Oolite Bulletins

In that case it is my duty to order you around!

I mean save you from yourself.

For a start we could use a prime terrestial landscape

optional several overlay-pictures of
-various levels of agriculture
-various levels of industry
-various levels of city encroachment

When that is done, you could try other types of terrestial landscapes, such as desert, forest, mountainous etc.

What is more fun, but less usefull, would be the exotic planets mentioned a few posts back.

What could also be fun are creatures that can be superimposed over the picture by planetinfo.plist, such as edible poets and deadly deadly goats.

Edit:
Ah. If you were refering to the alienspecies pictures, then look at hte arrays we posted earlier, I'm not going to repeat them here. It's about 100 alien pictures/overlays.
(ps. I think 'bony' is best translated as anorexic-looking or with bony plates like an aligator, depending on the species.)
(edit: on the same note I think slimey could also be read as 'drooling' for furry creatures.)

Wouldn’t it be easier to start by designing a UI for the various screens, possibly with pics of the planet and/or ship, and save the species pics for later? :-)

Yes.

It would,
but Milinks just mentioned he cannot understand it just yet.


so...what are you implying?

Are you volunteering.

edit: I want to bump the question: what is our style goal?

but to address Milinks question, since all this visual, modelling and administrative energy and motivation is in place, the programming bit is still an unknown.. these aren't regular insertable OXP elements that are discussed here, eh? Giles 'to-do list' Williams would have to be interested to see this evolve for there to be any point to go into mass production..

anywhoo, my vote on the 'style-goal' is for comic-magical photorealism.

for now Milinks, why don't you sketch out a few ideas. and good luck with the disk-recovery.

Might it be a good idea to start by defining the size of image envisaged?

I’d quite like to redo the UI screen programming, and break it out of PlayerEntity where it really doesn’t belong… but I also want to finish redoing the texture loading, and then the mesh loading, and I want to fix the brand new crashing bugs in Dry Dock, and get it working on Panther (although you should be able to convert stuff now, just not look at it…) so I can’t really in good conscience say I’m ready to jump in and do the programming side of a new UI. :-)

Style.

Only waist up? for those who cannot draw anatomy correctly anymore.
(size: 3widex4high)
or whole body (size: 2wideX4high)

I can do some sketching, but would be happy for anyone to make those more colourfull.
Wha-the-murgh is this photo-realism-bladibla?
Is it the cut-and-paste photo you showed an example off?

I vote for semi-cartoon style. Realistic, but not quite. The way RPG-ers draw their characters. ?
Drawback is = not easilly modulised perhaps.
I also vote for colour.

edit: what would a furry lizard look like? I rather think like a rodent. Would a slimy lizard look like a frog?

I think the stylings of Vaughn Bode would be perfect for Oolite but it's just a long shot opinion... It's a more cartoon feel & I know that would grate with the 'realists' amongst our ranks...

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

Wha-the-murgh is this photo-realism-bladibla?
Is it the cut-and-paste photo you showed an example of?

well if those photos were polished and amusingly though moderatley exaggerated and warped, then yes.

the Bode style is great, his line is very cool, but.. it doesn't grate with me, that's too strong a word..

I'm not sure I like Bode either, well... maybe for frogs.

It is important that the style and feel is generally similar.
Offcourse some might be more caricature others a bit more serious.
Not all races need to be high-tech, many natives are still pre-industrial, (with GalCop running the trade and 100% of the spacestation.)
Also, not every contributor will be able to deliver the same level of quality.

But I shudder at the thought of having a picture galerie as diverse as found in that 'Wizards of the Coast' card-game 'Magic'.
(ie: every picture great in it's own right, but no overall style.

What about if, in the landscape pics, we used some key colours for the trees, sky, etc. so that their colours could be changed automatically to suit the colours set in OXPs. It would be a bit strange if you were orbiting a planet with a pink atmosphere but the picture had blue skies, green trees, etc.

I was thinking about this the last time I played ArcElite, how on the system data screen it would (accurately I think) preview the planet's coulours (and the distance to, if there is any, its moon).
maybe Oolite doesn't know these things in advance of actually loading the system?

Key colours can be tricky, but a background layer that gets colourised in the colour of the sky and possibly a middle layer coloured in the “ground” colour shouldn’t be a major technical problem.

Keep in mind that most inhabited planets are close to terrestial and have an oxygen atmosphere (eg blue skies).

other colour skies are posible, but not very good for humans.
(chlorine = green, orange/reddishbrown=Iodine/bromide, methane etc )

I'm sure there are data sites for this kinda info...maybe even on bryce related pages.
Or look up the (visual) absorbtion spectra of atmospheric atoms.

Alien plant colour variation is anyone's guess.

Hey, the planet I’m sitting on has a nitrogen atmosphere.

Most transparent substances – certainly gasses – refract light in roughly the same way, resulting in a blue sky. This can subsequently be tinted by absorbtion of light by suspended particles – the red sky of Mars is a combination of dust in the atmosphere and a tradition of bad colour balancing. (It’s believed that it would actually be seen as blue by humans, with a yellow-orange tint from the dust.)