Oolite Bulletins

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I was under the impression that one unit in WIngs3d was 1m - real modellers out there will quickly correct me if I'm wrong!

That would be useful!

Ship looks good even untextured - but I don't get the engine outputs bein' so far from the outside of the ship (even if its a lot like how they work in original Nintendo Starfox)

It's only doing that because I basically copy and pasted the information for the ship from another ship (which was obviously much larger in size)
I'm going to change it later so that it only has one output coming from the centre.
Edit: also I need to make them a bit smaller or it'll look like the thing is on fire! haha

Size is usually 1 unit in Wings to 1 metre in Oolite. Normally if you build a model using a standard wings cube, then you'll have to increase its size by a factor of ten to be comparable with the usual Oolite ships.

My usual method is to use the downloadable Oolite models that Giles provided and use one of them as a size guide. Your Arwing would probably be about the same size as a Mamba...

Looking damn nice though.

Sorted out the Engine output trail!

Even in the Oolite universe, the police don't appreciate you going out in public naked.

@ MF - it's looking good - keep it - what's your plan for the final texture? Gonna be brave and add some shader stuff? Not pushing - just genuinely curious as I have still to find the time to either mod a ship already in existence or create one I'd like to see in game!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

@ MF - it's looking good - keep it - what's your plan for the final texture? Gonna be brave and add some shader stuff? Not pushing - just genuinely curious as I have still to find the time to either mod a ship already in existence or create one I'd like to see in game!

I'm going to do several textures.
I want a very basic one that looks very much like the initial images in this thread: Flat colours, most of it grey, red engine, light blue canopy, dark blue rudder-like things, and blue for the leading edge of the wings.
Basically aiming to get it as close to the original SNES version as I can.

Then I'm going to check and see what the N64 version looked like, as that had textures. Then I'm going to do my own take on it (as in, mostly copy what's there and think about adding a few things here and there.)

What exactly do you mean by 'shader stuff' anyway? Shade as in drawing stuff to make it appear that there's details on the surface or does Oolite support more advanced texture features such as bump-mapping??

Take a look at the Shaders' Outpost thread.

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

Take a look at the Shaders' Outpost thread.

O...M...G...

I've decided to leave my jaw on the floor.. the number of times I've had to pick it up while looking through those threads, it began to feel like heavy exercise!

I had no idea that Oolite was capable of such things!
So far I've just been playing it without any OXP's or anything extra.
I've always thought that graphics wise; it wasn't amazing but I looks pretty decent.. certainly not bad for a fan-made game.
But those.. sheesh! After playing Homeworld which was a full blown big developer game in '99... the detail in the textures on those babies completely blows HW out the water!

I get the feeling I wouldn't be able to create something quite that impressive. I think for the moment I'll stick with the basic texturing till there's a few tutorials floating about on how to do some of that stuff.
Although the thought of making the cockpit canopy partially transparent is a very inviting prospect!.. and making the area around the engines/lasers glow..and making parts of it more/less shiny.
This is defiantly something I need to keep an eye on.

My UVmap thingies...they're...

staring at me!

Moonlight Fox wrote:

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

Take a look at the Shaders' Outpost thread.

O...M...G...

I've decided to leave my jaw on the floor.. the number of times I've had to pick it up while looking through those threads, it began to feel like heavy exercise!

Glad you liked it, mate. I don't understand most of it, but the results are pretty impressive...

Ugh! So close!
I need help with texturing *sigh* I suck at this. haha

I've been following the oolite wiki guide for texturing.
(http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP_howto_texture)

Everything seemed to go okay, however the texture maps just aren't showing up.

I did the UV, made my 'texture', imported into Wings3D, it looks fine in Wings3D.. made the image internal
I exported as a .obj + .mtl file (it also spat out a .tga file)
I opened the mtl file in notepad and changed the reference to the tga file to png, changed the tga to a png (still looked fine)
Then I put the obj + mtl files in the Python folder and went:
Start>run>cmd
cd python25
obj2dattex.py Arwing.obj
it spat out the .dat file, placed it in AddOns>Arwing.oxp>Models
Placed the png into Arwing.oxp>Textures

What am I missing?

