Oolite Bulletins

There are some persons that are interested in helping me with this project. Now they are asking me for a polygon budget (and texture limits).

What would work without choking Oolite?

kindly
/BeRKA

The current limitations are: 320 vertices, 512 faces, 7 materials per entity (not 8 as previously reported). More can be achieved using subentities. Beyond that, it’s a question of hardware speed.

BeRKA wrote:

2: Is it possible to change the starting position?

I'd do this by creating a save game at the location you want to start at, and the ship, credits, and equipment you want to start with.

Then load this up to start a "new game".

The Win32 and Linux versions have a command line flag to load a game so you could use this to automatically load the starting game.

dajt: Thank You for your answer. Then we can find a better starting position in a better galaxy. Then we could use different Oolite galaxies as different part of the traveller universe. Is there an example anywhere on how to edit a save file?

Ahruman: Thank You for that answer. I have also been asked about the scale of the ship models. What scale should be used?

Save files are property lists, just like the various configuration files used by Oolite. There’s no documentation on fiddling with them, but they’re readable in a text editor.

Oolite models are defined in nominal metres. For reference, a Cobra III is 65 metres long, 130 metres wide and 30 metres high.

@bErka:

Mission_variables are recorded in the save file as well, which are a major part of OXP scripts.
As your MOD (not-OXP) deviates quite a bit from the classic concept, you will probably be using many of these before long.

To get back to your original question 2:
No yo cannot MOVE planets. HOWEVER, you can change just about everything about the planets(read: systems) that are there. You can add moons or atmosphereless planets at will.
So in principle, you could swap the properties of two systems.
There is NO way to delete or move the actual system locations though.
Maybe you could alter the galactic seed (ask Ahruman about that) but this would still generate the same fixed number of systems at different (fixed) positions. You might be able to create a starmap with an isolated cluster of systems you like. (Players will pester you relentlessly about the unreachable systems till you fall of the planet though. )

The question about the coordinate system:
take a look at the elite-wiki, there is a short description by Giles there.
here: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Methods
(under 'loooking for and adding ships')


edit:
You've been "asked about the scale of ships"?
Are you working on this with a team or maybe using this as a teaching-project?

Thank you for all help so far.

I really should stop hijacking this thread and start my own now...