Testing ship design?

Sin · Post by **Sin** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 7:14 pm

Well I've been playing this game for almost a week. Love it, especially with some of the oxp's on as well.

I've gone and made my first ship using the tutorial but after playing nearly an hour I've not seen it? Is there anyway I can force it to appear?

Nemoricus · Post by **Nemoricus** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 7:23 pm

Yes, there is.

First, get the Debug OXP and put it in your AddOns folder.

Then get the Debug Console. If you're running Windows, just run the console exe before starting up Oolite. I'm not sure about other operating systems.

Start your game and exit the station. Then, in the debug console, enter: system.legacy_addShipsWithinRadius("your-ship-role", 1, "abs", player.ship.position, 10000). Replace your-ship-role with the role of your ship. Add a custom role to make sure that you generate your ship.

Sin · Post by **Sin** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 7:34 pm

Will give that a shot thanks

Hmm, quite a ship. It's invisible! Back to the drawing board!

Sin · Post by **Sin** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 8:28 pm

I can't see anything. To test it I ran the brick demo and created that, it still did'nt work.

The ship is there. It appears on the scanner, shoots at me and I see exhaust gases as well but no image. Am I doing something wrong?

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 9:56 pm

Sin wrote:
The ship is there. It appears on the scanner, shoots at me and I see exhaust gases as well but no image. Am I doing something wrong?

Hmmm. Are you an ATI user under Windows? If so...maybe your ship is simply shown entirely in black? In that case it might help to turn shaders off. IIRC that bug only happened with shaders on...

It's always helpful to look at the log where model problems can be reported (missing png and such, e.g. due to a typo).

You should also remember to hold down the shift key while launching Oolite to force it to rebuild it's cache after you made changes to your oxp without changing the directory structure in the AddOn folder. You can verify in the log that the cache was explicitly flushed. Otherwise you might always see an outdated version of your work in progress, as oolite simply uses the cached version without detecting the changes.

Screet

Sin · Post by **Sin** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 10:14 pm

Thanks for that one. Clearing the cache allowed th brick ship to appear.

Looking in the log when I try and run mine I've got this error.

[mesh.load.failed.tooManyVertices]: ERROR - model block_wasp_exh.dat has too many vertices (model has 515, maximum is 500)

What does that mean? Am I just trying to create a shape that's too complex?

ovvldc · Post by **ovvldc** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 10:32 pm

So it seems..

Surely you can do away with fifteen of these vertices?

Best wishes,
Oscar

Sin · Post by **Sin** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 11:21 pm

I've done that in wings 3d by using the dissolve command. Now I've got too many faces!

[mesh.load.failed.tooManyFaces]: ERROR - model wasp_one.dat has too many faces (model has 813, maximum is 800)

Won't care it does'nt look that complicated to me, no idea where it's getting so many!

I can reduce that without too many problems but does anyone know if there are options within wings3d to count them for me?

MKG · Post by **MKG** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 11:41 pm

Someone's going to have to explain that to me to prevent my old brain going into complete shutdown. How does reducing the vertex count result in MORE faces?

Mike

Sin · Post by **Sin** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 11:51 pm

No idea, went to try and remove a bunch of small dips and the like thinking this would reduce the faces count and it went UP to 830?

However I've gone back to an older model and got it to appear. Shame its going backwards but never mind!

Thanks for all your help.

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 5:12 am

Try the "cleanup" command in Wings3D (have the whole ship selected).

Depending on how the vertex change has been done, it may well make more faces if you end up with duplicates or points that don't link up properly now.

PhantorGorth · Post by **PhantorGorth** » Sat Jun 13, 2009 7:49 am

Just a point to add as I do programming as part of my real life living. I get similar situations when I am testing code. With runtime error messages, you get to see only the first one it gets too or checks for in a subsection of code. If you fix the cause of that error and re-run the code only then does it get past that point in the code and show you the next error, if any. In this example you had a model with too many vertices. You probably had even more faces than 813 but it checked the number of vertices first and only showed you that error message. When you fixed that the number of faces dropped to 813 and now running it you got the error message for the number of faces. This is a normal yet annoying reality of debugging.

I can not be sure this is what happening to you but as an intelligent guess I think this is the most likely cause.

Regards,

Phantor Gorth
(Paul)