One thing that is odd is that when I open the .dat file in notepad and compare it with another ship (the stingray.oxp one) mine's missing a huge chunk of data from the bottom.
The stingray one has a section named TEXTURES near the bottom which has stuff like:
TEXTURES
ship.png 1.0 1.0 0.68321 0.44824 0.68321 0.45962 0.71855 0.44824
ship.png 1.0 1.0 0.32020 0.33296 0.31766 0.34737 0.27561 0.32510

where as when I open mine, the only reference it has to textures is one line right at the top:
// output from Obj2DatTex.py Wavefront text file conversion script
// (c) 2005 By Giles Williams
//
// original file: "Arwing.obj"
//
// model size: 17.487 x 7.596 x 31.311
//
// textures used: ['Arwing_texture.png']

But after the FACES section, it ends. (END)

I'm guessing this is the problem... but I have no idea how to sort it or why it's happening.

I don't know if it's related, but also the .mtl file that Wings3D spat out was really short:

# Exported from Wings 3D 0.99.02
newmtl N-Gon1_auv
Ns 100.000
d 1.00000
illum 2
Kd 1.00000 1.00000 1.00000
Ka 1.00000 1.00000 1.00000
Ks 1.00000 1.00000 1.00000
Ke 0.00000e+0 0.00000e+0 0.00000e+0
map_Kd Arwing_texture.png

I'm not sure if it's supposed to be that way or not.

try this, in the outliner window in wings, drag your imported texture image (make sure it's a png - i think renaming tga's to png's is going to confuse oolite) onto the 'default' material and delete any other materials from the outliner window, check your ship in the preview window, can you see the texture map on it? if so, select the entire object and choose File -> export selected-> and save it out as a obj.
open the obj file in a text editor and see if there are entries for TEXTURE in it now, if so the the obj2dattex.py format conversion thing.
Lovely work on the model by the way! The only starfox game i've played was the dinosaur planet one on the Gamecube, not sure if it's a proper starfox game or if it was an already written game that Rare added starfox and co too, it was great fun though, my nephew loved it at the time but the final boss was too hard for us

Well, this is what I've got:



I'm not sure if the .obj file that Wings is kicking out is correct or not as I'm not familiar with the file structure.
Basically there a lot of numbers (coordinates I presume) starting with the letter V then another block starting with VT, then VN, then it says:
'g N-Gon1_default
usemtl default'
followed by a load of numbers starting with F and separated by forward slashes.

Griff wrote:

Lovely work on the model by the way! The only starfox game i've played was the dinosaur planet one on the Gamecube, not sure if it's a proper starfox game or if it was an already written game that Rare added starfox and co too, it was great fun though, my nephew loved it at the time but the final boss was too hard for us

Yeah, you're correct. It was originally just called Dinosaur Planet and was intended to be released on the N64. (the previous console) But later, they added the Starfox characters in, and remade it for the Gamecube.
It's a fun game, although only really a Starfox game by name.
In the original N64 one they intended to be able to switch characters during gameplay. I wish they would have kept this feature as I would have quite happily played as Krystal throughout the whole game!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_A ... evelopment

hang on, i'm being daft - i think all the 'texture' references are in the .dat and not the .obj
What you've got in your screenshot looks fine. hmm, i wonder why the texture isn't appearing in wings?
edit: oh wait, i think i can see some quads in your model - looking at the uv layout, just above the red triangle - is that 2 quads (polygons with 4 vertices)? i'm sure the dat2objtex.py script won't deal with anything other than triangles, maybe that's the reason the textures aren't being written to the .dat file? - try triangulating the model. (use the polygon face selection tool to select the quads, right click and choose 'tesselate-> triangulate from the pop-up menu)

i think the blue cockpit polygon, the ends of the rear wings nearest the main part of the ship and the polygon under the red triangle are quads also

Yeah, I did those by taking a N-Gon and deleting one of the vertices to get a square/rectangle shape. I had no idea that it would cause any problems.
As I'm totally out of ideas, it's worth a shot!


EDIT:

OMG!
I see 'TEXTURES' in my .dat file!!

second EDIT:

SUCCESS! F**K YES!!
At last! You have no idea how much that was bugging me that I couldn't even get a flat colour onto the damn thing.
THANK YOU!




Third edit:
Well there's a tip that I'm NEVER going to forget. quads = bad.

Now time to mess with the config file and see what I can do to this thing!

Yes looking nice!

Now some nice textures