Oolite Bulletins

Back to this thread - anyone want to change my direction on the fdl say so now. I was aiming for a scarab speedboat and a lambourghini, done in the previous gecko style.

I know I've got to change the hull metal pattern.

I like your Fer-De-Lance Simon, I really do. I know Griff's ships are not supposed to overwrite the neo-lite vessels, but since installing the full Griff pack, the neolite Fer-De-Lance has disappeared from the shops.

In my mind (which is an unusual place), the neolite Fer-De-Lance is the new ship from that company, the successor to the classic vessel (re-skinned by Griff) and that accounts for the different look and higher top speed. The classic Fer-De-Lance is like a classic car now, still pricey because of its looks and collectability. It is the Lambourghini Countach to the neolite Fer-De-Lance Lambourghini Murciélago.

There is room for both in my sky.

@ Sendraks
You can get the Neoolite & the classic fer-de-lance ship back into the shops by either deleting the shipyard-overrides.plist from the griff oxp, or editing it and just taking out the bit where it sets the chance of a ferdelance player ship appearing in the shipyard to 0
eg remove these lines

So that'll put all the fer-de-lances back in? I'd be happy to ahve just your's and Simons.

Next stage on the fdl - I am close to having something which I can send to griff for final tweaking.



Some of the colors are not right - I'll explain:

I'm trying to illustrate how I am thinking about panel layout.

The black wedges in the sides are supposed to be inset in the nmap a la lambourgini - I'd expect to have some sort of dull metal in there in the finished model.

The d.grey blocks over the top are to be raised in the nmap, and shiny with a colored reflection thingy - possibly use the same texture as the light parts of the engine nozzle.

The long grill along the top and the short ones (with flames) at the sides are to be recessed, but the fine detail I do not intend to nmap - that works better just using a false 3D effect in the diffuse map and letting the dark bits (behind the grill right?) go matt.

The black circle on the spine to be inset.

The brown-ish star-circles on the bottom to be inset - dish-style. The center of them sticks out though.

The speaker-grill alosn the bottom I have a normalmap for - do not know if I should use it or just set the background matt. I'll try both ways.

Now Griff would use far more raised panels - actually, he draws recessed lines to delineate the panel edges and I just happen to think differently ;)

I intend more too, and detail within the panels. FDL should be showy without being overdone... so I'm testing the waters at each idea stage.
The pic is larger than I'd normally provide so folk can print it and draw over it with modest artistic skill.

Right now I am loading trunk. Hmmm: ... something to investigate :/

The trunk branch gets further: ... grrrrr! Now to find out what I missed.

@Griff - speak up when I am at the stage you want to take over. I can provide psd files, but photoshop does not seem to have a "grain merge" mode which means that I can get some effects with GIMP that won't translate.

@Everyone - constructive critique please. The idea is that it should look like a griff ship and not merely "good". You like what I'm doing, say why please - what do your like about it? Same if there is a niggle. Crit along the lines of: it is just not griff because... will get fast action.

@Everyone - constructive critique please. The idea is that it should look like a griff ship and not merely "good". You like what I'm doing, say why please - what do your like about it? Same if there is a niggle. Crit along the lines of: it is just not griff because... will get fast action.

OK, I do like - a lot - but it's not a Griff ship because the panels are too neat (but this may be because you haven't done any normal mapping - if this is the case then pretty much all of this is null and void) - but Griff's ships always seem to have a hit of "industry" about them - hints of subsurface pipes and panels and "stuff" that are barely accommodated by the hull.

Does that make sense?

Note - I've just read the rest of your words more carefully and you clealry state you have yet to nmap sorry - but it may be something to keep in mind when you do nmap.

Nice work simon! I'll use the griff_normalmapped_cobraIII shader on it as a starting point, i'm not sure how much time i can spend on this but if you can provide me with:
1. a diffuse map (y'know the usual colour 'skin' texture map)

2. a specular intensity map (greyscale - could just be a greyscale version of your diffuse map for a quick & dirty solution - lighter tone areas are more shiny than darker tone areas)

3. an illumination map for lighting up any cockpit windows, spotlights on the hull etc (a greyscale image, white = bright)
4. either a) a normal map or b) a greyscale heightmap which i will convert to a normal map with the nvidia plugin

