Oolite Bulletins

Griff wrote:

'Wireframe' Cobra3
well, this didn't work out very well, it's hideous.

'...and, inevitably, as the chronometers count down the seconds to midnight and the windows of the station's bar grow dark as the planet blocks out the light of the star, the old timers sit nearer together and begin to trade tales of 'The Phantom Cobra'. Some claim that it's the ghost of Commander Peter Jameson, reported lost at the end of the last Thargoid War, others that it is simply a manifestation of all those lost souls who were trapped in the trackless depths of interstellar space. One common story is the trail of bad luck and hideous deaths that follow in the wake of the ship's sightings....'

Captain Hesperus

Ah yes know them well, and you missed the one about a ship sailing slowly through space which when boarded had no sign of any crew and the table was set and dinner laid out and all..............

Griff wrote:

'Wireframe' Cobra3
well, this didn't work out very well, it's hideous.


http://www.box.net/shared/eku0d35g15

[small outburst="you may ignore it as a minority vote"]

Wow, that's cool!!!!!

As you may or may not know (and may or may not care) I am not into all this fancy new ship design, be it the dream team, the "ruining the classics" or whatever. Generally I feel it all ends up with a design overkill. It's just not to my personal taste.

But this one? It's gorgeous!!! (And fits perfectly into my own private "less is more"-philosophy, of course.)

I say: YES, that's an idea (and a ship) like I want to see in the Ooniverse. Just dump all these design monsters that look like they want to pretend they come from a different game! Give me more wonderful ingenious small ideas like this one instead!

Awesome! Really!!! The most awesome thing I have seen here in a loooong time!!!!!

I'm so excited!



[/small outburst]

So get the shader off Griff and start doing it to everything in-game.

Oolite-ultra-strict in the making.

Hmm. You could probably use length(fwidth(gl_TexCoord[0])) to determine how thick to draw the wireframe line (in texture space) and a texture with a gradient specifying how far each texel is from an edge. Have fun with that. ;-)

Griff wrote:

Dr.Nil, Random adds would be great! i suppose you could put a load of adds into a texture file a bit like the one Ahruman posted above in the decal shader example and have a shader pick a frame from it based on some random value or the game clock or something.

I could have sworn there was a thread by Aegidian somewhere here in the past where he gave the example of random subentities? somebody was making a spacedock? (might have been the tionisla orbital graveyard) but i can't find it anywhere now - does anybody remember this? random subentities would be great - you could change the neon signs or put different spaceships/crates etc on the spacebar launching strip thing.

I hope to see the cool shader crew look into it some day

(I suspect that my old Radeon cannot handle the shaders)

I wasn't sure wether to post this here or in the ruining the classics thread, but since it's mainly shader related tweaks i thought here would be the best place. basically here's a newer version of the griff_krait.oxp, this one has slimmed down quite drastically in terms of texture maps.

I've thrown out the specular exponent map and used a const float value in the fragment shaders instead, and dumped the glow map ( it basically only had 3 red dots on it in the firstplace and was very wasteful).
I've painted the lights into the diffuse texture instead and used the alpha channel in the effects map to provide an "illumination" effect for them - similar to how the floodlights on the spacebar are being done, oh, and some of the engine glows are working now too, try sneaking up on a dozing one and give it a few lasers in the rear!

Since the model now only uses 1 diffuse map the odd uv map error i was getting in wings has gone and also as Ahruman upped the model poly & vertex limits, the model is now frangible! Woo! Extra Kills! You can shoot off the laser cannon subentities and they won't fire anymore!

get it here http://www.box.net/shared/6ugzbf1ofo

Good to hear you got the engineglow working.
Mine didn't work either (using the pod-shaders).

Did you drop the specularity because it doesn't work right?
(at least for me it gives the ship a milky sheen, in stead of a roughened texture.)

added your link to the top posting.

hi A_H, the engine glow didn't work in the earlier version of the ship because i'd split the engine off from the main ship and had them as subentities which at the moment don't inherit some of the uniform binding data from their parent, I've now reworked the model so they are part of the main ship again (ahruman has already fixed this in his not-yet-released-development-version so when that comes out you'll notice the fuel injectors on the krait glow too.)

I dumped the specular exponent map as i wasn't really being used, it's the red channel in the original version's specular map, if you look at it you'll see it's pretty much just one shade of red, so it made sense to use that channel for something else and just put a "specular exponent = 4.0" value in the shader.

Specular exponent is sort of like the size of the highlight - if you make the highlight small (use a high specular exponent value in your shader) you get the impression that the surface is very glossy or even wet looking, it helps to use the smooth option in the ships .plist and .dat file too.

One specular effect i'm very fond of using is the specular intensity effect, i like to put lots of contrasting light and dark areas in the specular intensity map - you then get the impression of grooves or holes in the ship surface that the sunlight doesn't get into (such as between plates on the ships hull etc), i think this might be the effect you're after, in your painting program try applying a 'noise' filter to your specular intensity texture.

If you can get rendermonkey (or any other shader development program) working on your system it will make it much, much easier to edit and create specular intensity & exponent maps, you can have the map open in photoshop, and as you edit it the shader effects update in rendermonkey so you can easily see what is going on, until i saw this i had no idea what the specular exponent and intensity maps were doing just by looking at the ships fly past in oolite.

By the way A_H, thanks for all your work you've put into keeping this thread tidy and bookmarking all the useful info in the first post!

Ah, thanks for the support.

I'm not much for rounded shapes. They always look wrong when I do them.

I like the effect it gives to hullplates and recessed areas too.
I was using the glossiness only for some edges, 'plate edges' and the mandatory viewingport. But seeing as the models I'm currently playing with are basically default ships with applied shaders and scripts, this effect is lost on the whole.

Looking forward to picking appart your new applied shaders Griff...once I get these missionscripts working then i can get back to that...
or finish that thesis.

A high-exponent specular effect won’t work well on a flat surface, because it’ll only show up at very precise angles to the sun, at which point the entire surface will light up. This can be good for glass surfaces – the Shady Billboards shader uses an exponent of 256 for the secondary highlight representing a glass cover plate over the screen – but not so good for imperfect hull panels.

For specular highlights to show up details or “rough” surfaces, you really need a normal map, which requires additional information from Oolite. I’ve deferred this to version 1.71 so I can get 1.70 finished at some point.

Ahruman wrote:

<something> so I can get 1.70 finished at some point.

Now that's some good news at last. When can we expect that point?

Commander McLane wrote:

Now that's some good news at last. When can we expect that point?

I believe I said “in a couple of weeks” about three weeks ago. Currently, it feels like “in a week or two”. So probably sometime in November. Maybe even November of this year. ;-) (Note that 1.70 will still be a test release.)

You become more professional by the day Ahruman!

Extra points if you release in the X-mas season.


Really looking forward to all those juicy new possibilities.

Ahruman wrote:

(Note that 1.70 will still be a test release.)

I am not the one waiting for the mythical "next stable release". (Will it ever come? Perhaps when Giles returns?...)

On the contrary, I am the one waiting for hunting more new bugs, introduced by the new bugfixes.