Oolite Bulletins

Griff wrote:

Ahrumans 'Freaky Thargoid' oxp

That’s actually Giles’s OXP to start with.

OK - looks like its not worth it then ... 'm constructing shaders atm.
This may take a bit - do folks want to get a preview of the other ships, unshaded, in the game?

I would be excited to see a preview.

I am really liking the direction you took with your latest effort, as your older designs didn't appeal to me. (Say what you will about ships, and frills, and fancy graphics, but the original ship set is so darned... iconic. I LOVE the original shapes and designs.)

Simon, if you've decided to go with the idea to just put a glow map in the alpha channel of the diffuse texture you won't need to write any shaders, you can do it all with materials - with the added benefit of the glows also working on computers that's can't usually run the full shaders mode, just put something like this in your shipdata.plist for each ship, i've put comments on each line (the '//' then all the text afterwards) you can safely delete these from the code

Thats cool Griff - but I was going to have the color determined by the rgb part ... so I can have different color glowing bits .... the cabins are all yellow for eg while the engines are cyan and I can add little red and green lights ... and suchlike. But this gives me pause for thought.

Anyway - I've been doing paid work - I'll see if I can get at least a preview oxp out over the weekend.

At last - preview OXP available:
http://www.box.net/shared/1zunz8ixoe
... this is all the ships that are not vipers. I included an Iguana - I know one of the guns is out of place and the stats are wrong. Actually it flies pretty good on those stats.

What-else I've been doing: rworked navy ships


There are three ships here: the big one is, of course, a behemoth - dock in the rear... the smallest is based on the anaconda but I think it is a little convoluted to call a navy anaconda and the other one, dubbed destroyer, is more of a frigate so maybe the anaconda thing should be a destroyer?

Nice to see some new work Simon. I'm a fan of the Neolite ships, but not much the ones that replace the original ship set ( I'm too am somewhat attached to the original shapes), but the companions and wolfies which sit alongside Griff's set of the original ships quite nicely and between them make up my current 'core set'.

Liking the reworked navy ships - the basic textures found in the current OXP's for Galactic Navy and Behemoth have always jarred as they look out of place when everything else is so beautiful.

Ace work Simon! Beautiful textures and I love all the pipes and fiddly bits on the anaconda! You can never have too much pipework & greeblies i say!

Wow, loving the navy stuff Simon Your style is definately shining there, and I'm really chuffed to see the wings logo too! Maybe I could add something to the center of it for the navy..?
Also, I had a look but presume either the Behemoth isn't in there yet or it's texture is tiled, but was going to have a go at adding detail with a normal-map for it. Am I being blind?

Thanks folks ...
Griff: hmmm... I didn't put any fiddly stuff in the anaconda... or did you mean the navy version? That one is related to the core anaconda like the griff-boa and griff-krait are to their respectives. There is a serious poly count in there: at least for Oolite (I see that less than 10000 polys is usually consider "low" in modelling forums.)

I have heard people about the neolite core set and learned a lot about how the modelling works. Considering griff is just plowing ahead with his uber-shaded ships I figured I'd take pity on those who would like to have the griff set but their machines won't run the shaders. BTW:
~$ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Redwood [Radeon HD 5600 Series]
... neither of these GPUs can handle the shaders -- at least under X. The xserver crashes and resets when one of your ships tries to load. I'd have thought the R5600 would have done the trick... OTOH: the X system is getting altered for my particular system (hybrid gpu laptop) so it may get better in a few months. Gripping hand: this machine runs the neolite shaders with either gpu: it's just your shipset that messes it up. Perhaps I can talk some random windows user (stares hard at Griff) into setting up a dual-boot to test these things in linux on the same HW?

The navy designs are not in the preview ... I thought about it but they'd have non-functioning turrets and no script: I'd have to make them police craft ... can you imagine one of those showing up at a firefight. Note: the "destroyer" fits into a station dock - just. So get caught launching with narcotics and one of those issues the challenge? .... hmmm: may be worth it

There are some untextured tharg-things on my HDD too ... just for balance. I've used the wing-logo thing sans circles for military-type ships and escorts ... though my old skull and crossed-swords sees some light on the sidewinder and moray - sort of military-surplussy craft. The stormbringer logo indicates piratical tendancies - but see the mamba skin: I used a skateboard logo on that. I have a collection of various animal skulls so other races can be intimidated too. The idea is that a fully shaded version will have decals.

Some of those ships could use a rustified texture...

I've just about decided to go with the materials-glow effect for the minimal version ... I can still use shaders to give extra tints later, so there may be yellow windows glowing cyan...


there are three behemoths... a front-loader and one where you can enter from either end. Some of the details are still unstable like some of the pre1 ships have changed since I did the thumbed shots earlier (mamba got sleeker and an extra engine for eg.) I've all but decided that the "navy anaconda" will turn into a light destroyer and the destroyer will turn into a frigate.

Nice that some people want to do some normalmaps for the ships - feel free: if your effort get acclaim I'll use it. If anyone wants to try writing the shader that would be good too.

Griff wrote:

Simon, if you've decided to go with the idea to just put a glow map in the alpha channel of the diffuse texture you won't need to write any shaders, you can do it all with materials - with the added benefit of the glows also working on computers that's can't usually run the full shaders mode, just put something like this in your shipdata.plist for each ship, i've put comments on each line (the '//' then all the text afterwards) you can safely delete these from the code

Code: Select all

materials = 
	{ 
		"your_ships_diffusetexture.png" = // make sure this matches what's in your .dat file 
		{ 
			diffuse_map = "your_ships_diffusetexture.png"; // this is where you can specify an alternate diffuse texture, if you're not doing that you can delete this line.
			specular_color = ( 0.2, 0.2, 0.2 );  // edit this to taste
			shininess = 5; // edit this to taste
			emission_map = { name = "your_ships_diffusetexture.png"; extract_channel = "a"; }; //extract the Alpha channel from your diffuse texture for use as an emission (glow) map
			emission_modulate_color = (0.9926, 0.9686, 0.7325); // edit this to taste, it's the glow colour - this example is a sort of milky off-white colour
		}; 
	};

Hmmmm ... Is there a " hw to use materials" someplace? For instance: can I use the rgb channels to set the glow color? I'm guessing "not". I'll have to pick a color that will look "right" in several contexts ... windows, hull lights, and exhaust. Of course I can vary the intensity with the glow map.

yeah, just paint out your glow map using all the light colours you want to see on a black background and in the materials do: Have a look at the shady blackmonks oxp, this is how the station glow map is being done (see griff_blackmonks_station_hull_glow.png for the actual glow map)

Simon B wrote:

Hmmmm ... Is there a " hw to use materials" someplace?

[wiki]Materials in Oolite[/wiki]

It hasn’t been revised for 1.75, but I think it’s still accurate.

That was quick! The Ahruman is everywhere. The Ahruman sees all. We give thanks for the bounty of the Ahruman. <reads> Hmmmm ... looks like everything I've been doing with custom shaders could have been done in the default. I wonder why I didn't do that earlier <checks> oh yeah. I'll have another go.

@griff: so for the effect I'm thinking of, I'd need to multiply the color channels of the diffuse-map with it's alpha channel to get an emission map (so windows glow yellow and engines glow blue etc)? I'll have to watch how these things blend. Actually I'm kinda liking the idea of all pearly lights on these ships... its growing on me.

Simon, all my 'ship' OXPs use an emission_map (glow map) for the lighting effects. Have a look at Boa Clipper, Contractor or YellOo Cabs for some examples. Hope they help