Oolite Bulletins

Answer me this someone please: have I been getting hit by two lasers, with twice the damage?

El Viejo wrote:

Answer me this someone please: have I been getting hit by two lasers, with twice the damage?

Yes. It's the same as with any intentional-multi-laser NPC. And the chance of being hit with both lasers (rather than one laser hitting and the other one missing) is of course much bigger as with a ship whose lasers are wide apart (like the Imperial Courier).

Thanks McLane... I thought that the Gecko was hitting me rather hard... now I know why.

Good find on the typo in the shipdata.plist El Viejo, i'll get that fixed in the next update

Fitting the lasers onto the ships as subentites is just so that they can have their own set of textures seperate from the textures used on the main hull of the ship

Griff wrote:

Fitting the lasers onto the ships as subentites is just so that they can have their own set of textures seperate from the textures used on the main hull of the ship

This, in short, makes no sense.

Firstly, a given mesh can have up to eight materials. (The limit used to be seven, but as far as I’m aware multiple textures per mesh have always been supported; the Coriolis model in version 0.1 from 2004 uses several.)

Secondly, the laser itself isn’t textured, so it could still be attached to the base ship even with a subentity being used.

i'm not sure i follow, are we talking about the 'beam of light' thing drawn by the game, or the model subentity it emits from? i could have sworn i couldn't get more than 4 textures loaded into a shader which meant that effects maps for the guns and stuff worked best on a seperate subentity with it's own shader, plus no point having them in a texture big enough to cover the main hull if they're just going to be used on some small sticking out bits, better to just have smaller resolution subentity textues

Griff wrote:

I could have sworn i couldn't get more than 4 textures loaded into a shader

You can have up to eight materials per ship. Each material has its own shaders and its own set of textures.

ah, i didn't know that. It's still only one material per 'polygon' though is it? we couldn't have say, diffuse & normal mapping in one material, then the specularity & glow maps in another material and add both materials to the same polygon?
edit: oo, and a third 'dirt' material that we can mix in with script magic

Polygons, materials, textures... aarrgh!
<scratches head, and returns to pondering fighting Geckos with twin mil lasers... hmm>

Griff wrote:

ah, i didn't know that. It's still only one material per 'polygon' though is it?

Yes.

Griff wrote:

we couldn't have say, diffuse & normal mapping in one material, then the specularity & glow maps in another material and add both materials to the same polygon?

No. That’s what custom shaders are for. :-)

(This has a reasonably close relationship to how rendering works at the hardware level. Allowing multiple materials per polygon would either require Oolite to rewrite the shaders, or to render each polygon more than once.)

@Gimi - here's your decal mapped onto the pod, it's an excellent design but i think a bit too finely detailed at the moment, maybe the text and graphics need to be a bit bigger & bolder? You can take the text and graphics right to the edge of the 128x256 'canvas' it'll fit snugly onto the pod

Griff wrote:

@Gimi - here's your decal mapped onto the pod, it's an excellent design but i think a bit too fine at the moment, maybe the text and graphics need to be a bit bigger & bolder? You can take the text and graphics right to the edge of the 128x256 'canvas' it'll fit snugly onto the pod

Thank you Griff. This was useful. I have messed up transparency on the original, so I'll have to redo the whole thing. (Not a bad thing, as I'm learning Gimp very fast at the moment). This will also mean changes to two other designs I'm working on.

I think the Hazard triangles came out very well though.

Just a quick request for anyone using TG2 for Griff's....could you take a look at my post here in the TG2 thread as I have some weird laser things going on.

Added a small companion oxp to the box net folder - "griff_shipset_player_flyable_NPC_ships_v1.0.zip"
edit: updated to v1.02 - changed the shader binding 'throwingSparks' to the proper 'damage' shader binding - ship lights now dim as energy levels drain

"An OXP for Oolite 1.75 and higher, adds player flyable versions of previously NPC only ships - Gecko, Krait, Mamba & Sidewinder"
Needs oolite 1.75 to work properly (makes use of the new 'hyperspace_motor' shipdata.plist key to ban these ships from being able to witchjump)

Ship pricing and equipment availability for the 4 new ships in this OXP hasn't had a lot of thought so if anyone has any ideas please let me know

Griff wrote:

Added a small companion oxp to the box net folder - "griff_shipset_player_flyable_NPC_ships_v1.0.zip"

"An OXP for Oolite 1.75 and higher, adds player flyable versions of previously NPC only ships - Gecko, Krait, Mamba & Sidewinder"
Needs oolite 1.75 to work properly (makes use of the new 'hyperspace_motor' shipdata.plist key to ban these ships from being able to witchjump)

Ship pricing and equipment availability for the 4 new ships in this OXP hasn't had a lot of thought so if anyone has any ideas please let me know

*cough* so those aren't able to jump into witchspace? What use are they then?