Oolite Bulletins

Nice long docking tunnel on those Griff Rock Hermit's. This ones actually a Pirate Cove and I'm sneaking in behind a fugitive asp.



He's taking his time.



Simple shaders.

Beautiful.

Stunning, considering Simple Shaders

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Stunning, considering Simple Shaders

Quick question... what's the difference between Simple and Full shaders? I've only used shaders a tiny bit (when running KDM, they don't seem to work in GDM).

Just more eyecandy with full shaders.

In those above screenshots the docking tunnel would have had animated running lights, and possible a red glow if the Pirate Cove had detected me in the vicinity, while the asp's engine would have had a pretty glow and the asp's hull would have had a nice colour sheen to it.

As Capt. Murphy says in the shaders in my shipset, switching on simple shaders removes:
Engine & Lasergun heat glows
Decals
Random paint colours
Hull temperature heat glows
Animated glowmaps

you do get specular mapping, simple glowmaps and normalmapping (although i'd have switched off normalmapping in simple shader mode if i had enough brains to work out how to do it!)
Simple mode will work differently in other OXPs shaders, it works by the shader author placing certain shader effects between tags in the code that are prevented from running if the shader detects that the simple shader mode flag is on or off
eg, here's abit of code that adds a lasergun glow effect

//'s at the start of a line let you add comments, notice the #ifndef OO_REDUCED_COMPLEXITY and #endif and how they bookend that bit of code? It means that those particular few lines will only run the if the OO_REDUCED_COMPLEXITY
flag is not true ( ie simple shader mode is not switched on)

I followed an Anaconda through its wormhole, and tracked it all the way from the witchpoint to the sun (man, are they slow). It seemed to take the heat better than me, as I had to back-off a couple of times to cool down, then dive in again. Eventually, it blew and left just one red-hot cargo pod which I scooped... but it must have dematerialised in the scoop as it never appeared in my manifest.



This was using Wildeblood's Sensible Sun OXP... hence the very distant main planet.

El Viejo wrote:

I followed an Anaconda through its wormhole, and tracked it all the way from the witchpoint to the sun (man, are they slow).....This was using Wildeblood's Sensible Sun OXP... hence the very distant main planet.

That is really daring: following an anaconda over that prolonged distance.

That blowing up is a bug of the anaconda pilot: He/she should not start sunskumming without enough heat insulation Since 1.75 (or was it already since 1.74?) do ships that start as sunskimmer get extra heat insulation on creation. (Even their escorts get extra insulation). But in your case you started with a normal trader that jumped out of the system. That one missed the insulation and than the pilot is doomed when starting sunskimming. Specially with a slow ship that stays quite long in the hot area of a sun.
The only foolproof way would be to give all ships that have a sunskimmer role a high heatinsulation in shipdata itself. But I never suspected that anybody would really follow such a ship to check if things went correct.

When following a ship that launched and went sunskimming, or that entered from witchspace after you, the heatinsulation should be enough to realy jump out from inside the suns corona.

Eric Walch wrote:

The only foolproof way would be to give all ships that have a sunskimmer role a high heatinsulation in shipdata itself.

Wouldn't it be logical that, if there is any chance at all that it will go sun skimming, it has heat insulation. My only conclusion to this would be: "sunskimmer role = has heat insulation" unless it breaks something else that is.
No pilot, not even NPC ones, would attempt sun skimming without.

Gimi wrote:

No pilot, not even NPC ones, would attempt sun skimming without.

An NPC in fact did just so, and that's the problem...
Maybe you meant that they shouldn't? In that case, re-read Eric's last post, he's on the dev team and fully agrees.

Cmdr. Maegil wrote:

Gimi wrote:

No pilot, not even NPC ones, would attempt sun skimming without.

An NPC in fact did just so, and that's the problem...
Maybe you meant that they shouldn't? In that case, re-read Eric's last post, he's on the dev team and fully agrees.

Sorry, I may have been unclear. I was trying to agree with, and reinforce Eric's view, and thus enticing him to make the relevant changes in the code, unless it breaks something else that is.

Gimi wrote:

I was trying to agree with, and reinforce Eric's view, and thus enticing him to make the relevant changes in the code, unless it breaks something else that is.

It is just such a rare event that I didn't really bother implementing it. To do it right, one would need a new AI command that checks if a ship could risk going to the sun. But, when I had that idea, we were already having a feature freeze. What I (with help of Kaks) now did was making sure only ships with a sunskimmer role started sunskimming. Before 1.75, any trader created at the witchspace entrypoint could decide to sunskim. (When following a ship through a wormhole, it is created in the old system and than the Ai decides what to do, but the AI has no access to checking heat insulation))

I actually played some time with this stuff, tested lots of ships and ended up with the following rule of thumbs: Ships (and their escorts) that start as sunskimmer on creation get their insulation corrected according this formula when the value in shipdata is lower.

Eric Walch wrote:

That blowing up is a bug of the anaconda pilot

If it's a bug, it shouldn't be affected by the feature freeze...