Oolite Bulletins

Posted: **Wed Feb 07, 2024 5:14 am**

What's the story with screen background images, anyway? Back in my day, they were all 1024 x 512 pixels. There was some technical reason for that; Ayton explained it to us one night.

1. IIRC, Oolite will allocate a block of memory to load the image into that is some multiple of 512 pixels; so if you e.g. use an image that's 1024 x 640 lines, it uses the same amount of memory as a 1024 x 1024 image. Does that sound right, or am I imagining things?

2. Anyway, the practical question: how do I use your 1920 x 1080 image as a mission screen background?

Posted: **Wed Feb 07, 2024 5:48 am**

You could use it as is - Oolite will resize it to fit the display when required. However, it's best to make sure any images we add to Oolite are scaled to be a factor of 2. ie 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 1024x1024. The X doesn't have to be the same as the Y either. So 2048x1024 is fine.

And that's the size I used for all the backgrounds in Xenon UI: 2048x1024. And when I display one, I use this format:

Code: Select all

	{name: image_filename.png, height:546}

Setting that height property, with a image size of 2048x1024, seems to put the image right where it needs to be.

Here's an example from screenbackgrounds.plist:

Code: Select all

"oxz-manager"               = {name="xenon_oxzmgr.png"; height=546;};

Here's an example from xenonui.js

Code: Select all

			setScreenBackground({
				name: imagename,
				height: 546
			});

Not sure what the reasoning was for 1024x512. It might have been memory related, but we can now increase the size of the JS memory by editing the GNUstepdefaults file. From

Hidden Settings in Oolite

Key: jsruntime-size-mib
Type: integer
Default: 32
Introduced: 1.89
Adjusts the JavaScript runtime size. The value is expressed in MiB and in the absense of this key, the default value of 32 MiB is used.This can prove useful when too many script-heavy OXPs are in use.

One final note: things like Xenon UI and BGS are using backgrounds to display their images. If you're putting a mission screen together and want to keep it compatible with them, use the "overlay" property, rather than the "background" property.

Posted: **Wed Feb 07, 2024 6:28 am**

Sorry, missed part of the answer.
To use an image on a mission screen do the following: (taken from the example here https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolit ... e:_Mission

Code: Select all

 mission.runScreen({
     title: "My first mission screen",
     message: "This am a mission screen wot is good",
     overlay: {name:”my image.png”, height:546}, // here is where you use overlay
     choicesKey: "me_firstmission_choices"
 },
 function (choice)
 {
     if (choice === "1_YES")  player.commsMessage("Yay!");
     else if (choice === "2_NO")  player.commsMessage("Boo.");
     else  player.commsMessage("Whut?");
 });

Posted: **Wed Feb 07, 2024 11:33 am**

Looks absolutely superb (as do your other retextures)!

phkb wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 4:24 am
Question: At present, you'd only see the Mark II guard if the station is attacked, not as a general replacement to Vipers. Should I make the special Pitviper Mark II the default police ship for Riredi, or leave it the way it is?

Prolonged answer:

Riredi (Vanilla game F7 text)
Government: Corporate State
Economy: Poor Industrial
Technology Level: 13
Population: 5.8 Billion (Harmless Furry Insects)
This world is very fabled for the Rirediian mountain slug.

Riredi OXP F7 text
This world is very fabled for the Rirediian mountain slug. These gigantic creatures are isles of flourishing life on the barren planet and each of them forms a complete ecosystem. Dealing with radioactives is strictly prohibited on this world because radiation is harmful to the slugs. Riredi is home of Coluber inc. and Riredisec ltd.

From the Wiki page
Riredi is home to Coluber Inc., Riredisec Ltd & the Crab-Boolean Corporation.
Coluber Inc. (Coluber Works and Shipyards Ltd.) are the manufacturers of the Coluber Racers, the Coluber Pitviper, and the Coluber HUD CH01.
Riredisec Ltd. are a well established transport company that is specialized in the transportation of larger quantities of gold, platinum and gemstones).
Crab-Boolean Corporation are the manufacturers of the CB-HUD Mark II which accounts for 40& of their sales.

Blurb on Riredisec Ltd. comes from the Coluber Blue Racer wiki page

I read Captain Beatnik's blurb (see Pitviper reference below) as intimating that Coluber Inc. does not control the Riredi system.

Bearing in mind the gradual deterioration of GalCop (and the additions to the local police by Commies & Dictators), I'd presume that Riredi/Coluber Inc. would be able to bamboozle GalCop into outfitting all local GalCop police with their local ships. Or at the very least provide the local share as Commies & Dictators do

Coluber Inc. have obviously chosen to invest a lot of their political capital/wealth in providing the local main orbital and outfitting the local police force. And the local government (about which Beatnik says little) are obviously not vetoing it, whatever their feelings. A personal decision by the MD of Coluber?

Logic behind answer: In anarchies the police force is entirely paid for by GalCop and is thus very small. In Commies and Dictatorships GalCop is augmented by the local government which wants itself to control what goes on. One presumes that the richer systems just bung more dosh into the GalCop police kitty. But they could provide ships as well. And that would help flavour some of the other systems.

