Oolite Bulletins

I got icons on my resume.
Not literally, just that i did them.

Murgh wrote:

it can already browse through 'sealed' oxp's, with .dats and textures in separate folders and everything?

Yep. Easy when I found where too hook in to tell Cocoa to allow browsing packages; after that, it was one line.

Relative to the directory containing the .dat, it looks for textures in ./, ./Textures/, ../Textures/, then inside Oolite. This seems to cover pretty much everything.

I was planning to put out an alpha when it did something useful beyond previewing, but what with holidays and stuff I may do one today or tomorrow just to make sure it works on other people’s machines. Watch this space…

one willing guinea-pig

Dry Dock for Oolite pre-alpha 1

• It claims to be able to read and write various formats, but .dat (“Oolite Mesh”) is the only one implemented (for both reading and writing).
• The tools on the left are ignored.
• The inspector palette doesn’t.
• Left-drag rotates the model, not very well. Right-drag or control-drag moves the light. (There are actually two lights, one weak one diametrically opposite to the main one, to bring out details on the back). Scroll wheel moves camera in and out - no other interface for that yet.
• The list view on the right always contains the same boring things. In future it might contain interesting things.

God jul.

god jul to you too, but Dry Dock 'unexpectedly quit' upon its first initial trial run. I'm currently stuck with a Jaguar, would that the extent of the problem?

och god påske!

I knew there was something I forgot. It currently needs Tiger. Possibly this will change, but the priority is to ensure it works.

Currently the thing I’m aware of that requires Tiger is texture loading. I need to get the nice mipmapping texture loading to work with legacy systems for Oolite, and I’ll copy that back to Dry Dock… but not this year.

Anything helpful from the console log or crash report might be useful anyhow. There’s a working e-mail address in my user profile.

crash report is in the mail. I'm a poor judge of what is useful in there.

the console says nothing.

I'm not sure who I have to bribe to get my hands on a Panther around here.

idea for additional features.

It would be cool if one could show multiple craft,
to make a scene, add backgrounds of planets/stations, draw in laserfire, exhaustplumes etc.

You did have lights and subunits already working.

Nah, I had lights and subunits already planned…

Murgh wrote:

I'm not sure who I have to bribe to get my hands on a Panther around here.

If your not careful you'll end up with the real thing :O

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

idea for additional features.

It would be cool if one could show multiple craft,
to make a scene, add backgrounds of planets/stations, draw in laserfire, exhaustplumes etc.

You're thinking about making a machinima comic, using Oolite's universe maybe?

did I write panther? ehm. I think I met a fella that can hook me up with a Tiger. until then, no testing Drydock for me.

Tigers, Panthers. I preferred the Python myself...
You are not talking about Frontier freighters, are you?

No Rxke, not a comic, just staged screenshots.
(Check out the newships in the suggestions area. Those are renders from wings, edited to have lights a coloured background and exhaustplumes, I did not place the turrets in in wings, so they are just hinted at.)

Good idea though.
You go on and do the Dark wheel comic.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

You go on and do the Dark wheel comic.

Would be kind of boring, only shots of ships, no persons/aliens...cockpits, bars... It could come in handy for the manual, though...

Arranging multi-ship scenes isn’t going to be a high priority. Possibly exporting ships with sub-entities, plumes etc. to some 3D file format, though…

One thing I do plan to do reasonably soon is a “Compare Size…” feature, which lets you select another mesh and show it side by side with the current document at the same scale, allowing rotating.