Oolite Bulletins

What HUD is it?

Don't you recognise the trek hud?(modified of course).

Yes, its a slightly modified trekhud

On patrol in Tezabi system, I encountered this oddity:



GalCop will not allow me to give any further details at this time.

Odd, and yet strangely... hypnotically beautiful <blinks slowly>

Those screen shots are from an OXP I am working on featuring a cobra mark III getting in to formation with the player.

The things you come across as a test pilot... space is getting crowded:

Hmm, Looks like a Saturn with out rings and a Jupıter.

speaking of rings...

can oolite handle ringed planets? and if so, are there any or did i miss them all?

Wyvern wrote:

speaking of rings...

can oolite handle ringed planets? and if so, are there any or did i miss them all?

Theoretically you could have a giant ring model spawn around a planet, haven't seen it done though. Plus without transparency it would look weird, and even if it was not a solid ring but a ring made of gas, you would still be able to crash into it.

ADCK wrote:

Wyvern wrote:

speaking of rings...

can oolite handle ringed planets? and if so, are there any or did i miss them all?

Theoretically you could have a giant ring model spawn around a planet, haven't seen it done though. Plus without transparency it would look weird, and even if it was not a solid ring but a ring made of gas, you would still be able to crash into it.

Do you think a truly realistic planet ring made of icesteroids and numbering in the many thousands could be done without crashing the game due to slowdown? No fancy stuff here just basic models with very small textures and NO shaders. I would like to see that.

CommonSenseOTB wrote:

ADCK wrote:

Theoretically you could have a giant ring model spawn around a planet, haven't seen it done though. Plus without transparency it would look weird, and even if it was not a solid ring but a ring made of gas, you would still be able to crash into it.

Do you think a truly realistic planet ring made of icesteroids and numbering in the many thousands could be done without crashing the game due to slowdown? No fancy stuff here just basic models with very small textures and NO shaders. I would like to see that.

I would like to see that too, but the entity "limit" is about 150 on my laptop. Once it approaches about 150 entities in game, the frame rate plummets to nothing.

But what about a solid U-shaped object, say 7/8ths of a ring, textured black with glittery, twinkly asteroids painted on, and about 30-50 individual asteroids in the gap, with some clever scripting to always keep the gap closest to the player?

CommonSenseOTB wrote:

ADCK wrote:

Wyvern wrote:

speaking of rings...

can oolite handle ringed planets? and if so, are there any or did i miss them all?

Theoretically you could have a giant ring model spawn around a planet, haven't seen it done though. Plus without transparency it would look weird, and even if it was not a solid ring but a ring made of gas, you would still be able to crash into it.

Do you think a truly realistic planet ring made of icesteroids and numbering in the many thousands could be done without crashing the game due to slowdown? No fancy stuff here just basic models with very small textures and NO shaders. I would like to see that.

Yeah, could do that, if you made it all one model it would be a lot easier to manage instead of having to plot the positions of 1000's of objects you'd only have to plot one (a single model made of many smaller models would work)

But you'd only be able to see the rocks close up, so you'd be adding 100's of 1000's of polygons when the most you'd see would be a small percentage of it at one time, and only when close enough to actually make out the rocks. Would be much easier to just make a disc shaped model and put a ring texture on it.

ADCK wrote:

CommonSenseOTB wrote:

ADCK wrote:

Theoretically you could have a giant ring model spawn around a planet, haven't seen it done though. Plus without transparency it would look weird, and even if it was not a solid ring but a ring made of gas, you would still be able to crash into it.

Do you think a truly realistic planet ring made of icesteroids and numbering in the many thousands could be done without crashing the game due to slowdown? No fancy stuff here just basic models with very small textures and NO shaders. I would like to see that.

Yeah, could do that, if you made it all one model it would be a lot easier to manage instead of having to plot the positions of 1000's of objects you'd only have to plot one (a single model made of many smaller models would work)

But you'd only be able to see the rocks close up, so you'd be adding 100's of 1000's of polygons when the most you'd see would be a small percentage of it at one time, and only when close enough to actually make out the rocks. Would be much easier to just make a disc shaped model and put a ring texture on it.

The problem with one huge object is the drawing distance. Objects that are further away than a certain threshold distance from the player are not drawn at all by Oolite. For small objects you don't notice that. But for big object it means that instead of getting smaller and smaller in your rear view as you get farther away from them, at a certain point they suddenly disappear. And vice versa, as you're closing in on it, the object suddenly appears in your view.

This comes already into effect in some systems where the witchpoint is placed at its outer limit coordinates. If there happens to be a big main station, like a Torus station, you'll see it popping into existence. One moment there is nothing to see, the very next moment there is a station of considerable size in your field of view. If you turn around and go back a little, it suddenly becomes invisible. It looks a little silly. The same would apply to a huge ring-shaped object around the planet. It would dominate your view below the threshold distance, and completely disappear above it.

And the same would of course apply to a ring made of a gazillion of small objects: above the threshold distance all of them would be invisible. For the player the ring would cease to exist with distance. It's not really satisfactory.