Oolite Bulletins

I don't think nested escorts are allowed (i.e. a ship acting as an escort can't in itself have escorts - I think it confuses the AI)

Ganelon wrote:

Now, some thoughts about the ship. Firstly, a Destroyer wouldn't likely be alone like that. Give it some escorts or a squadron she's backing up and it'd be tougher to take down. The plasma turrets off the topside are quite scathing, but it seems defenceless on the belly and almost defenceless on the tail. Maybe consider moving a couple of those turrets to her tummy and/or tail, just to discourage people from finding those safe places to pick her apart.

Nifty ship, though. Something about the lines reminded me a bit of "Space Battleship Yamato", though I'm guessing that it's more Star Wars inspired. What might be fun, if you ever make a bigger battleship, would be to have it escorted by two of your Destroyers, each with an escort of a few ships and have them be attacking the station. That'd be a heck of a firefight to fly out into.

Well, it has a trader AI.

Therefore I think it's best to assume that the ship isn't a destroyer or warship at all. Instead some very rich and eccentric trader guy decided to have a unique ship modeled after a blueprint taken from a 1000 year old fiction. How much sense this premise makes is for each player to decide. I don't think it makes a lot, therefore I don't find it sensible to have ship designs from 20th century fictional universes in the 32nd century Ooniverse at all.

The idea that Commander Jameson would encounter a "real" Star Destroyer is—forgive me for being blunt—ridiculous. For starters a "real" Star Destroyer would come from a different Galaxy, and from a very distant past.

And as for escorts having escorts: Nope, not possible. Either a ship has escorts or it is an escort.

Ganelon wrote:

Now, some thoughts about the ship. Firstly, a Destroyer wouldn't likely be alone like that. Give it some escorts or a squadron she's backing up and it'd be tougher to take down. The plasma turrets off the topside are quite scathing, but it seems defenceless on the belly and almost defenceless on the tail. Maybe consider moving a couple of those turrets to her tummy and/or tail, just to discourage people from finding those safe places to pick her apart.

Nifty ship, though. Something about the lines reminded me a bit of "Space Battleship Yamato", though I'm guessing that it's more Star Wars inspired. What might be fun, if you ever make a bigger battleship, would be to have it escorted by two of your Destroyers, each with an escort of a few ships and have them be attacking the station. That'd be a heck of a firefight to fly out into.

I agree with all that, however, as I pointed out this was just a time-waster whilst waiting for some inspiration for the Chupacabra, I will however probably re-make it with lighter textures and make a larger one similar to Lord Vader's destroyer from the movies... Watch this space

EDIT I have found the model I want... unfortunately it has about 250,000 polygons, and I somehow think oolite cannot handle that, now to spend ages getting it below 2,000.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I don't think nested escorts are allowed (i.e. a ship acting as an escort can't in itself have escorts - I think it confuses the AI)

I think by using system.addGroup(....) you can achieve that.

Okti wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I don't think nested escorts are allowed (i.e. a ship acting as an escort can't in itself have escorts - I think it confuses the AI)

I think by using system.addGroup(....) you can achieve that.

Depends on what you mean by 'that'. addGroup() adds ships that will belong to the same ship group. While an escort group is a special case of a ship group, ships added via addGroup() do not form an escort group, but a simple ship group. They don't escort each other.

So, if by 'that' you mean creating escorts, the answer is already a clear 'no'. If you mean creating escorts that themselves have escorts, the answer is an even clearer 'no'.

Think about it from an AI perspective: a mother (= the ship that is being escorted) needs a mother AI, (= an AI that contains commands to interact with its escorts), for instance route1traderAI. An escort (= the ship that escorts) needs an escort AI (= an AI that contains commands to interact with its mother), so it needs escortAI. So, what about the 'middle ship'? The one that escorts another ship, and is at the same time escorted by its own escorts? Which AI would it have? If it had a mother AI it would be incapable of interacting with its own mother, thus it would not be an escort. If it had escortAI it would be incapable of interacting with its own escorts, this it would not have escorts. A ship can't have two different AIs at the same time. And that's the reason why you can't have nested escorts.

