idolknights Shipyard

[idolknight]

Thought I had better make a new thread....

Here is the update of the Adder, I guess its pretty much complete apart from abit of d&b.

I will be starting the Anaconda next, or maybe containers not sure yet, let me know what you think.

[Micha]

That looks pretty darned nice!

Although I'd possibly be tempted to either paint the entire topside in the chosen colour, or leave it all grey apart from the logo area. Kindof looks like they ran out of paint partway through *g*

But in either case, I like it!

[idolknight]

something like this?



I really like the 2 tone blue paintjob, black and red looks sweet too!

Cheers Micha!

Do you guys think I should do battle damage on a seperate uv map? Say 3 different stages?

[Thargoid]

Nice looking ships there. My only slight concern would be the blue one might be difficult to see in-flight against a black space background. But that could either be deliberate, or overcome by using a flasher or few...

[Micha]

@idolknight: imho that looks much nicer, although you might want to add an uncoloured (grey) version as well as that looks nicely industrial.

@Thargoid: that's a general issue I have - in original Elite if ships were too far away they become white points, closer up they became the model. In either case you could easily target & shoot them even at a distance

In Oolite they are always models which means the smaller ones are invisible even within firing range. And I've had poorly-lit (or coloured?) ships right next to me which were almost impossible to see (in fact, I nearly ran into a stolen police cruiser once - it was nearly black!). It'd be nice to be able to turn up the gamma a bit - I don't care about realism.. it's a far-fetched space-game to start off with!!!! I just want it to be fun

I like a little lighting, but imho there should always be a minimum gamma-separation between the background and the model. Not sure how one could ensure that.

[idolknight]

Nice looking ships there. My only slight concern would be the blue one might be difficult to see in-flight against a black space background. But that could either be deliberate, or overcome by using a flasher or few...

Nice idea, What i am thinking of doing....Maybe make a number of different colour/toned skins using the colours from a 12 colour, colour wheel.



So each ship could have the option of any of the colours on the wheel. Maybe a .OPX wizard could help me on that as the rest of the ships are skined.

Im guessing your flasher idea would use the game engine or swaping btween skins? I like that idea, specialy for battle damage showing exposed internals.

[idolknight]

@idolknight: imho that looks much nicer, although you might want to add an uncoloured (grey) version as well as that looks nicely industrial.

I was going to keep a plain ship just for the peeps who dont want to use the paintjob option!

I will keep tweeking with the idea with the Adder for now intill I come to a universal idea for all of the ships. Such as battle damage/lights/colours/weapons & upgrades. Tho I have no idea about .OPX's so if any of the ideas require that sort of editing I might avoid them. Unless there is someone in here that would take that side of this project on.

[Thargoid]

Flashers are basically ship lights, which can either be continually on or can flash on and off (hence their name ).

Full details are in the wiki on shipdata.plist - click here.

It is also possible to make multiple copies of the ship and have the shipdata.plist use different textures (rather than using different .dat files, which is usually what maps the texture - this way over-rides it). It was posted somewhere on here by Ahruman iirc, although I can't find the post off-hand and don't have time to go hunting at the mo...

Depending on what OS you're running, it may also help you to get the debug OXP and debug console (see the post from Ahruman here so you can spawn ships and do other fun stuff in-flight (the console's built into the Mac version iirc - I'm a Windows slave so had to download it).

Actually if you haven't a good look through that thread may give you some further ideas or thoughts, or at least a centralised place to holler if you need help anytime

PS It's OXPs, not OPX's

They're not too difficult to write unless you want to get fancy very quickly. Have a look at some existing ones and maybe have a go yourself? Especially as you're re-skinning to begin with, the shipdata.plist file in your Oolite install (under oolite.app/Resources/Config if you're on Windows, and probably somewhere similar for the others) and the wiki link above about said file should make interesting reading for you.

[idolknight]

I guessed the flasher thing would be like the lights on the docking beacon. I think I will keep away from them for now, I am a total noob to oolite. I have only been playing it for a few months, bloody love it!

