Oolite Bulletins

Oh. another small bug I noticed, but have not been able to reproduce yet:

While in Witchspace, Thargoids were attacking eachother and a (misplaced) sidewinder-escort.
They were ignoring me. I activated the debugging keys.
After a while I decided to take a closer look. (Two of the Thargoids collided, crearting a nice light show.)
The Thargoid I had targetted (Thargoid Invader, with turret) had a purple-blue line-box surrounding it. untargetting did not remove the box. The box looked to be the same size as the 'bounding box'.

edit: this seems to be the new full-debug visual cue?
If you enter full-debug, models (and subentities) are represented as blue boundingboxes and dockables as red ones etc.

1 and 2 are probably related to the ATI sky rendering problem.

I'll add a picture below....
http://www.box.net/shared/grhif5pbug
You can(t) see the shaded areas of the station and if you look carefully you can(t) see the stalks in the scanner.

I can clearly see both. The problem is with the configuration of your screen, or possibly a colour correction issue.

Drawing of a purple box is a feature. It can be activated with the ‘x’ or ‘d’ key while paused (the latter being “all debug flags”), or (Mac OS X only) from the Debug menu with the Debug Menu OXP installed.

All debug flags can be disabled with the ‘n’ key while paused.

While we’re at it, the full (I think) list of semi-secret debug keys (again, press while paused) is:

• ‘0’: dump a list of all entities, then disable all debug flags.
• ‘b’: enable collision test debugging.
• ‘c’: enable octree debugging, which will print the line “DEBUG Octrees collide!” whenever two objects collide. Er, woot.
• ‘d’: enable all debug flags.
• ‘s’: enable shader debug messages. Specifically, this is equivalent to enabling “$shaderDebugOn” in logcontrol.plist, which can be used to enable any set of log messages you want.
• ‘t’: enable textured planets, only it doesn’t at the moment.
• ‘x’: enable drawing of entity bounding boxes.
• ‘n’: disable all debug flags, disable textured planets and turn off $shaderDebugOn.

The “debug flags” are settings used to control various tests and messages throughout Oolite. I’m not sure exactly what they all do, except that they add up to a lot of log messages. Individual message types can be disabled through logcontrol.plist as usual.

Keys added to wiki.

Yer right.
If I crank up the brightness to maximum, I can see the shaded areas, more stars and stalks....only even the grey of the boards is now painfull to my night-adapted eyes.

So 1, 2 are local problems arising from me rebooting and reinstalling drivers etc.

Added the keys to the wiki.

Wasn't yet done. So where have you put them, A_H, if you have?

umm page = debug_keys

did I forget to put a link?v

Never mind. It just didn't cross my mind to put them on an extra page. I thought the natural place would be the Keyboard Controls Page.

But it certainly is no harm to have them in both places.

I am sure it was mentioned somewheres.

escorts abandoning their mother.
I frequently observe 4 escorts in formation (leader missing) heading for the WP, while a short ways off a lonely Boa or Anaconda is heading towards the planet.
groups of unemployed escorts can be seen scattered across in the spacelanes.

Yes, known problem. Ahruman just hasn't yet figured out why escort behaviour somehow seems to be broken in 1.69.1.

BTW: Wouldn't the Testing and Bug reports-section be a good place to look whether something already has been reported and, if not, to report it there?

After installing Oolite 1.69.1 over 1.68, my fighterhud.oxp stops to function. I find that all the oxp files are intact in the add-on folder. Is this a bug? What should I do to recover the fighterhud? Btw,
the other oxp of ships are functioning ok.

All the HUDs are not drawn in 1.69.1. This is a known issue.

I frequently observe 4 escorts in formation (leader missing) heading for the WP

I encountered this same problem while play testing my OXP in Version 1.65 on a Mac. I would script a medical transport or frigate to appear in the space lane, and on my way to meet it, I would encounter the escorts, flying in formation towards the witchpoint. After an entire, frustrating, afternoon of trying to locate the source of the problem I gave up and moved on to other things.

Then, while working on my shipdata.plist, I noticed that some times I had used <key>escort-ship</key> and other times I had used <key>escort-role</key>. The escort-role key turned out to be the problem. Ships using the key escort-ship had no problems, where as ships using the key escort-role experienced the problem quoted above - switching them fixed the problem.

I'll post this in the Bug-Report Section as well.