Oolite Bulletins

Been doing some work on the Grass Snake.

As Svengali said, these are very low poly models but in the case of the grass snake I think it could benefit from upping the poly count. Before I release any such thing I thought I'd ask if there were any particular adoption ettiquette on such matters (these oxps falling into my care since Svengali's 'retirement').

The original looks more escort than trader to me and so I'd also be interested in steering its profile a little in that direction.

Any fans of this ship? Would it either break hearts or be disrespectful to tweak it in a different direction?

Wow, Oolite is really a work of generations: 8 bit apocalypse's ships being overhauled by Svengali, and Svengali's work being overhauled by Redspear!

(Feeling mighty old all of a sudden )

OK, so no outcries of heresy so far (although I may have managed to depress Rxke , sorry old boy)

So here's what I've done so far. In each picture the original is on the right.







I've tried to keep the basic character of the original as I saw it (quirky jet shape) whilst making it less, well, 8-bit era.

Any thoughts?

As an aside, tweaking a pre-textured model will stretch the texture to fit the new shape. This can be used to breathe a little new life into older shipsets (or at least blow the dust off them) e.g. Deepspace...

/puts on reading glasses/

Beautiful work!

 FarstarMurderer v1.2 is online and in the manager as well.

Changes:
- v1.2 requires Oolite v1.88
- Materials entry updated
- Added missing positions (scoop_position, etc.)

good stuff!

Rxke wrote:

good stuff!

Off now for the Remorse of Conscience...

Will be interesting what Redspear does with the Grass Snake

Unfortunately, Redspear's been all too busy away from Oolite lately.
Ever since he started referring to himself in the third person his old strategy of working on whatever was amusing him at the time has become less and less productive. He has, however, set himself the target of releasing/updating at least 3 oxps by the end of the month. We'll see...

I talked before about turning the grass snake into an escort but I've since thought it might be better to stick closer to the original vision (large, very fast trader) and nerf in other ways.
Fast traders can make masslock a pain of course (when not piloted by the player) so it would need to be rare, expensive (partly to justify scarcity and partly because it's an amazing ship).
Front laser only perhaps (if memory serves it really is astonishingly fast for such a big trader) and maybe it doesn't need missiles either.

Anyway, the model's in a good place IMHO (improved but not too far removed from the original) and so it's only a few tweaks away from an update even if I don't get around to seeing what I can do with the texture.

@Redspear: No need to hurry And the model already looks good!

I've done a quick mockup for the RoC, but I guess I need to change a bit more to get closer to the previous version. Probably changing the normal map will give a better result.