As for the info on the ship textures, very interesting, I was wondering if something like that was workable. I wont look into it now, but I will crack on with making a selection of textures for the Adder. I guess aslong as the texture swap thing in shipdata.plist is workable then there is nothing to stop that in the future. I am dull when it comes to any sort of coding lol

I am also a windoze slave, I will check out the debug option, it look very useful! Thanks for the info Thargoid!

[Griff]

Apologies for thread hi-jacking, the discussion about lighting got me thinking about Ahrumans recent post in the shaders outpost thread, about it being possible to override Oolites built in shaders, so if you play Oolite with shaders enabled, unzip this oxp to your addons folder, put on your sunglasses and play Oolite as if Misters Blinn, Phong and Gourard had decided to take up a life of hanging out at the beach skateboarding instead of going to college.

who turned up the lights.oxp http://www.box.net/shared/leormrzeqy


There might be a way of modifing texture map colours using shaders.
what i think you need to do is split the ares of the texture you want to re-color into a seperate channel (best place would be in the alpha channel of the texture map) and use a shader and the 'entityPersonality'* uniform binding (see http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Shader ... :_uniforms ) to recolour the alpha channel then add it back into the colour texture.

*groupID might be a good binding to use as well, especially when recolouring escort ships so that they all have the same colour scheme. GroupID's an integer value though so i'm not sure how to turn it into a float so it can be used as an R,G or B colour value in a shader *attempts to summon maths wizzard*

I know a lot of this is confusing ramblings, i'll try and blunder my way through an example shader over the weekend, so we can find out if it's a workable idea or not.

[Lestradae]

@Griff:

After testing, you do know that with your little lights oxp you just casually solved the "dark ships in shipyards and savegames screen" unintended feature, yes?

You will put that onto the wiki, yes?

Brilliant

L

[Griff]

well, it looks a bit horrible though, - the shader i posted is a clumsily mangled phong shader example i found here ( http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses ... yTutorial1)
meant to hark back to early 3d games when the computers couldn't afford to do any proper lighting calculations, my version doesn't calculate any proper lighting just a bit of specular highlighting on polys facing the light source, everything else gets floodlit. when the dark ships problem gets properly addressed it's going to look much, much better

[Lestradae]

well, it looks a bit horrible though

I really don`t think that it looks horrible, just much more brilliant

when the dark ships problem gets properly addressed it's going to look much, much better

Glad to hear it

Keep up the eye candies

L

[Thargoid]

I guessed the flasher thing would be like the lights on the docking beacon. I think I will keep away from them for now, I am a total noob to oolite. I have only been playing it for a few months, bloody love it!

About the same length of time as me then Yes the lights on the beacon are flashers, they're not difficult to do. The wiki entry I linked to before gives all the info you need to put them on your ship (or other entity).

As for the info on the ship textures, very interesting, I was wondering if something like that was workable. I wont look into it now, but I will crack on with making a selection of textures for the Adder. I guess aslong as the texture swap thing in shipdata.plist is workable then there is nothing to stop that in the future. I am dull when it comes to any sort of coding lol

I found the post I was thinking of (click here). That gives details of how to do ships of varying texture (using it and the like_ship shipdata.plist key). It just saves having multiple duplicate dat files for the same ship type, differing only in which texture they refer to. And don't be afraid of this kind of scripting, with the help of the wiki information and reference to the many existing examples around (trunk and OXP) they're not difficult to get your head around - even an idiot like me can do it

I am also a windoze slave, I will check out the debug option, it look very useful! Thanks for the info Thargoid!

It's designed for scripter coding, but it's also very useful to be able to inject ships directly into the Ooniverse, for example the ones you've just spent hours creating and now want to test and indeed just see majestically flying in space

[Micha]

so if you play Oolite with shaders enabled, unzip this oxp to your addons folder, put on your sunglasses and play Oolite as if Misters Blinn, Phong and Gourard had decided to take up a life of hanging out at the beach skateboarding instead of going to college.

who turned up the lights.oxp http://www.box.net/shared/leormrzeqy

Thank You!! Not dissing all the hard work that went into making the lighting work 'properly' but this way I can see what I'm shooting!