5. an effects maps for the engine glow and up to 2 'paintmaps' (gets recolured and mixed into the final colour texture - allows you to re-paint your ship, randomly or via settings in the shipdata.plist)
rules for this effects maps are:
Red channel = orange heated glowing metal around the exhaust
Blue Channel = Blue/Cyan glow from the exhaust plume
Green Channel = Paintmap mask 1 - this is optional
Alpha Chanel = Paintmap mask 2 - this is optional
6. a decal map if you want random decals - this can be done differently to the decals on the cobraIII, you can provide full colour decals with the alpha channel acting as a mask in-order to cut them out neatly, provide a power of 2 number of decals, arranged in a horizontal row with a final image size as a power of 2 dimension, eg (64px high, 512px wide)

i'll cobble it all together into a shaderified oxp and help with the tweaking (a lot of tweaking can be done by editing numbers in the shader, launching oolite to see the ship, quit tweak some more etc)

Simon B wrote:

@Everyone - constructive critique please. The idea is that it should look like a griff ship and not merely "good". You like what I'm doing, say why please - what do your like about it? Same if there is a niggle. Crit along the lines of: it is just not griff because... will get fast action.

Yup, this looks damn good to me and meets the description of a lambourghini crossed with a scarab speedboat.

When this is released, this will give three Fer-De-Lance's in game that look great and I want to have co-existing peacefully together.

They probably have different names though and stats to differentiate them.

Griff's Classic Fer-De-Lance - as per the default Oolite stats, but probably make it a little tougher in the energy department.

Simon's Neolite Fer-De-Lance - a newer faster Fer-De-Lance (as per Simon's revised stats) - but perhaps drop the cargo capacity a little and the energy to make it a little more vulnerable.

Simon's New Fer-De-Lance - no idea yet.

While I was waiting, I reworked that mamba...

... its a bit snub-nosed, but the point at the end is so thin anyway, and this has fewer polys. Doubling the engines gives the meatier look but increases the poly count mightily. However, I dispair not as I have seen griffs moray.

Each engine has 203 polys - before tesselation.
The body has 134, again, before tesselation.
Total count is 584 incl the gun... after tesselating, this comes to 1072 triangles all up. Is this a worry: the mamba is one of the ships we see a fair bit of?

I also cobbled together some decals for people to use...

(click to enlarge)

The skull comes from the jolly-roger that seems to be everywhere - the one with the swords wot decorates the python blackdog. The circle with the arrows you'll recognise as the stormbringer symbol. More of a literary reference for the cerebral pirates. A cadeucus, because you cannot have too many. And the dove thing is arabic calligraphy for peace and love.


Don't worry those who replied, I have read them:

I hear you over the lack of fine detail - I have to keep visiting the screenshots to remind myself what I'm aiming for. However, my thought was to block in the bigger bits and let griff use his set of tools to do the fiddly stuff. Hopefully I can shave hours or even days off the production time.

Its tricky figuring what it is if you cannot see the normalmapped shot.

The neolite FDL was originally intended to be a fdl-ng, with a std spec with only one engine appearing in neolite core. But it was noticed that the higher spec version balances nicely and makes the ship worth having ... even with the strongly curtailed view. Nobody has complained that the specs are not standard so I kept it as is.

The griff-ferdelance is quite nice, especially the non-scuffed version. Perhaps griff can be pursuaded to keep it as a seperate oxp, a-la the original krait and boa. Boost its speed for a sports-craft?

This one - I've finally installed the trunk build via dpkg. Initial tests show I can run it with full shaders on my low-spec lappy (celeron-mobile, 1gig, i965 gfx, ubuntu 9.10) - which is actually better than 1.72 did.

Downloading griffs ships now, which should give me a nice set of examples.

The upshot is that I'll get the requested maps so some sort of think happens in this system then get them to griff for the final cutting.

I don't know if I should do those flames as decals or what?

Wow the mamba does look really sexy. I want one

pagroove wrote:

Wow the mamba does look really sexy. I want one

Which is fine as long as you're happy falling through somebody else's wormhole to get anywhere...

... I never figured out how to disable the witch-drive on a player ship - suspect you can't. So a player-mamba would have a bit of extra.

Thought - perhaps I should start a parallel thread to this one so I don't end up dominating this celebration of all things griffin?

Simon B wrote:

... I never figured out how to disable the witch-drive on a player ship - suspect you can't.

No, you can't. (EMMSTRAN!)

The only workaround I could think of is using a timer that constantly resets the player's fuel to 0. Alternatively you could set it to 0 on starting the countdown. Then the jump would fail. But still this wouldn't give the impression that no witchdrive is installed, because in that case you should get an error message by your ship's computer instead of a countdown.

Disabling the witchdrive:

An (admittedly non-elegant) workaround could be to set the hyperjump time to a few million seconds via <key>hyperspace_motor_spin_time</key>. That way, the ship you edited will effectively never be able to jump.

what about setting fuel to zero?