Scanner Blebs

Killer Wolf · Post by **Killer Wolf** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 11:17 am

hi.

i'm running 1.73.3, testing my new ship. it isn't working. that's a problem for later, but what's going on w/ my scanner : i've got a script that should've spawned 3 of my ships when i exit from hyperspace. it doesn't. another craft from another OXP does, but the odd thing is that my scanner now does this :-

when i launch from the station everything's cool, it's only happening when i exit hyperspace. :-/

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 11:39 am

That looks right. What’s the problem?

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 11:45 am

It's a big ship, so it gets a correspondingly big scanner blip. If you want another example look at the main system station in Aqualina (from Aquatics, G3). It's a heeeuge station, and therefore it's got a big-ass blip too.

Cmdr Wyvern · Post by **Cmdr Wyvern** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 3:34 pm

Thargoid wrote:
It's a big ship, so it gets a correspondingly big scanner blip. If you want another example look at the main system station in Aqualina (from Aquatics, G3). It's a heeeuge station, and therefore it's got a big-ass blip too.

So does the Torus stations, and I think the Transhab station does, too.

Killer Wolf · Post by **Killer Wolf** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 3:48 pm

oh. it's a big splodge of multiple triangles that seem to originate from a point below the scanner, rather than a golf club indicating the position of the station, and it never used to look that way so i assumed summat was broke. cheers anyway. :-/

Chrisfs · Post by **Chrisfs** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 6:59 pm

Black Monks Bank/Monastery does the same thing. Though it seems to be oriented the wrong way on the scanner, shouldn't it be oriented the same way as the actual station ?

The could be a false alarm on my part though.

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 7:03 pm

Chrisfs wrote:
Black Monks Bank/Monastery does the same thing. Though it seems to be oriented the wrong way on the scanner, shouldn't it be oriented the same way as the actual station ?

The could be a false alarm on my part though.

I've had the same impression sometimes for large objects. Especially if it's located at the top right of the scanner or similar this seems to happen.

Screet

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 8:58 am

If the screenshot is of a rear view, the orientation is perfect.

Note that the odd shape of the scanner blip is caused by the object not being centred. I'd say that in the example shown the origin of the structure (0, 0, 0) is located at the very top, in what looks like the station itself, while the tentacle-like docking ports (I assume that's what they are), are very much off. So the z-coordinates (if it is the z-direction) will be between for instance +100 and -1500. (I don't have the OXP in question, so the numbers are only a guess, but I hope you get what I mean).

I consider that a design flaw. The origin of the structure should be in its physical centre, so that the z-coordinates range from +800 to -800 instead. This has two immediate effects:

(1) The box drawn around the structure if you target it shrinks to a reasonable size, and the structure is placed into the actual centre of the box. As it is now, I suspect it to be huge, enclosing twice as much space as necessary.

(2) The blip becomes a regularly shaped octaedron instead of this hugely off-centered version.

There are a lot of big structures that suffer from this design flaw. I once took the liberty to correctly centre the Transhab station, thereby improving both its targeting box and its blip, on my own computer. Here are some before-after screenshots. In the original the model's origin is at the docking bay, to the far left of the model as seen in the picture. You see that the tageting box is drawn around the origin, and it is much too big. In my version the origin is in the middle of the model, roughly where the rotating arms are attached. The targeting box fits much better, and also the blip on the scanner is centred, not off-centre as in the original version.

So I call for the designers to correctly centre their models. Looks much better in-game.

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:20 am

Nice practical example.

(BTW, which HUD is that - I like!)

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 10:57 am

It's the Cobra Courier HUD, but modified for the IC.

Cmdr Wyvern · Post by **Cmdr Wyvern** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:03 am

DaddyHoggy wrote:
(BTW, which HUD is that - I like!)

It looks a bit like DrHUD to me.

Killer Wolf · Post by **Killer Wolf** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 12:47 pm

Well there y'go then.
the origin is at the top : that square construction on top w/ the "air traffic control" looking tower on top of it is a trading post, and has a docking port in it. for some reason, when i was learing about docking slots from examples on here at the time, it wouldn't work at all unless the dock slot was at/on the origin.
like i said, it just caught me by surprise, the other versions of oolite didn't do this.

cheers!

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 12:54 pm

Docking ports work fine when not at the origin (e.g. I could easily move your asteroid models until they were centred, thereby removing the dock from the origin). If I look at the screenshot it seems that the first nod is reasonably close to the centre of the model. You could put that at the origin. Anyway, what you have to do is to move the main model along the right axis until it's balanced. And then move the subentities by exactly the same amount into the same direction. That's all.

And the big blips for big ships are not that new. They are in Oolite since before I switched to JS, because they were there when I started working on ghostsfromthepast.oxp. Like 1.70, or so?

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 7:58 pm

Commander McLane wrote:
So I call for the designers to correctly centre their models. Looks much better in-game. :)

It also reduces the amount of collision testing that needs to be done, and improves the resolution of collision testing when it is done. (Try enabling octree display – “console.debugFlags ^= 0x80” in the JS console – with both versions of the TransHab.)

Killer Wolf · Post by **Killer Wolf** » Tue Oct 06, 2009 6:32 am

Commander McLane wrote:
Docking ports work fine when not at the origin (e.g. I could easily move your asteroid models until they were centred, thereby removing the dock from the origin). If I look at the screenshot it seems that the first nod is reasonably close to the centre of the model. You could put that at the origin. Anyway, what you have to do is to move the main model along the right axis until it's balanced. And then move the subentities by exactly the same amount into the same direction. That's all.

And the big blips for big ships are not that new. They are in Oolite since before I switched to JS, because they were there when I started working on ghostsfromthepast.oxp. Like 1.70, or so?

that's interesting ~ i simply couldn't dock until i put my dockslot at the origin. i must've been doing something else wrong - i freely admit to fumbling about blindly when trying to create the thing, heh.

anyways, that station is binned now so i'm not wasting any more time on it, i was only posting cos i thought my scanner was knackered!

cheers all.