pythons (for example) can have escorts. If Oolite picks your ship to escort a pirate then it will be generated as a pirate.

[Killer Wolf]

cheers for that. something to take into account when deciding what i want them to do in the game.

hmmm, escorts :that might be one for the suggestion box, hiring a pair of escorts. say you got a lumbering boa and a nice load of 300 tons of something to take to an anarchy at a juicy profit. you'd be a sitting duck unless you could hire a couple merc (or cops supporting their pensions?? as per bad cops oxp??) to escort you in.

[Ramirez]

Just a thought - is the 'wingman' role possibly a police-specific version of the escort? If so, that could be used to ensure a ship appears in a fleet of other police vessels without turning up as a general escort.

Having hired escorts has often come up in the suggestion box (in fact there's some more talk about that over there in the Salvaging Ships thread).

[Killer Wolf]

i've taken "escort" out the list, it's easiest for now.

oooookay... :-

1) ran on my other machine, seen ships w/ lights. so...i dunno, mebbes my other puter's graphics card is being rubbish??

2) loaded up all my stuff into an oxp, am playtesting. the thing hangs together pretty well. i've seen my ships in the wild, i've bought one variant to play test and tweak views etc, the new hud works. BUT : you can buy three of my variants, but only one is ever appearing at the stations. i've checked the shipyard plists, no typos i can see, no mismatched tags far as i can see, got no "dictionary missing" type stuff in my stderr file. set all my ships to Tech level 1 and for like C500 so they'd be easy to get a hold of to play test (in theory!!) - any ideas as to why the other two variants are never appearing for sale? the other appears quite frequently and the various versions w/ different kit suggest my code for the random kitting out of it is fine so that's good, but....where's my others?? :-\

ta!

[Dr. Nil]

And you did do a player version of each type in shipdata, and a shipyard entry for each type?

[Killer Wolf]

i did, yes.

would putting each variant in its own folder w/ separate shipdata/shipyard plists be of any advantage??

[Dr. Nil]

You could make a copy of the entire folder somewhere else and then start to copy-paste rebuild the OXP starting with the ships that don't show up. There's no problem making the player versions to appear on the demo-ship screen?

[Killer Wolf]

yeah, might try that, canny idea

yeah, they're all cool - all in demoships and look good on the intro screen, and i've seen both a trader version and a MkII in the wild. the cop version is working as good as ever, specially now the lights show up, and i have two other variants, a pirate and a hunter but they're supposed to be rare so i marked them as like (0.1) probability (duh, note to self - take that out so you can see 'em and play test 'em, ya fricking mook). just seems to be getting the buggers up for sale that seems the sticking point.

but aye, i'll try adding them one at a time and see how it goes. cheers Doc.

edit - actually, come to think of it, i've not put the *player* versions in demoships, cost tehy look exactly the same as the NPC ones, using the same models. i'll alter that as a first step.

[Killer Wolf]

well, i think Oolite might just be having a chuckle at a thick newbie. changed all refs to player variants in demoships, came up fine.
went into Buy Ships - only one.
took it out, replaced it w/ a missing one only, appeared in Buy, yay.
added the next ship, went back into Buy, neither ship.

repeat etc etc for about an hour, and i've come to the conclusion that it *is* working but some of my variant must just be very randomly picked as for sale. but i've got screen prints to prove it worked!

also - came across a cop variant, shot him, lights came on - i'm assuming that mebbes the flashy stuff is rubbish on my skanky new PC (it's rubbish w/ 3D stuff, i can see the planet meshes etc etc.

[TGHC]

IIRC the ships only appear on a random basis, the tech wizards should know.

[Charlie]

I think wingman is not specific to the police...

I'ts one of the roles I've given to my Falcon's...

Occ you see pairs of them flying in close formation because of this.

( Neither one shows up with a Police-coloured bar )