The Feudal States

[Screet]

the big battles I was planning for this OXP will generally use only a handful of different textures at one time, so having a large number of ships (>20 or so) fighting it out shouldn't be much of a problem.

Have you played Assassins yet? The Thargoids at Geteve are fun...I had my whole scanner blinking, it was entirely useless. The screenshot is similar to yours, just that the ships are placed all around me (and surely not that many, as there's no infinite loop adding them).

The game did run fine for quite some time before it did slow down. However, some log message had been written very often. Once, it did fill the log with >12000 lines in 15 minutes...and the game did not run out of memory or crash!

Another Assasins mission (fair wind) is said to add about 80 ships around the player - I got the impression it's much more - and the game does run well!

Furthermore, it might not have slowed down visiting Geteve at all would I be able to use the full power of my machine. I was worried about some results from my graphics driver and did read up - just to find out that those results were correct: my graphics card is running oolite with a maximum of 25% of it's full power, GPU-Z reported low GPU load and my processor was around 30% busy.

Is there an in-game way to show the frame rate?

Screet

[Captain Hesperus]

*toggles to Q-bomb*
*WFIs into the centre of the swarm*
*presses 'm'*
*presses 'i'*
*presses '2'*
*watches the party*

Captain Hesperus
"I've been a baaaaad kitty...."

[JensAyton]

Thanks for the clarification. I've seen math.floor and math.random in other people's scripts but have never understood quite how they work.

Math.floor(): “Returns the largest integer less than or equal to a number.”
Math.random(): “Returns a pseudo-random number in the range [0,1) — that is, between 0 (inclusive) and 1 (exclusive).”

Is there an in-game way to show the frame rate?

Shift-F.

[Eric Walch]

Thanks for the clarification. I've seen math.floor and math.random in other people's scripts but have never understood quite how they work.

Math.floor(): “Returns the largest integer less than or equal to a number.”

Math.floor() is rounding, not randomising. There is also a Math.round() and a Math.ceil(). that round to the middle and to the top resp.

[JensAyton]

To go into more detail: Math.random() * 256 will give you a random number that’s no less than 0 and strictly less than 256. Math.floor(Math.random() * 256) will therefore give you a random integer that’s no less than 0 and strictly less than 256, i.e. at most 255.

[Griff]

If you want to avoid an overly-European look you could always make some coats-of-arms using Japanese mon:

These are beautiful, thanks for posting this Disembodied!
that one 4th along on the 6th row down, isn't that the Tri-Force from Zelda?!

[Disembodied]

that one 4th along on the 6th row down, isn't that the Tri-Force from Zelda?!

I don't know – but the one immediately to the right of that looks suspiciously like a head of cabbage ...

[Commander McLane]

that one 4th along on the 6th row down...

...the one immediately to the right of that...

You could of course just say 'no 36' or 'no 46', but OTOH, why make it simple when we can create a silly and overcomplicated code instead?

[wackyman465]

It's not really that complicated, actually, the numbers are pretty hard to read...

[Ramirez]

I've taken a quick break from scripting to work on some models. I've always planned to have some large shields to act as buoys and signposts, and so here are a few tests:



The House of Aronar - Vert, in pale a crown Or and and ram rampant Or
The House of Oreseren - Quarterly 1st and 4th on a field Ermine a hare salient Gules, 2nd and 3rd Gules a chevron Or

As for the ships, I've added a fourth to the set, a large cruiser, so with 12 houses that comes to 48 possible combinations. I've experimented with placing these shields on the ships as subentities:



While this works OK, and has the arms displayed in a nice clear resolution, it would mean creating a very large number of different .dat files for all the different shield sizes. While this may not cause memory issues, and for me it's just a case of copying and pasting, it's still rather inefficient. I've tried out some of the shader OXP tests on my mac and they seem to work, so I think I'm going to try the decal shader route. I've deliberately kept the ship designs fairly simple as the feudal states are not that high tech, so they should provide a good basis for me to learn how the whole shading stuff works. If I can get just four ship models looking anywhere near as good as some of the Shaders Outpost screenshots that would be amazing. I might need to do a shout out for help later on. (random thought - as I might incorporate planet visits into the OXP there's scope to make use of the shader linked to cabin temperature. It would be great to be able to see other ships with their hulls glowing from the heat of re-entry).

