sun positioning and size in 1.71

[another_commander]

@Commander McLane
Do the suns and/or planets appear small always? Do they ever appear normal? Do you by any chance happen to be in the system info screen at any point prior to seeing them small? Shortly after the v1.71.1 release, we discovered a (fatal in some cases and already fixed in trunk) bug where the planet appearing on the F7 screen would be treated like a sun by the game. Maybe this could cause more complications than initially assumed.

[Commander McLane]

(1) It's only the suns, not the planets, as far as I can tell.

(2) It's hard to tell whether it is all suns, but pretty many. Some do seem reasonably sized. I think I have to do more comparing between 1.65 and 1.71.1 to give the exact answer. I'll do that.

(3) No, I didn't visit the F7-screen. After installing 1.71.1 I started it and launched immediatly with one of my save-games. The sun was small.

[JensAyton]

Yeah, the wormhole is in proportion to the size of the ship. In Murgh's original OXP the Frogs are called by a specific custom role and so use their custom AI (which chats to the player but never jumps). If you change this to call them as traders rather than by their custom role, then they will use the native AI for traders and so can jump. I think if you set AutoAI to false, then the ship will follow the AI specified in its shipdata entry however it is called. But without this command it defaults to the AI of the role it was called by.

This is a point. Before auto_ai was introduced, behaviour was equivalent to auto_ai = false. However, auto_ai defaults to true (at the recommendation of the OXP-making community™), so existing ships which use a custom AI and a standard role (such as trader) will now be swapped to standard AIs in contexts where they weren’t before. The fix would be an updated Frog with auto_ai explicitly set to false.

[Eric Walch]

Today I observed an extremely rare event. At the moment of a ship creating an wormhole, also an grey line was added to the sky. Length about 20km and a blue dot at one end. This end shrunk in time tearing the blue dot with it. The end without a dot stayed stationary and was placed at about 5km distance of the wormhole that was also created.

The grey line shrunk for about a half a minute and than suddenly collapsed.

Very weird but also so present that it almost look intentional. Maybe an alien from an other dimension that took a look in our 2 dimensional Ooniverse? Be prepared for the next thargoid invasion.

[JensAyton]

Today I observed an extremely rare event. At the moment of a ship creating an wormhole, also an grey line was added to the sky. Length about 20km and a blue dot at one end. This end shrunk in time tearing the blue dot with it. The end without a dot stayed stationary and was placed at about 5km distance of the wormhole that was also created.

I suspect you’d hit the “Debug AI” checkbox in the target inspector. :-) Blue dot is destination, red is primary target, cyan is target station (when docking), magenta is “found target” (for scripting.

[Lestradae]

There you have your alien: Its Ahruman.

[Commander McLane]

I've made a small survey of Lave and its neighbouring systems now, with a new Jameson and no OXPs (except Debug.oxp in 1.71.1).

In all five systems I visited the suns are smaller in 1.71.1 than they are in 1.65, but not at the same proportion. Sometimes it's just a bit smaller (I wouldn't have noticed it without the direct comparison), but sometimes it's a lot smaller. Maybe the size difference grows somehow with the square (or a higher power) of the distance, or exponentially?

Here are five screenshots. Left side is always 1.65, right side is 1.71.1. All screenshots are taken from the witchpoint:

Lave:


Diso:


Riedquat:


Leesti:


Orerve:


Apart from the suns being small, there are also colour diffences. The sky looks much blacker, much more saturated with black, in 1.65. In 1.71.1 it's never really black, but dark greyish, or with elements of some colour in it. Probably this is not so visible on the resized screenshots above, but in-game the look and feel is really different. (Although, strangely enough, I've just opened my screenshots in GraphicConverter and picked up the black colour with the pipette tool. In both cases it seems to be RGB 0,0,0. But why does it look different?)

Second, the planets' colours are different. Here's one example of Lave, seen from the station:


Still I have no idea what causes all of this. Any help very much appreciated.

[TGHC]

This probably has no bearing or relationship whatsoever, however I do recall in TNK that planets/suns were different sizes dependant upon the activity you were about to encounter, ie if they were smaller than usual then you knew that you were in for a series of battles, and after you had finished off the blighters, the sun/planets were reduced in size again as if you were further away.

[Frame]

Commander McLane...

You should indentify which party Made your GFX card in order to get drivers...

While im on PC/Vista GFX:ATI HD 2600 XT, ATI drivers will not work for me.. Only the ones Written specificly for the Card works from the HIS website...

In my Case its HIS who made my GFX card, and therefore hosts the drivers..

