Oolite Bulletins

My pleasure.
(It was EV's idea)

Griff wrote:

thanks for sorting out the wiki page Smivs!

@JJP
I hadn't thought of randomising the colouring on the station to be honest, i could certainly have a look into it, the only drawback might be that the station will need another texture map of some sort to control the effect and it's already rather texture heavy, the bits we can see in the screen shot above is two 2048 x 2048 maps, and the dock is another three 1024 x 2048 maps, i haven't even started work on texturing the rest of the station hull yet.

This 'Distance mapping' shader code by Ahruman looks really interesting: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=71920#p71920
seems perfect for adding a decal to a station using only a small decal texture

Depending on the texture maps and other effects used, it is possible to "dye" maps a different colour via script.

Have a look at my butterflies demo OXP for an example - there is only one texture (it's white), but it's dyed by the script into 6 or 8 different colours that are actually spawned. You could maybe do something similar with a suitable baseline texture.

I just led four pirates into interstellar space via my own wormhole, and found this error in the log: First and only error that I've seen concerning the missile/Cobra III... did going into interstellar space via a deliberate mis-jump cause it?
I presume one of the bandits must have been a Cobra III with missiles version.

Thargoid wrote:

Hmm odd, did the ship actually have any sub-entities (missiles or it's main front gun)?

I never got a look at the Cobra Mk III SE (that's what I've named the missile/Cobra)... I was involved in nasty firefights at both ends of the tube.

Griff,

I apologize for posting in this thread, but I have not been a member of this forum long enough to have PM privileges...

I am a fan of the game Elite and think you have done an amazing job with your ship models for Oolite. With your permission, I would like to use your models in an Elite mod for the game Transcendence. It just uses 2D graphics, but there are (python?) scripts that have been made by Transcendence modders that will use Blender to generate 2D ship facing graphics from 3D models. Of course, I would give complete credit to you in my mod for the graphics.

I must admit that I know very little about 3D modeling, but in playing around with this to see if it was feasible I have been able to convert your DAT files to OBJ files that I can open in Wings 3D and Blender. However the textures and shading seem to get lost somewhere in the process or my complete lack of knowledge is preventing me from doing it correctly.

So my first question is: Do you mind me using your models for my Transcendence mod? My second question is: Can you give a complete 3D noob some pointers on what I should do for the shading and textures to show up?

Thanks,
Styro

Hi Styro
wow, that sounds really neat! yes please use the ships & textures how ever you want, chop then up, re-edit them or whatever.
Have a look here http://www.boxcn.net/shared/rpkms25cc9
there's a 'resources' folder, it's a bit of a jumble but there's a 'resources - Obj format ships.zip' that has all the ships in obj format and there's also a multipart zip file (created using 7-zip, which you might need in order to unzip the files again) called 'Resources - Textures (no Alphas).zip.001' - .zip.004, that has all the ship 'skins' and effects maps etc in it (all the skins will have 'diffuse' somewhere in their filename, the normal maps have 'normal' somewhere in their filename and the 'effects' maps for all the glows etc that probably only mean something to the shaders in oolite will have 'I love Cheese sandwiches' somewhere in their name, no not really, they will have 'effects' somewhere in their filename
i'm not sure if you need things like the greyscale specular intensity maps, if you do, they're all in a seperate zip called 'Resources - Textures (alphas only).zip

i think that if you put all the model .obj & .mtl files in a folder alongside all the diffuse. png's, when you import the .obj object in wings it'll appear fully skinned, i don't really use blender so i'm not sure how it all works over there

Thanks for the speedy and helpful reply!

I am downloading the files now and will see if I can get it all figured out.

Added an Alternate Coriolis Model & texture to the box net downloads, it's the one i mistakenly gave a supermassive docking bay too so it's really hard to crash a cobraIII docking with it, so i thought i might as well slow down it's spin speed too, makes it feel like a much bigger structure in space!


It's rather high poly and uses a whole bunch of big (2048x2048) textures (download is about 22MB) so there's a half size texture version uploaded there too and to be honest it's plenty big enough (but since i had the full size textures ready to go in an oxp i thought i'd upload them too if you have a fancy enough graphics card)
edit: also uses code from Ahruman's Distance Mapping shader example to give sharp decals https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=71920#p71920 (the station had a big blank bit in it's texture so i stuck randomly generated numbers in there - so we'll all have to imagine that there's more that one station in orbit at any one time! like is says in the manual )
edit: hmm, looks like there's something wrong with the model in the uploaded oxp, it's not fitting together properly, i'll have a look at what's wrong in a bit, if anybody want's to try out the oxp it might be worth holding off downloading for a bit
edit2: I've fixed the fault in the model and re-uploaded the oxp

Oooh, lovely... can that be made to replace the Coriolis stations in the all-in-one OXP?

You can install this oxp alongside the all in one and you'll get stations from both, i'm not sure if i should merge this oxp into the all-in-1.oxp it's got a messed up docking bay size (and like the rock hermit it a bit high poly & texture size - although if it works really well for everybody i can certainly add it in


if you want the all-in-1 coriolis to stop appearing, save this out as shipdata-overrrides.plist in the config folder of this oxp: It'll overwrite the stations role and stop it being picked when oolite needs to spawn a coriolis

Cool... thanks Griff. I'll try both res versions, see what my old gfx card can do.

The full res version seems to work fine on my machine (ATI HD3650 512)... cool.
The docking-bay is larger... I just docked my Cobra III the wrong way round, if you see what I mean.

Would a wiki wizard be kind enough to amend/disable/strikethrough/delete the link on the Griff Industries page to the normalmapped shipset all-in-one OXP, specifically the old link to Dizzy's site which hasn't been updated since May 2010. There was a newcomer in IRC this afternoon who had downloaded a very old shipset from the Dizzy link. If the kindly wiki wizard felt so inclined, perhaps he could add a pic of the new Coriolis station, as well.

I just came across the new Coriolis in my game. I love the new sense of scale that it has; finally the Coriolis looks and feels as huge as it should. I think my docking computer's gonna be gathering dust for the next few jumps, because whenever I see this station I can't help but dock manually to check it out.