Oolite Bulletins

be worthwhile if the missiles had different attributes, ie if we can define high explosive missiles or hardhead/high speed ones etc.

I don't want to water down everybody's wine, but remember that this is only about one single variant of a Cobra III, NPC only, and while in combat with it you usually won't even be close enough to actually see the missiles. Therefore I wonder how much detail is actually worthwhile to put into this. It will have relatively little impact on game play.

Commander McLane wrote:

I don't want to water down everybody's wine, but remember that this is only about one single variant of a Cobra III, NPC only, and while in combat with it you usually won't even be close enough to actually see the missiles. Therefore I wonder how much detail is actually worthwhile to put into this. It will have relatively little impact on game play.

I know and agree. My thoughts were more of Oolite 2.0 where things like this may (or may not) be more visible, and also available on other ships as well. For example, a picture of a rotating missile when the item is selected on the F3 screen would be nice. To make it worth while, I would suggest making the markings quite clear such as one or two colour ribbons around the front part of the missile, quite wide. Whether that will take away from the overall look of the missile is something for the artist to decide. Ultimately, and if at all possible, it could be a decal that OXP makers could modify to give their missile a unique look if they choose to use the built in models in Oolite 2.0. However, way to early to discuss this now.

As a final point, it does contribute a little bit to the overall immersion into the game. Whether it is cost effective or not would be for Griff to decide.

Commander McLane wrote:

I don't want to water down everybody's wine, but remember that this is only about one single variant of a Cobra III, NPC only, and while in combat with it you usually won't even be close enough to actually see the missiles. Therefore I wonder how much detail is actually worthwhile to put into this. It will have relatively little impact on game play.

YAH Ads (rather than the Constores themselves) - have pretty much zero impact on game play (unless you really do *impact* on one at the WP ) but doesn't stop huge amounts of effort going into producing them...

Gimi wrote:

As a final point, it does contribute a little bit to the overall immersion into the game.

It definitely does that... from close range, I watched one launch all four missiles in quick succession in a furball... beautiful.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

YAH Ads (rather than the Constores themselves) - have pretty much zero impact on game play (unless you really do *impact* on one at the WP ) but doesn't stop huge amounts of effort going into producing them...

Well, their impact is to be there and visible whenever the player jumps into a system or launches from a main station.

The impact of tiny markings on small missiles attached to the not-really-huge belly of one single ship type among dozens or hundreds would be to be there, but still be practically invisible.

I agree on the immersion aspect, and hope that the Cobra III-with-external-missiles is only a prototype of things to come (we would need visible missiles on all ships, and for some the geometry may be much harder to master than for a Cobbie; it's difficult to find a roughly horizontal part on the belly of a Boa or Anaconda). However, visible effects can only lead to more immersion if the player will actually, y'know, see them. YAH ads are hard to overlook. With external missiles and tiny markings on them I'm not so sure.

True... but if you get into lots of close-quarters dogfights and furballs, you get to see all sorts of detail, as in Ganelon's Thargoid warship pics above.

Commander McLane wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

YAH Ads (rather than the Constores themselves) - have pretty much zero impact on game play (unless you really do *impact* on one at the WP ) but doesn't stop huge amounts of effort going into producing them...

Well, their impact is to be there and visible whenever the player jumps into a system or launches from a main station.

The impact of tiny markings on small missiles attached to the not-really-huge belly of one single ship type among dozens or hundreds would be to be there, but still be practically invisible.

I agree on the immersion aspect, and hope that the Cobra III-with-external-missiles is only a prototype of things to come (we would need visible missiles on all ships, and for some the geometry may be much harder to master than for a Cobbie; it's difficult to find a roughly horizontal part on the belly of a Boa or Anaconda). However, visible effects can only lead to more immersion if the player will actually, y'know, see them. YAH ads are hard to overlook. With external missiles and tiny markings on them I'm not so sure.

I should also point out that the missiles on this ship are huge compared to the standard trunk models. We did try initially to use those, but on my test rig (a standard cobbie using initially standard missiles) they were almost too small to see until you were almost kissing the cobbie's underbelly. From memory the models are about 10-15x larger here than on a standard missile. Oolite's scaling fun and rubber-rulers strikes again

Hence on the prototype I passed to Griff the ship used my Trident missile (from Aquatics) and he subsequently made his new missile model and skin, which is the one you see in the OXP.

And the ideas floated above are nice in theory, but to make them work in practice would need either some major changes to how sub-ents are handled (so we could select and add new sub-ents to existing ship models by script) or at least some very fancy shader work and missile model standardisation, which is certainly beyond me.

The scripting works for a very specific (and NPC) test case where the missiles available are entirely under script control (they are set up by the script on ship spawning) - it wouldn't work in the current guise for player ships or even NPCs which have a full pick of available missiles...

Well, they look awfully good in scale on that Cobra, though. Maybe it's a case of the default size being a bit too small? Considering the damage a missile can do, maybe they *should* be a bit more visible.

See if you can work out how this came about!

Some kind of q-bomb/shader malfunction?

I find especially the one behind the planet puzzling.

Looks like an accident in a flasher factory. :-)

Ahruman wrote:

Looks like an accident in a flasher factory.

A rather explosive accident at that.

I thought the sun went nova when I first saw it but waited for those better qualified to answer first

CaptSolo wrote:

I thought the sun went nova when I first saw it but waited for those better qualified to answer first

In the first screenshot the planet and moon are lit from the viewer's side, which indicates that the sun is actually located somewhere behind the viewpoint. Therefore I'd say it can't be a nova.

There were at some point certain interferences with the way q-mine explosions were drawn, and I seem to remember that even a pink hue could be the result. However, that particular problem was addressed and eliminated many Oolite-versions ago.

I am not sure, by the way, that we're seeing a progression of the same incident here. The relative positions of viewpoint, planet, station and explosion don't seem to progress logically from picture to picture (note that in the second picture the explosion is behind the quite distant planet, while in the last picture it's visible on the scanner and must therefore be quite close). We could for instance be seeing four distinct examples of something very big blowing up in a cascading effect. In that case the big explosion effect would interfere with the relatively small blue-sphere effect. It's just a wild guess, though.

Another, completely unrelated idea: is it a revived Orbs.oxp?