Seeking support Via the AMD/ATI customer care, that i would not recommend, as it takes ages to get a response, and when you do; its usual "did the latest drivers work for you"...


If it is AMD/ATI who has made your card, then though luck... :-/

[Commander McLane]

It seems that ATI made the card. Here is what my System Profiler tells me:

Code: Select all

ATI Radeon X1600:

  Chipset Model:	ATY,RadeonX1600
  Type:	Display
  Bus:	PCIe
  PCIe Lane Width:	x16
  VRAM (Total):	128 MB
  Vendor:	ATI (0x1002)
  Device ID:	0x71c5
  Revision ID:	0x0000
  EFI Driver Version:	01.00.068
  Displays:
Color LCD:
  Display Type:	LCD
  Resolution:	1440 x 900
  Depth:	32-bit Color
  Built-In:	Yes
  Core Image:	Hardware Accelerated
  Main Display:	Yes
  Mirror:	Off
  Online:	Yes
  Quartz Extreme:	Supported
Display Connector:
  Status:	No display connected

[Frame]

It seems that ATI made the card. Here is what my System Profiler tells me:

Code: Select all

ATI Radeon X1600:

  Chipset Model:	ATY,RadeonX1600
  Type:	Display
  Bus:	PCIe
  PCIe Lane Width:	x16
  VRAM (Total):	128 MB
  Vendor:	ATI (0x1002)
  Device ID:	0x71c5
  Revision ID:	0x0000
  EFI Driver Version:	01.00.068
  Displays:
Color LCD:
  Display Type:	LCD
  Resolution:	1440 x 900
  Depth:	32-bit Color
  Built-In:	Yes
  Core Image:	Hardware Accelerated
  Main Display:	Yes
  Mirror:	Off
  Online:	Yes
  Quartz Extreme:	Supported
Display Connector:
  Status:	No display connected

Seems like ATI has released no such card.... From what i can find, it is a Radeon mobility X1600 Card you have installed..

i dont have a program that can read .dmg files, nor do i have any clue to how Mac Drivers Work, but for Windows there is .inf files, and within them are perfectly well described what Card this Driver support..

I Presume from your Model that the Manufacturer of the card is apple..., under license from ATI...

however i can only find drivers from january 2005 ( apples site)... that is quite outdated i bet...

[JensAyton]

Turns out I am seeing this, given less extreme examples. D’oh.

My suspicion is that the changed sun sizes are a result of accidental changes in the order in which pseudo-random stuff is generated during system set-up. This could be tricky to fix, but I’ll look into it for 1.72. This shouldn’t change the range of sun sizes, though.

[Ark]

Second, the planets' colours are different. Here's one example of Lave, seen from the station:

From what I know every star has its unique color (red, blue, etch) that illuminates everything within the system (planet, ships etch).That is the reason why many times the planet looks deferent in the info screen and deferent in space. Because in the info screen the light is always white in contrast with space. Only in star systems that the corona of the star is white you can see the planet in space exactly as you can see it in the info screen.

I do not know if the problem with the distance of the sun affects that somehow but I know for sure that in 1.71 the light that illuminates everything in the system takes into account also the light from the background stars. So in a system that you have a green sun and a lot of background red stars the planet may look a little bit deferent from versions prior to 1.71

[JensAyton]

Second, the planets' colours are different. Here's one example of Lave, seen from the station:

From what I know every star has its unique color (red, blue, etch) that illuminates everything within the system (planet, ships etch).That is the reason why many times the planet looks deferent in the info screen and deferent in space. Because in the info screen the light is always white in contrast with space. Only in star systems that the corona of the star is white you can see the planet in space exactly as you can see it in the info screen.

I do not know if the problem with the distance of the sun affects that somehow but I know for sure that in 1.71 the light that illuminates everything in the system takes into account also the light from the background stars. So in a system that you have a green sun and a lot of background red stars the planet may look a little bit deferent from versions prior to 1.71

Absolutely true, but that doesn’t explain why Lave’s continents have gone from purple to green. :-) I actually noticed this during testing, but forgot about it.

The use of pseudo-random numbers during set-up needs to be made more robust, but doing that while maintaining the old look is tricky.

[Commander McLane]

however i can only find drivers from january 2005 ( apples site)... that is quite outdated i bet...

Yeah, that's the ones I mentioned before. It's a bundle of drivers from ATI for a range of cards that were used in Macs at the time. And as I wrote before, there is not even a driver for the X1600 among them!

So no new drivers for my graphics card.

Anyway, now as our Supreme Grand Admiral has seen the problem on his system as well, and has already a hypothesis about the possible cause, it seems the graphics card and its driver are probably not to blame, anyway.