Oolite Bulletins

Eric, is it correct that the worm has nullAI?, i noticed it when i was copying all the settings for the worm from the Oolite shipdata.plist, i thought, 'hmm, that looks a bit odd', or is there some autoAI magic happening behind the scenes when a worm gets spawned in the game?

edit: thanks for the explanation Eric!

Griff wrote:

Eric, is it correct that the worm has nullAI?, i noticed it when i was copying all the settings for the worm from the Oolite shipdata.plist, i thought, 'hmm, that looks a bit odd', or is there some autoAI magic happening behind the scenes when a worm gets spawned in the game?

Never noticed it, but you are right. Role "shuttle" is on the auto_ai list but "oolite_worm" not. And shuttle is the only used role in game. The roles preceded with oolite- are never used. In game that nullAI is always overwritten by a desired role .

I allways thought of the worm, as some form of failed prototype robotic fighter, but to cut losses, they relaunched as a utility craft, while the Navy's adaptation of it, became a landing craft, and the name then stuck...

On the C 64 I was often engaged by these kind of crafts... two or tree hits from a pulse laser was all it took.. however.. i was wandering the purpose of these in deep space. Usually they bunched together with a group of other more formidable ships... (sometimes you could get really close)... in my imagination, i thought they where transporting slaves and goods between the ships.

Cool Maps Griff..

Frame wrote:

...... in my imagination, i thought they where transporting slaves and goods between the ships....

Looking at the design you must be right. For a landing capable ship you would expect something like wings on the ship. e.g. the cobra would do for landing. I would imagine a worm would fall like a brick. Or it would cost an tremendous amount of energy to land it safely.

Eric Walch wrote:

Or it would cost an tremendous amount of energy to land it safely.

Well, but many ships in the Ooniverse can obviously curve space like there is no tomorrow - no problem to do this to reverse gravity, then.

Yet, following my above argument, the next question might be why the standard planetfall ship isn't a Hammerhead hauler ...



L

Lestradae wrote:

Well, but many ships in the Ooniverse can obviously curve space like there is no tomorrow - no problem to do this to reverse gravity, then.

Yet, following my above argument, the next question might be why the standard planetfall ship isn't a Hammerhead hauler ...



L

Maybe the curvature of spacetime is like the depth of the sea: the flatter spacetime is, the "deeper" it is. Big engines that can push big ships need flatter spacetime to operate in. As spacetime becomes more curved, you have to use smaller and smaller engines. It's like mooring a big cargo ship offshore in deep water, and ferrying the goods in to land on small flat-bottomed skiffs and barges.

Maybe the curvature of spacetime is like the depth of the sea: the flatter spacetime is, the "deeper" it is. Big engines that can push big ships need flatter spacetime to operate in. As spacetime becomes more curved, you have to use smaller and smaller engines. It's like mooring a big cargo ship offshore in deep water, and ferrying the goods in to land on small flat-bottomed skiffs and barges.

Good analogy... and interesting - I was thinking the other day about some of the assumptions about hyperspace which all sci-fi seems to share. Like the trope about not being able to use hyperspace in heavily curved spacetime - ie near a gravity well (planet, sun...) Anyone know where that one comes from?

Now there's a question, Zevans.

You'll have me thinking about that for days, now.

[Edit: taken off to new and more relevant thread]

A more blinged version of the fer-de-lance i made earlier on in the thread. I cribbed the paintfleck shader from AMD's rendermonkey, you tile a really bumpy normal map over the ship so it appears really high-res, then just a bit of fiddling in the light macro and you can use it to fake that posh car paint stuff

edit: changed some of the texturemaps and tweaked the shaders a bit

http://www.box.net/shared/r7chpijdxa

Cor, pearlescent paintwork - cool!

sweetness. little doctoring of that and you'd have a nice Blitzspear!

hey that looks nice

A small update to the normal mapped coriolis from ages ago, just to clean up the texture a bit and to re-lay out the uv's on the model a bit better to help the normalmap generating pluging work out which way is up!



http://www.box.net/shared/fd09a30pak

I went back and redid some of the bits on the cobraIII, it was a quite an early attempt at normal mapping a ship, and whilst i was at it i took out a lot of the scratches and dirt in the paintwork so it looks a bit more respectable and might get through it's MOT


http://www.box.net/shared/19szyrq3yz