Oolite Bulletins

Hey Griff

The last (and indeed penultimate) version of the all-in-one bundle of your fine ships seems to cause this effect on my system: corolis stations become very dark. Or at least they do when full shaders are on; when shaders are otherwise set, all is fine.

I'm running Oolite 1.74.2 on an 8600GT Nvidia card, on Windows XP. The OXP readme is signed 'Griff 18 November 2010'.

Can you help, please?

hmm, i did swap the glow map from the diffuse texture into the normalmap texture on the coriolis station a while back to make it easier to player to add their own paint jobs onto the station hull, i just checked the oxp and although there does seem to be a bug in the oxp, line 3462 needs to be instead of but this wouldn't give a dark station, infact in 'no shader mode' the stations would have a constant 100% strength glow all over them!

There also looks like a syntax error on the end of line 3483 there shouldn't be that final comma as that's the last item in the list, it's a long shot but maybe that's causing a texture load problem on your system and the normal map and glow map are missing causing dark stations? if you edit the oxp's shipdata.plist yourself to fix these bugs don't use notepad to do so, wordpad is OK though and once you've saved the changes you need to hold down the shift key on the keyboard straight after launching oolite and keep it pressed down untill the spinning cobra title screen appears - this forces oolite to re-read in all your oxp files a-fresh, otherwise it won't notice the changes, i will fix these bugs in the next update of the oxp

If these don't cure it, could it be that you're noticing the shadowing thing that Oolite does when there's a planet between the station and the sun? i couldn't grab a screenshot of a station in shadow, but here's my cobra III flying in sunlight then in the station's shadow

do the dark stations look similar? i think objects just get illuminated by the systems ambient light when they're in shadow, the coriolis textures are quite dark and need a lot of specular light to help them shine so when they don't get this sunlight on them they might also look really dark

Griff wrote:

to make it easier to player to add their own paint jobs onto the station hull

Oh... I'd forgotten about that feature... thanks for the reminder, Griff... I'll have a little tinker with that later.

Hi Griff, and thank you for trying to help

I applied your fixes, but there seemed to be no change - and it doesn't seem that, in my present system, the planet is between the sun and the station. Note also that the problem affected a corolis in at least one other system too, and that other types of station seem unaffected. But, still, my testing has been pretty sketchy. I add, finally, that the corolii seem even darker than the ship in your picture: you can barely see anything save the docking slot.

Griff, are you planning on uploading new versions with the fixes any time soon. Just wondering whether should start fixing or wait for updates.

I'll update the all-in-1 bundle hosted at Commander Cheyd's deephorizons site tomorrow, i meant to do it today to fix the debris awarding kills bug but i'll upload it tomorrow with the tonights fix for the glowing coriolis in non-shader mode.

@UK_Eliter - what does the coriolis look like at lave? maybe start a new game and launch and have a look through the rear view, on my system the front face with the docking slit in is very dark but some of the side panels are lighting up OK, does it look anything like this:

if not, it sounds that for some reason the shader isn't lighting the station properly, i can't think why that could be though, i've just checked through it and it looks OK, mind you it is possible that i uploaded a buggy version of the oxp then fixed it on my system and forgot to re-upload, but the version i've got in my oolite workstuff is the one i signed '18 November' so i'm sure it's the same one as the version causing you problems

I only downloaded the all-in-one recently (Jan 18th), and I've seen no problems with the Coriolis station.

@UK_Eliter - do you have any other versions of the coriolis oxp in your addons folder as well as the all-in-1 bundle (maybe the individual download version of the oxp) - prehaps there's a clash and the old coriolis shader is being used instead of the new one in the bundle?
I've decided to re-upload the bundle oxp to deephorizons tonight, it's going to take a while, the internet in Wales relies a lot on people in Holyhead waving flags to transmit the data but it should be uploaded in about an hour.
I'm not sure when i'll get around to updating all the individual downloads, i've changed quite a lot of files (effects textures mainly) so i'll probably have to re-do them all using the bundle version as a reference, i don't fancy going through all that yet until at least the new coriolis oxp is done

Griff wrote:

the internet in Wales relies a lot on people in Holyhead waving flags to transmit the data

Like this, you mean.

Thank you very much. I suspected it wouldn't take long, hence my question.

I seem to remember more than adequate internet connections on my visits to the Black Mountains and Anglesey.

Griff:

I do not have any other versions of the coriolis OXPin your addons folder. Moreover, I removed some other OXPs that might be interferring, but doing so made no difference. Admittedly, though, I haven't tried removing *all* the other OXPs.

Here is a screenshot of what I see when I launch from a corolis. (I mean a particular station; but I have tried it with one other system which had a corolis, and I saw the same.) I am afraid that the screenshot is a bit wonky. .



Note that all other bodies seem unaffected, and that, as I say, when I turn off 'full shaders' all seems to work as it should.

gosh that is dark! i had to load it into photoshop and ramp up the brightness just to see what i'm looking at!
I don't think that's the coriolis from the 'griff normalmapped oxp', or if it is, something is clashing with it -could you post your log file, (it's usually found at C:\Oolite\oolite.app\Logs\latest.log on a windows XP pc, just open it in a text editor then copy and paste all it's contents here in this thread) i wonder if there's something in there that might help us work out what's going on, plus, the log will also list all of your installed oxp's and it might give us a clue as to which one has a buggy shader

I small plea to Griff.

I tend to play with lots of OXP's. I try to keep things updated and I test different versions of OXPs and generally play around with Oolite.

Now, my plea:
Would you at all consider to put version numbers or a date in the file name for you ships, all in one etc. It would help me (and others I believe). For me, it would suffice to have the version number in the name of the ZIP-file only. You can leave the name of the actual OXP-folder as is, although if it does not make conflicts, having a version number in the OXP folder name would be even better.

Griff: I've isolated the problem. It is DeepSpaceShip.oxp. With that OXP in, I get the black station; without that OXP, I get the proper - wonderful looking - station.

Or rather it was a version of DeepSpaceShip from which, by accident, I'd removed most of the files. (I'd removed all but the 'config' folder, having used the 'non-override' version of that folder and, er, none of the other files in the other directories.)

Thanks everyone for your help.

Gimi wrote:

You can leave the name of the actual OXP-folder as is, although if it does not make conflicts, having a version number in the OXP folder name would be even better.

That might well be a case of the solution being worse than the original problem: people could then easily forget to remove the previous version of the oxp, and have 2 or more conflicting versions of the same oxps sitting next to each other...