Oolite Bulletins

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Most cool worldship, Mandoman! Are we seeing the front or the rear of the ship? Is the sphere going to rotate?

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Thargoid wrote:

The one thing to be aware of with large ships (and stations) is that after a given distance from the player (a few scanner-lengths or so, I forget offhand) that Oolite won't draw them. Hence if they are big enough to still be visible at that range, they tend to just "blink into existence" or conversely vanish without trace if you're leaving them behind.

Its more than 'just a few scanner lengths'. e.g. the constations are still visible from the planet. Not drawing at all will only happen when much further away than planet-sun. And it will be an issue when creating ships of planet size.

What also could be an issue is that Oolite expects that the main entity is the biggest one. When the main entity is to far away to be visible, oolite doesn't bother to check further for subentities. The only example of that were the old ring stations. The central core was small and when that came in drawing distance, the big rings just popped into view. Svengali fixed that in the new release of the ring stations.

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Mandoman - one thing all your ships seem to have in common (this is not a criticism, merely an observation) is that the bigger/quicker the ship the more/bigger engine exhausts the ship has on the rear end.

It is generally accepted, given the strange non-Newtonian physics of Oolite ship flight, that the stuff coming out the back of the ship is NOT reaction mass that is pushing the ship forward, but simply a stream of exotic particles (some of which emit light in the visible spectrum) channelled away from the equally exotic engines that make E/Oolite ships fly - I think quite a few commanders (for example - Another_Commander?) turn the engine exhausts off completely, simply because in their Ooniverse they're not required to justify/rationalise the forward flight of the ships.

In more practical terms you'd save yourself quite a few polygons not trying to produce reasonably rounded engine outlets...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

turn the engine exhausts off completely

That idea is tempting, but I like some plumes. Griff's Moray has no drive plumes, which makes it different and interesting.
I'd prefer to just reduce the plumes drastically across the board. Would that be a simple thing to do?

El Viejo,

Have you looked at buckyballs? (No I'm not being rude, honest!). Far fewer vertices than a sphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene

Fullerenes can be arranged in pairs to form a sphere like object of hexagonal and pentagonal flutes, very like pollen grains look under a microscope. Rather than arranging vertices to make a football like object arrange vertices to form uprights between the upper and lower fullerene vertex points. Of course, it does require more vertices than cones but far fewer a single high quality sphere. I may have code that demonstrates this if what I'm trying to say is unclear.