Oolite Bulletins

Hi there
just for info, maybe it will help someone.

I had the same problem. No stars. Quickly found the problem: I had previously installed Zygnos cinematic skies as oxz from the ingame expansion manager, forgot abuot it and installed the oxp manually again. No stars, no nebula... I deleted the manually added oxp and BINGO.

But I had reconfigured some things in the planetinfo.plist of Zygnos OXP, so I added a planetinfo.plist in my own addon/config/ folder. Again: No stars. Ooops..?
Re-naming it to planetinfo-override.plist helped.

There may be more than one oxp that uses planetinfo.plist. Why could the game not deal with this one? Any ideas?

ralph_hh wrote:

I had the same problem. No stars. Quickly found the problem: I had previously installed Zygnos cinematic skies as oxz from the ingame expansion manager, forgot abuot it and installed the oxp manually again. No stars, no nebula... I deleted the manually added oxp and BINGO.

But I had reconfigured some things in the planetinfo.plist of Zygnos OXP, so I added a planetinfo.plist in my own addon/config/ folder. Again: No stars. Ooops..?
Re-naming it to planetinfo-override.plist helped.

There may be more than one oxp that uses planetinfo.plist. Why could the game not deal with this one? Any ideas?

Was there anything in the log when the stars were not available? The game does deal with multiple planetinfos from what I recall (haven't checked recently though), but if an OXP makes references to non-existing nebula textures for example, things can go wrong. Starfields and nebulae can cause exceptions (which are logged) if not set up properly.

Additionally, after a quick search for plist references ending in override.plist in the source, there does not seem to be any handling for planetinfo override plists, so I guess what you effectively did when you renamed it was deleting it.

Hi there and merry Christmas to you all!


I did some changes in the planetinfo-override.plist and it had no effect. What you predicted, the game does not use planetinfo-override... I renamed it.

So what does my faulty planetinfo.plist do now? There is nothing suspicious in the log. Nebulas and planets are fine, in 1.8 I used the same planetinfo.plist to adjust ambient level and starcount multiplier. Worked as it should. I did not change the file at all, now it does not work. Not at all as it seems.

So, I removed all the unnecessary entries. I now have a folder/file: addons/config/planetinfo.plist
that reads simply as follows: Does not work.
The ambient level remains unchanged and the stars vanish once this file is used. I tried the ambient level alone, that keeps the stars, but the ambient level cannot be changed....

It creates some problem. I can hardly see enemy ships. Often my autocrosshair indicates I'm on target, but I don't see it. Too dark obviously. And lost in the incredibly high number of stars created by ZygoCinematicSky. Also the station is terribly dark. I was quite happy to lighten things up a bit until I changed to 1.82 last weekend.


Has anything been changed in the way OOlite handles this plist entries?

Both work just fine for me when copy pasted. Have you removed all oxps when you test these?

Uh ohhh.... Thanks for that idea.
Without the OXPs - same result
without the oxz - BOOOOM... There must be an interference with one of the oxz then..
I'll try to figure out which one.

Edit: It's Zygos Cinematic Skies and Nebulas.

In 1.8 I used it as oxp. Recently I installed the oxz. There must be something in it that does not go well along with the additional plist...

ralph_hh wrote:

So, I removed all the unnecessary entries. I now have a folder/file: addons/config/planetinfo.plist
that reads simply as follows:

Code: Select all

{
	"universal" = 
	{
    "star_count_multiplier" = "0.5";
   	"ambient_level" = "2.2";

	};
}

Does not work.
The ambient level remains unchanged and the stars vanish once this file is used. I tried the ambient level alone, that keeps the stars, but the ambient level cannot be changed....

No as far as I can recall. Your above example works as expected for me, doing a simple copy/paste as far as the ambient level is concerned. The stars are indeed set to 0, but that is because the multiplier is meant to be an unsigned integer, therefore your 0.5 is probably getting truncated to 0.

So... After removal of Zygos and my config plist file, everything is fine.
Re-Installing the previously used Zygos OXP all is fine.
Setting the ambient level to 4.0 in that Zygos planetinfo brightens the world as it should.

But as soon as I change the star_count_multiplier below 1, the stars vanish.
0.995 - no stars
1.0 - all stars
number >1 increase the star count as intended.


Crazy.
I use Notepad++, I do use 0.5 not 0,5 to answer the obvious questions.
Well, with the ambience set, I can live with that number of stars.

A workaround if you set sky_n_stars to a lower value than the current defaults (5000-10000) which is set individually for each systems in the core planetinfo.plist. You can adjust the ambient level within the game using [wiki]Headlights[/wiki].

ralph_hh wrote:

But as soon as I change the star_count_multiplier below 1, the stars vanish.
0.995 - no stars
1.0 - all stars
number >1 increase the star count as intended.

The star_count_multiplier is expected to be an unsigned integer. Entering 0.999 or 0.5 or 0.076 or whatever less than 1, will keep the integer part (0) and discard the floating point part. This is why you see this behaviour and it is the same in 1.80 (just built 1.80 and tested without OXPs, exactly the same thing). If you noticed something different in 1.80, it is probably due to interference from some other OXP.

OK, after a check on the wiki, it seems that the information there regarding star count multipliers has been wrong for quite a while. It was written as if the multipliers had been floats and the example given was not working either.

However, I don't see why the multipliers couldn't be floats indeed, as this would allow more flexibility. So, in commit d73cb8b3, the star and nebula count multipliers have been switched to floats. Now you can enter 0.999, 0.5 or even -8.375 and it will work. BTW, negative multipliers are silently converted to positive ones for sanity reasons, so the last example would be applying a multiplier value of 8.375. Default, as always, is 1.0. So, what happens in the game now, is what the wiki suggests.

Wonderful, thanks!!
Another problem solved...
I'd not recommend to set the value to 8
Took me minutes to launch until my Computer finally coped with that many stars.

hello to all, Commander Sprocket here...

Ok, my on board computer system failed. Purchased a new system complete, works great...! got stars...!

Thanks to all that have helped with this issue...

Sprocket...