Can one do anything else with this OXP in terms of marking out Riredi?

Shipyards: It's great that the PitViper is definitely for sale in the local shipyards. Is it possible to ensure that say 75% of all ships are Coluber ones (corporate monopolies)? And that PitVipers are very rarely sold outside the system? And ditto for the Coluber Racers - 4 colours + 2 variants?

New Cargoes: Can we add in a couple of New Cargoes products based on the mountain slug? Some sort of medicine produced by Riredisec, for example? A cure for cancer, or Alzheimers would be nice. Much sought after in Ceesxe with its life-enhancement clinics and other rich human/humanoid worlds. And say another beauty product which works for say lobsters or felines? These would presumably be in rather limited quantities since the lore on Riredi's corporation does not mention them. And Riredisec would have an almost entire monopoly on transport!

Personalities There are several personalities mentioned in the Beatnik/Dizzy Lore. It would be nice to meet one or two in the system, flying a PitViper say. Could there be a chance of meeting tartan-clad Filgafel Saramant the younger "flying erratically" with his escorts (in Junta Enforcers?) either here in Riredi or back at his home in Atriso? I'd be happy to come up with some dialogue for him!

Is there anything else which can be done to make the system a bit special?
•Something else in the system? A special Rock Hermit with some unusual feature? An alien?
•Some special piece of Coluber equipment only fitable at the Main Orbital or down planet? (see "Black Racers" on Blue Racer reference below: Attitude Control System - how about an inferior fitable version which costs an arm and a leg? Or a Type-II superconductor main bus which occasionally malfunctions?)
•Something to do with local regional politics? An involvement of some sort in the civil war in Eninre?
Or Oresre? An argy-bargy between Riredisec's personalised Blue Racers & Selezen's "psuedo-Thargotic" Oresrian Traders next door? Lore: Commander Wildefluff, Riredisec's renowned insectoid pilot, mistook an Oresrian for a Thargoid, potshotted him, and the deadly feud began. Ever since, the Oresrians have targeted mostly Riredisecian Blue Racers (escorted by Red Racers?) - and the Riredisecians have returned the honour. Could one faff a little with the NPC's - say give Oresirans better reaction times and Riredisecians better accuracy? But this one might need a lot of work.

•Or something else entirely?

References:
Sector1/Eninre - for local systems
Riredi OXP - constructed from the other pages
Coluber Blue Racer Lots of lore here: eg: "Coluber" is a genus of fast moving, nonvenomous snakes commonly known as racers. Racers are not harmful ... ... as long as you leave them alone! But if you goad them, they become VERY aggressive. The nature of the ships Coluber Ltd. produces is similar.
Coluber Pitviper Lots of lore here too!
CB HUD Mark II A little lore on Crab-Boolean

Looking at this all, one can see that Captain Beatnik had a good feel for lore.

Posted: **Wed Feb 07, 2024 3:11 pm**

Wildeblood wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 5:14 am
What's the story with screen background images, anyway? Back in my day, they were all 1024 x 512 pixels. There was some technical reason for that; Ayton explained it to us one night.

This one?: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=127716#p127716
Or this?: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=51631#p51631
Or this?: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=114032#p114032

And... should any of this be included in our wiki?

Posted: **Wed Feb 07, 2024 10:19 pm**

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 3:11 pm

This one?: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=127716#p127716

And... should any of this be included in our wiki?

That first one should be copied, complete and verbatim, to the wiki. (The other two are just noise.) But it's not the exchange I was thinking of; those three are from before my time. I've just come from the screenbackgrounds.plist page on the wiki, which is just a copy/paste of the file, without any expounding on how to make best use of it. That wiki page didn't exist until you created 3 months ago, Cholmondely.

Another example of,, Wo ist die Dokumentation?''
"On the wiki."
Yeah, right. You're doing great work, but it's really highlighting how slack they've always been in the past.

Posted: **Wed Feb 07, 2024 11:20 pm**

Wildeblood wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 10:19 pm
Another example of,, Wo ist der dokumentation?''
"On the wiki."
Yeah, right. You're doing great work, but it's really highlighting how slack they've always been in the past.

Can't blame them. They created something great. But they left without passing on their knowledge - we were just not there in time.
Now we cannot just explore Ooniverse, we can also explore what's making up the matrix.

BTW: Dokumentation is female

Posted: **Thu Feb 08, 2024 12:26 am**

Wildeblood wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 10:19 pm

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 3:11 pm

This one?: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=127716#p127716

And... should any of this be included in our wiki?
That first one should be copied, complete and verbatim, to the wiki. (The other two are just noise.) But it's not the exchange I was thinking of; those three are from before my time. I've just come from the screenbackgrounds.plist page on the wiki, which is just a copy/paste of the file, without any expounding on how to make best use of it. That wiki page didn't exist until you created 3 months ago, Cholmondely.

Another example of,, Wo ist der dokumentation?''
"On the wiki."
Yeah, right. You're doing great work, but it's really highlighting how slack they've always been in the past.

