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Shipbuilder wrote:

(I've edited my previous post to show the images of the new ships now - I keep learning a little more each day !).

Ha... three years ago, I'd never joined a forum anywhere, and had no idea how to use one (or photobucket). Then I found Oolite and was forced to join this motley collection of brigands, traders, belters, hunters and space bums. I have progressed a little since then... heh! Photobucket should offer you various types of link for each image. There is an 'Image' link and a 'Thumbnail' link which will be the most useful two... just C&P that link. It also has reasonable image editing and resizing available.

Also, have a look at Gimp - excellent free image manipulation software.

El Viejo wrote:

... I ... was forced to join this motley collection of brigands, traders, belters, hunters and space bums.

You'd be hard pressed to find a finer body of Men and Things anywhere!

El Viejo - Thanks I use the following for putting together my oxps (You are right Gimp really is a great piece of free software).

Software used - Gimp for the texturing, 3D Wings for the modelling and Vim for the text editing (All free and referred to on various posts on the forum).

Will anyone be able to advise me how to release one of the ship oxps in the near future ?

I don't fully know what the process entails i.e. I believe that I update the oxps on to the forum but do they then get posted on the Oolite Wiki site and if so who does this ?

Open a free personal account at Box.com is the first step. Then look at their free upgrade option - usually very simple to 'arrange'.

Then you package your OXP in a .zip and upload it to your Box, then post the link here on the forum. As you release each OXP, start a new [Release] thread for it.
Hopefully, a kindly wiki wizard will create an entry for it on the Oolite wiki.

There are other file hosting sites, or if you have your own website you can host them as a .zip there.

A few points to consider.
You should attach a licence to your OXP...most people here use the Creative Commons licence.
The OXP should contain a 'readme' (which no one will read! ) containing information about the OXP, the author, licence and any credits.
The downloadable .zip should contain the complete OXP as a .oxp folder and the readme. Don't put the readme in the .oxp folder as Mac users won't see it.
Maybe ask a few board members to check and try it for you. A request here should do the job. Coding errors and case-sensitivity problems are quite common particularly if the OXP has been developed on Windows, because Mac and Linux O/Ss are much more strict and stringent. Having a few members give it a once-over pre-release can save a lot of grief after it's too late.
Best of luck,
Smivs

Wow! These ships look good! I was born on the 70, so I'm dying to try some of these!

The Oolite Chatroom (aka DS's Seedy Space Bar - usually frequented by a right disreputable bunch of old space hands) is a cool place to hang-out, and many simple queries can be answered quickly there (at least on British/European time). If you've never used IRC, it's also pretty easy to pick-up.

Some good-looking designs there! Just one comment: "Lightning" = "big electrical sparks from clouds that fry things"; "Lightening" = "to make lighter".

Thanks for the spot Disembodied I never noticed despite it being the first ship I started on.

I've updated the shipdata.plist

Hi all – Is there anyone out there who is able to provide some advice with regard to specifying your own external views.

I am trying to set up views for the Colonial Viper Mark 1 (Which is a relatively small ship and have found that the default external views could do with being altered so that the ship looks a little bigger).

I have set up external views, based on the scripting in the Merlin oxp, but would like to add a top and bottom view.

The views from different angles around the ship look fine however I have tried to add a top view and bottom view and think that I understand the view position scripting but am struggling with, I believe, the quaternion used for the view orientation. I have attached a paste of the script below for reference.

Can someone shed any light on what I need to specify for the view_orientation script for the last two views to get the top and bottom views to work ? Basically I just want the top view to look directly down from a distance of 100m above the ship and the the bottom view to look up from 100m below the ship

<key>custom_views</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Rear View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>0.0 10.0 -100.0</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Rear Right View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>75 10.0 -75</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>0.9239 0.0 0.3827 0.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Right View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>100.0 10.0 0.0</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>0.7071 0.0 0.7071 0.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Front Right View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>75 10.0 75</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>0.3827 0.0 0.9239 0.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Front View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>0.0 10.0 100.0</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Front Left View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>-75 10.0 75</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>0.3827 0.0 -0.9239 0.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Left View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>-100.0 10.0 0.0</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>0.7071 0.0 -0.7071 0.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Rear Left View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>-75 10.0 -75</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>0.9239 0.0 -0.3827 0.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Top View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>0.0 100.0 0.0</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>view_description</key>
<string>Bottom View</string>
<key>view_position</key>
<string>0.0 -100.0 0.0</string>
<key>view_orientation</key>
<string>0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0</string>
<key>weapon_facing</key>
<string>FORWARD</string>
</dict>

In the view arrays you have 4 keys:

• Description - self-explanatory.
• Position - the position "in model space" where you are viewing from. Position is relative to the origin of your model.
• Orientation - a quaternion detailing which way you are looking. See below.
• Facing - which of the ships weapon positions will fire if the fire key is pressed when in this view.

The key you are having problems with is the Orientation one.  Quaternions are described in the wiki and in several pages on the web, but are still a bit of a mathematical nightmare. Have a look in the wiki (and beyond) and see if you can follow it.

1 0 0 0 is the unit quaternion, corresponding to looking along the Z-axis (ie forward on your model).

0.7071 0.7071 0 0 is the quaternion looking "up" (ie along +Y axis).

-0.7071 0.7071 0 0 is the quaternion looking "down" (ie along -Y axis).

The quaternions are all normalised (w^2 + x^2 + y ^2 + z^2 = 1). There is a very useful excel sheet around somewhere which is great for doing such calculations. But I always forget who made it (Frame I think, but not 100% sure) and where you can get it from.[/color]

I notice the Merlin has no sizes specified...are you sure it is similar enough in size to your ship to give you useable positions. As your viper is reasonably small, why not take the view positions from the default Adder which is of a similar size. From the game's own shipdata.plist:- You will notice this code is in the prefered OpenStep, but it should be easy enough to translate it to XML which you are using at the moment.
You will find the games' 'resources' folder where the shipdata.plist and others reside is very useful reference and resource for all sorts of things.

Thank you very much gents for your prompt and helpful advice.

I'll get on to this tomorrow and take a look at the info on the Wiki.

I'm hoping I will be able to get a ship up to standard and released within the next week or so.

With regard to the XML verses OpenStep coding issue their any particular advantage for using one rather than the other ?

I am just starting out therefore it's hopefully not too much of an issue to change to Openstep if that is the standard moving forward as I am in the learning process at the moment anyway.

I think most people favour OpenStep as it is far more human-readable. It is also eaier to write and easier to bug-fix. As I pointed out the plists for the core game are coded in OpenStep.
Indeed the core game files are an invaluable resource. If you haven't found it yet, the 'resources' folder contains all the plists, models, AIs and scripts for the game. There are good examples of almost everything in there.
With regard to skins, you might also want to look at stuff the core game doesn't use but OXPs can, like light-maps and shaders. For these you will need to look at OXPs. For shader examples you can't beat Griff's work, and all of my ship OXPs use light-maps so take a look at those - the 'materials' section of the plist is what you want.

El Viejo wrote:

Hopefully, a kindly wiki wizard will create an entry for it on the Oolite wiki.

Or just ask for an account for yourself so you can create the entry