Oolite Bulletins

I've only just found this thread and joined it very late but I just wanted to answer one question asked very early on by snarkism and show why oceans of even Earth-like planets don not have to (and probably shouldn't all be blue - even for human colonial ones!)

snarkism wrote:

2) Sea colour. You could probably vary the sea colour more from planet to planet - lighter or darker blue (Cyan to Black) - not every planet will have seas of pure water.

Water (i.e. H20) isn't blue - its a colourless liquid (mostly) that looks blue both from space and on the ground due to atmsopheric absorbtion/scattering/diffraction (on Earth) of all shorter wavelengths of light (the blues) - this is why at sunrise and sunset the sun looks very red/orange as as the path length through the atmosphere means some of the greens are diffracted out too leaving only the long wave reds.

What I'm trying to get at specifically is that liquid oceans even watery ones do not have to blue - it is dependant on the dominant wavelength output of the system's sun (is it reddish? if yes - then there wont be much blue to scatter out so the oceans could look green) - is the atmosphere like ours? If human colonials then yes, but not necessarily for others - low amounts of aerosols in the atmosphere (dust/water vapour) and not too much blue would be diffracted out from a yellow/white sun and the oceans could look quite purple in colour.

So that's the physics lesson over and what I'm trying to say is the Earth/Sun combo is pretty unique a slight deviation either side of star peak wavelength output and/or atmospheric content (for small planets that's literal - since they'd have "thin" atmosphere's and almost no scattering of any description even in day light the oceans could look almost black (the planet's sun subtends only a few seconds or minutes of arc - so the majority of reflection would be the blackness of space) makes a huge difference to the "colour" of water based oceans...

Basically, I like what you say and have no problem not having blue oceans all the time.

But work on this branch is basically over until it gets the nod from the other devs. It caused quite a stir when it appeared and was pretty unpopular for various reasons, so progress only got as far as earth-like and mars-like planets. Then the effort to continue wasn't worth the grief being generated.

I did this last update to fix a bug and get the branch up to date with respect to the SVN trunk so if work restarted it would be easier to get going.

Something else to note is that the planets don't have easy to get at attributes like the life is human colonial, the seas are blue/green/purple whatever - all that descriptive stuff would have to be parsed and certain phrases checked for every time a texture was generated to try and make the texture match the description.

So even if the ocean colour changes, it will be completely random, or at best tied to the sun's colouring (which seems doable and is part of what you suggest).

i just d/l'd the textured planets thing the other day, and it's a stunning improvement. i love the way the clouds are a separate layer. the only bad point is the sun is now billions of miles away! i (stupidly) decidided to flit to the sun in Ensoreus and it took about 20 mins of Torus!!

Have been too busy playtesting some other stuff to try to fly out to a sun. I'd count it as a serious minus for this branch, if sunskimming becomes near impossible.

The newest uploaded exe doesn't work. It's about half the size of both the trunk exe and the previous tp branch exe. First it asked for noise.dll with that in the folder it came up with some other reason for not running.

Dr. Nil wrote:

Have been too busy playtesting some other stuff to try to fly out to a sun. I'd count it as a serious minus for this branch, if sunskimming becomes near impossible.

The star was set farther away to make the system more realistic. The readme tells you how to adjust the star's position.

Thanks. Been far to busy for readmes

Dr. Nil wrote:

The newest uploaded exe doesn't work. It's about half the size of both the trunk exe and the previous tp branch exe. First it asked for noise.dll with that in the folder it came up with some other reason for not running.

I have the same problem.

ditto

I downloaded the exe file (oolite-1[1].65-tp4.exe) not the zip, and it says

This application has failed to start because SDL.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem.

It is smaller because I "stripped" it which removes stuff you don't need.

If you're installing it over a plain old 1.65 installation you'll need noise.dll - I didn't think of that.

I have posted it at both http://www.filefactory.com/file/2d241f/ and https://developer.berlios.de/project/sh ... up_id=2999.

Download it and put it in your oolite.app directory, with the exe and all the other dlls. Also note you can't just run the exe, you have to run it via the batch file because it needs a lot of environment variables to be set correctly before it can work.

I can run the game with noise.dll in oolite.app directory, but there's definitely still something wrong. All text is weirdly messed up and unreadable. Here's a screenshot. I can post more details. Just tell me what do you need to know. Oh, and a little question about the mod: Is it possible to set a random value for the sun_distance_modifier in the configuration file?

Did you resize the window or switch to/from full-screen mode? That will mess up the textures like in the screenshot.

Otherwise, perhaps it can't find the textures. Post the top of your stderr.txt file and there might be something in there about the paths.

stderr.txt said the following

Warning - GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT is not set - using /c/GNUstep/System
Warning - GNUSTEP_NETWORK_ROOT is not set - using /c/GNUstep/Local
Warning - GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT is not set - using /c/GNUstep/Local
...

The batch file I use to run Oolite is as follows:

@echo off
set GNUSTEP_PATH_HANDLING=windows
set GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT=E:\games\Oolite\oolite.app
set GNUSTEP_NETWORK_ROOT=E:\games\Oolite\oolite.app
set GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT=E:\games\Oolite\oolite.app
set HOMEPATH=E:\games\Oolite\oolite.app
oolite.app\oolite.exe

Edit: This probably was just me trying to directly run oolite.exe, not the batch file.

Pardon me for being a noob, but that previous caption might have been from wrong file.

There were two different stderr.txts in my oolite directories. The other one, which I think is the correct, was repeating "do DTD found!", but I spotted the following line in it:

at line: 10 column: 14 ... EntityRef: expecting ';'

I don't understand anything about this, but I hope you do

dajt wrote:

If you're installing it over a plain old 1.65 installation you'll need noise.dll

Download it and put it in your oolite.app directory, with the exe and all the other dlls.

OK done that, so far so good.

Also note you can't just run the exe, you have to run it via the batch file because it needs a lot of environment variables to be set correctly before it can work.

How do I do that?

(me wonders if there is a "How to run batch files for Dummies" on Amazon)

Don't you just rename the new .exe to replace the original and then run the game from the usual icon on the desktop, or wherever it may be?