I barely understand a word on that wiki page. But I could see that there was something missing, but did not know enough to add anything meaningful to the file.

As adumbrated zillions of times, I'm just a dumb pilot. Every time I try anything original, it fails without exception. Unless I can get somebody else to take me by the hand and give it to me on a plate (just ask Phkb, NiteOwl or Hiran!). My attempts at OXPs were either copies of others, or done by others or utter failures. I can't get Hathor Trade Station to work - I bodged it. I can't get HDBG-B to work - I bodged it. I can't even stick a decal on my ship - I bodged it. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. Quite depressing, really. I've learned a little from the 3 gentlemen just mentioned - but it has been such a minute fraction of what I could have learned from them that its rather embarrassing.

So with the wiki, all I can do is add programming tid-bits if I can understand that they are relevant. Quite bluntly, it needs somebody like you to massage it into some sort of shape. Hiran is not a JavaScripter. The others are too busy. And bluntly, I'd rather see their new OXPs. Massively Locked started doing great things (see his wiki user page, his javascript basics page and his user contributions (click the "500" button at the bottom)), but then his mother collapsed and it all went phut.

I understand that Aegidian did some wonderful tutorial-type stuff in his day, but I think it has all gone. It seems to have been mostly here on the BB, and died horribly in the Great Deletion. His other stuff has also gone (eg: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=20556#p20556). But then it was presumably all in legacy script...

I do still wonder if I could at least learn the legacy script - a lot of the stuff is still there on the wiki if one looks at the old versions of the pages, before it was deleted by the javascripters. But I'm pretty sure that the sort of thing which I want to do involves javascript.

What I'm really into is the Lore. Adding depth and nuance. Hence my badgering over the Riredi.oxp. And the Lave.oxp. And LitF. Montana05's invasion and his 3rd theological flavour of Dictators. Driving poor old DGill bananas over the Feudals. And Alnivel over the Commies, the Tionisla Chronicle Array and Personalities.oxp. They all involve (to me) more flavour and immersion, making things more meaningful and adding more realistic complexities.

But at least if we can get the stuff onto the wiki, then it is there for the Cognoscenti to massage into shape. But then, as Cody keeps reminding me, more is less: too much detail, too much confusion, too much distraction...

Posted: **Tue Feb 13, 2024 6:55 am**

I think the city lights and planet texture are looking pretty good now.

What do you think? It's not a problem if the planet texture and the normal map clock in at over 22mb just by themselves, is it?

If only I could work out what I'm doing wrong with my method that's stopping the lights being visible on a Mac.

Posted: **Tue Feb 13, 2024 7:21 am**

phkb wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 6:55 am
If only I could work out what I'm doing wrong with my method that's stopping the lights being visible on a Mac.

Did you try bugging a_c? Whatever it was that he did worked just fine...

Griff's 2009 version also does too

Posted: **Sun Feb 18, 2024 1:34 pm**

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 3:11 pm

Wildeblood wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 5:14 am
What's the story with screen background images, anyway? Back in my day, they were all 1024 x 512 pixels. There was some technical reason for that; Ayton explained it to us one night.
This one?: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=127716#p127716
Or this?: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=51631#p51631
Or this?: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=114032#p114032

And... should any of this be included in our wiki?

Found it:

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... 80#p178246

Posted: **Sun Feb 18, 2024 2:35 pm**

phkb wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 6:55 am
I think the city lights and planet texture are looking pretty good now.

What do you think? It's not a problem if the planet texture and the normal map clock in at over 22mb just by themselves, is it?

If only I could work out what I'm doing wrong with my method that's stopping the lights being visible on a Mac.

What a beautiful system to visit!

Posted: **Mon Feb 19, 2024 1:27 pm**

OK, here's a preliminary release: Riredi_2.0.oxz

Here's what's in the box
* updated textures on station, included normal and specular maps.
* updated planet textures, added lights, normal and specular maps.
* switched from the Pitviper Mark I to the Pitviper Mark II for the Coluber Guard.
* used updated textures for Pitviper Mark II.
* made the Coluber Guard police ships the default ones for the Riredi system.
* removed unused ballturret entry from shipdata.plist.
* ensured the main station is selling predominately Coluber ships (if there are Coluber ship mods installed).
* added a New Cargoes commodity (Rirediian Mountain Slug Emollient)

I just realised I have one extra thing to do: remove radioactives for sale, and make the price so low as to be not worth selling. Because, according to the planetinfo lore entry: "Dealing with radioactives is strictly prohibited on this world because radiation is harmful to the slugs." I guess I could also make them illegal to import. Anyway, that will be in the 2.0.1 release.

As always feedback/comments/bug reports/etc are welcome and encouraged.

Posted: **Mon Feb 19, 2024 6:05 pm**

Planet and station look great out of the box!

Here the em map (reduced brightness and a lilbit color) I used on the hotspot post in screenshots

Posted: **Mon Feb 19, 2024 10:21 pm**

did commander Beatnik also have a custom buoy?

If not can I suggest a custom skin

Oolite Bulletins

[RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)

Re: [RELEASE:] Riredi (ambience OXP)