If I understand correctly, it's also possible to swap out the shader information in the shipdata.plist with a single replacement texture, so I can still produce a non-shader version if necessary without having to create a whole host of .dat files corresponding to each texture.

Better get back to the script - still lots to do!

[pagroove]

I've taken a quick break from scripting to work on some models. I've always planned to have some large shields to act as buoys and signposts, and so here are a few tests:



The House of Aronar - Vert, in pale a crown Or and and ram rampant Or
The House of Oreseren - Quarterly 1st and 4th on a field Ermine a hare salient Gules, 2nd and 3rd Gules a chevron Or

As for the ships, I've added a fourth to the set, a large cruiser, so with 12 houses that comes to 48 possible combinations. I've experimented with placing these shields on the ships as subentities:



While this works OK, and has the arms displayed in a nice clear resolution, it would mean creating a very large number of different .dat files for all the different shield sizes. While this may not cause memory issues, and for me it's just a case of copying and pasting, it's still rather inefficient. I've tried out some of the shader OXP tests on my mac and they seem to work, so I think I'm going to try the decal shader route. I've deliberately kept the ship designs fairly simple as the feudal states are not that high tech, so they should provide a good basis for me to learn how the whole shading stuff works. If I can get just four ship models looking anywhere near as good as some of the Shaders Outpost screenshots that would be amazing. I might need to do a shout out for help later on. (random thought - as I might incorporate planet visits into the OXP there's scope to make use of the shader linked to cabin temperature. It would be great to be able to see other ships with their hulls glowing from the heat of re-entry).

If I understand correctly, it's also possible to swap out the shader information in the shipdata.plist with a single replacement texture, so I can still produce a non-shader version if necessary without having to create a whole host of .dat files corresponding to each texture.

Better get back to the script - still lots to do!

Great work Ramirez. Do you have a 2D picture of the shield from the house of Aronar. Then I can add it to the Aronar page on the Wiki (follow the link from this page)
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Famous ... ion_Pack_1

[Ramirez]

Hi pagroove. 2D png of the Aronar pic is here.

[pagroove]

Hi pagroove. 2D png of the Aronar pic is here.

Hey thnx I will add it to the WIKI page of Aronar

I really like the upcoming idea of a Feudal OXP.
I mentioned earlier that there could be a space castle. What about a space castle attack/siege mission? There also could be space equivalents of watchtowers and siege equipment.

Of course the space castle should look modern. Something like the Bank of the Black Monks but different.

[Ramirez]

Some of the missions I'm designing involve freighters that need to be escorted by knights of a certain feudal house. The exact house will be selected at random by the mission script, so I'm looking at a way to assign a set of escort ships dynamically.

I've followed the wiki instructions on how to set up an escort from scratch. I can get feudal knights to spawn in a system and then using an escortAI.plist, look for a potential formation leader nearby. After a while they usually detect the freighter and join up with the formation, though this can be a bit hit and miss.

The problem is, to make a ship a potential mothership, I think I need to give it an escorts number in shipdata. This automatically creates random escorts when the mothership is spawned, and this may prevent other units from joining the formation.

What I need is a way to make a ship a potential formation leader, with a maximum number of escorts, but to not have the escorts generated automatically. Is there a separate key I can use to define maximum number of escorts rather than the number to be deployed initially?

Sorry if this doesn't make much sense - it's all a bit complicated!

[DaddyHoggy]

A suggestion to tie the banking oxp and this oxp together can be found here