How big is the biggest possible escort group?

because it is possible to have mixed escorts and it could look like they are escort-escorts even if the game doesn't consider that they are...

Staer9 wrote:

How big is the biggest possible escort group?

because it is possible to have mixed escorts and it could look like they are escort-escorts even if the game doesn't consider that they are...

According to Wiki Max is 16.

[According to Wiki Max is 16.

One problem with big escort groups is that the default spacing between ships is derived from the size of the mothership. With a big mother, the outer escorts wont bee seen on scanner. This was for example the case with the battle cruiser in IxianShips.oxp. Since 1.75 we can define custom escort positions. I added those custom positions to the current version of IxianShips.oxp so that they are now nicely clustered around the mother. You might want to look there.

Thanks Eric, I'll check it out, is there a way of assigning specific escort ships to specific possitions?

anyway, here is the Super Star Destroyer so far...



both the control tower and the underside need to be textured, but it shouldn't take very long, when finished it will be 6km long and 2-3 km wide

Almost forgot, still working on an update to Bulk Haulers, so far got the models for the Lifter (7 versions), IP Shuttle, Variation of the Lynx Bulk Carrier, Imperial Cruiser/Trader, Super Bulk Hauler MkII done, and am about 40% done on the Long Range Cruiser MkII (Some of these have been shown here and in other threads)

But earlier today I decided to take a break from the LRC MkII and continuing with the theme of Frontier ships, have made the models for the Panther Clipper and Puma Clipper.

Note: Both these ships are about the same size of a Behemoth.

Panther Clipper:

Click for full resolution.


Puma Clipper Front:

Click for full resolution.


Puma Clipper Back:

Click for full resolution.

There does seem to be a systematic slide towards ever larger ships - while they're nice to look at from a cinematic point-of-view I do wonder where we're going with this - given that Oolite has always been focussed on small to medium sized ships that are fixated on fighting and/or trading with a game engine designed around that concept...

People might remember that ship as the one that hit the Death-Star in Return of the Jedi... maybe someone will model a dockable Death Star the size of a small moon.

Ganelon wrote:

The plasma turrets off the topside are quite scathing, but it seems defenceless on the belly and almost defenceless on the tail. Maybe consider moving a couple of those turrets to her tummy and/or tail, just to discourage people from finding those safe places to pick her apart.

At first I found that part of your comment quite strange, as it is meant to have 6 turrets underneath that can also defend it from behind... so I looked into that a little and found out that I had made an error in the shipdata.plist... Instead of flipping the Y axis co-ordinates I had flipped the X-co-ordinates... thus causing there to be twice as many turrets on one side and none on the other. Ganelon, try downloading this version and it should be quite a bit harder to kill from underneath, if not say why and I will have to fix it.

Version 1.3 can be downloaded here

DaddyHoggy wrote:

There does seem to be a systematic slide towards ever larger ships - while they're nice to look at from a cinematic point-of-view I do wonder where we're going with this - given that Oolite has always been focussed on small to medium sized ships that are fixated on fighting and/or trading with a game engine designed around that concept...

I guess it all boils down to the standard answer: don't install it if you don't like it.

But yes, for the people who do install OXPs that add very big ships Oolite will clearly develop away from what Elite was. That's not necessarily bad, although I too am a little wary of the influence this development will have on Oolite itself. One day we may no longer recognize it anymore as a re-interpretation of Elite, and personally I'm not looking forward to that day.

Staer9, it's very interesting to see a creature painted as the texture of a ship. A darker beak with (fangs maybe?) would add to the chupacabra's legendary status as a stalking loner predator that sucks the blood out of its prey. Maybe even a bit of blood dripping off.
Your Star Destroyers make me like the idea of data driven galaxies where one is under Imperial Threat. In their own galaxy the quest would be to survive the empire to return to your own or be a bounty hunter or something. Nicely done. You have little of the dark side about you.

ADCK you have a good start on some nice designs that add continuity to the elite/oolite franchise. The panther and puma are almost purrrrrfect. Perhaps matching cat fur textures and also cougars/cats with escort AI as escorts for these 2 kittens would be cool.