Two questions in a matter of days, I really don't have many problems with other things you know.
Anyway, here I am trading between Teanrebi and Tianve in Galaxy 1 as hard as possible desperately saving up as many credits as possible to purchase my first ship upgrade. As I know there is a Mosquito Trader in a nearby system (thanks to a recent thread that highlighted this cool ship).
So I wander over collect my new ride, and spend a few moments admiring it after launching. And went back to my two trading planets and picked up a few more bits of equipment. But after about two more planet hop's the external view (key V) no longer works. I can not see my lovely new pride and joy.
So I load up a save game from before the ship change, and external view works (Cobra MKIII). So I go and collect my ship again and external view still works. Again several jumps later it stops working. Does anybody know if this is a small known issue?
External views have to be explictly defined - as they are for all the inbuilt ships, but not all the ship-creating OXP'ers included this option. I don't have oolite on the machine I'm writing this post on so I can't remember where the external view needs to go (one of the plists) - and you copy and paste the data from a ship that is of a similar size to your new ride (so you'd be OK with the Cobby3 views for the Mosquito)
Given the nature of this forum somebody will be along with the exact info you need in a short while - I'm just letting you know its not exactly a bug, more an oversight.
Excellent that post looks like it has the answer. I will have to refine my searching, as I did try and search here for it as I assumed it might have come up before.
Thank you very much for the link and information guys.
Yes, there is a silly bug in Oolite, which allows you to use external views immediatly after buying a ship which hasn't them defined, if your previous ship had them defined. The previous view positions simply continue to be used. However, this works only until you are reloading your new ship. Therefore after a restart of the game the external views are gone.
Many moons ago I came up with a fix for that: if a ship hasn't got any external views defined, oolite would use the default (cobra mk3) ones. I think I committed that to trunk way back then, but I'm not too sure anymore.
If it's not on trunk yet, I'll try and remember to commit it for 1.74 ( 1.73 is under feature freeze )!
I remember now! I meant to ask if we wanted the cobra 3 external views as standard when undefined, since for some really big player ships (you know the ones I mean!) some views could end up inside the hull itself.
On reflection, it would still count as a bugfix for most of the oxps, though. Ok, I'll uncomment that fix, unless there are any objections!
no objections from the guy with the really big player ships because the OSE ships will all have external views defined as standard - actually, already have in the current beta
I remember now! I meant to ask if we wanted the cobra 3 external views as standard when undefined, since for some really big player ships (you know the ones I mean!) some views could end up inside the hull itself.
Scaling the offsets in proportion to [[ship drawable] collisionRadius] should be a simple enough fix for 1.74.