Oolite Bulletins

Let's catch up a little bit with what has happened lately in Oolite. In the last few months, we' ve had:

• Implementation of the [-]-help command line option, which brings up info about the available command line switches.
  
• OXZs in the in-game manager can be now filtered by category. Use c: as the filter.
  
• Mouse sensitivity is now user configurable. Use the "mouse-flight-sensitivity" key in the user defaults file, range is 0.005 to 1.0. Default is 0.95.
• For the Windows port, we now have color gamut expansion in HDR for more vivid and saturated colors when necessary.
• For the Windows port, we now have a new HDR screenshot format which allows us to save screenies in expanded colorspaces like DCI-P3 and BT2020. (Sorry no example available for the last two because you would need an HDR display to be able to view it properly).
• New wormhole effect (best viewed animated in-game):
  
• New ECM effect (does not look great in a static image, best viewed animated in-game):
  
  This is the effect you see whenever an ECM blast is triggered, be it originating from the player or from an NPC. If you don't want it, it can be disabled by setting the key "ecm-visual-fx" to NO in the user defaults file.

All this and more available in the latest pre-release 10e222e.

Nice
Could be possible to filter the OXPs also by part of name? Like "miss" for all missiles and missjumps and promisses?
Or it is already there and I just missed it somehow?

gilhad wrote: ↑Fri Nov 29, 2024 5:31 am

Nice
Could be possible to filter the OXPs also by part of name? Like "miss" for all missiles and missjumps and promisses?
Or it is already there and I just missed it somehow?

It's already there as part of the keyword filter. This filter works on all words of an OXZ including the description text though. It's not restricted to the name only. Hopefully it's close enough to what you are looking for.

another_commander wrote: ↑Fri Nov 29, 2024 6:17 am

gilhad wrote: ↑Fri Nov 29, 2024 5:31 am

Nice
Could be possible to filter the OXPs also by part of name? Like "miss" for all missiles and missjumps and promisses?
Or it is already there and I just missed it somehow?

It's already there as part of the keyword filter. This filter works on all words of an OXZ including the description text though. It's not restricted to the name only. Hopefully it's close enough to what you are looking for.

Thank you very much
It did not come on my mind, that keyword could be used for this

an old favo(u)rite of mine...




Revisited 17 and a new 18...

Just so that this gets documented somewhere...

In the latest 1.91 pre-release a specular anti aliasing filter was introduced. Its purpose is to reduce specular shimmering that may occur with high frequency normal maps or when the resolution of the specular maps is not large enough to correspond to the desired detail. Anyway, in Oolite the main example is the Cobra Mk1 texture, which represents an extreme case of shimmering.

The Tokuyoshi-Kaplanyan specular anti aliasing filter, while not completely solving the problem - I believe that would require combining it with higher res specular or normal maps - it certainly makes things much, much better. In the example below, we have two animated gifs (the issue is visible mainly when animated). The first is what we had until now, the second is with the T-K filter applied. You will see that the Mk1 is visibly less shimmery in the second gif.

Since the performance hit of this filter is almost negligible, having it around is considered a Good Thing (TM).

Without specular anti aliasing:


With specular anti aliasing:


Remember that this is an extreme case of the effect. Less extreme aliasing will be obviously smoothed out a lot better,

another_commander wrote: ↑Mon Aug 11, 2025 9:22 am

Since the performance hit of this filter is almost negligible, having it around is considered a Good Thing (TM).

Any theoretical side-effects?

None that I'm aware of.

Cool

A new feature is up. You can now select the tone mapper used by the game to render its scenes both in SDR and HDR and you can select it by script. This feature is available from 1.91 revision f90d84a onwards.

The new porperty is oolite.[sh]drToneMapper, it is read/write, the input type is string and if you want to change it you have the following options for each case:
SDR:

• "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_ACES", our current default
• "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_AgX", punchy and colorful
• "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_HEJLDAWSON", the Hejl/Burgess-Dawson filim tone mapper
• "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_UC2", the tone mapper used for the game Uncharted 2
• "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_UCHIMURA", a great option, I think it will be my default for a while. This is the tone mapper used in the game Gran Turismo
• "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_REINHARD", the classic Reinhard tone mapper, very simple and fast but rather dull compared to the rest
• "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_NONE", mainly for testing, this is the raw scene as it comes from the render frame buffer

HDR:

• "OOHDR_TONEMAPPER_ACES_APPROX, our current default, which is the Narkowicz ACES apporximation for HDR
• "OOHDR_TONEMAPPER_DICE", a luminance-based option, bright and vivid
• "OOHDR_TONEMAPPER_REINHARD", the standard Reinhard gig adapted to HDR

You can query the current active tone mapper by just calling oolite.[sh]drToneMapper in your script or from the debug console. When running in HDR, querying the SDR tone mapper will return "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_UNDEFINED", while trying to query the HDR tone mapper when the game runs in SDR mode will yield "OOHDR_TONEMAPPER_UNDEFINED". Trying to set the wrong tone mapper type for the game mode you are running will only print a warning in the log and do nothing.

If you want to set a new default (e.g. Reinhard) you can do so by editing your .GNUstepDefaults and adding the line:
"sdr-tone-mapper" = OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_REINHARD;
for SDR or
"hdr-tone-mapper" = OOHDR_TONEMAPPER_REINHARD
for HDR. Note that the quotation marks for the tone mapper values are not necessary.

If you try to set a tone mapper using an invalid string, ACES will be automatically selected both for SDR and HDR.

Here is a random scene rendered with the various SDR tone mappers which were changed on the fly for taking these shots, so that you can get an idea of what we are talking about.
ACES - use oolite.sdrToneMapper = "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_ACES"


AgX - use oolite.sdrToneMapper = "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_AgX"


Hejl/Burgess-Dawson - use oolite.sdrToneMapper = "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_HEJLDAWSON"


Uncharted 2 - use oolite.sdrToneMapper = "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_UC2"


Uchimura - use oolite.sdrToneMapper = "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_UCHIMURA"


Reinhard - use oolite.sdrToneMapper = "OOSDR_TONEMAPPER_REINHARD"