Oolite Bulletins

Posted: **Sat Oct 17, 2009 4:47 am**

Commander McLane wrote:
I'm starting to guess that something crappy is going on with my Safari. I have another issue with the faulty display of GIFs, which had solved itself a couple of weeks ago, but has returned now. In both cases I have no idea about the cause.

Have you tried flushing your browser cache? Also, do you have any upstream caching going on? For instance, my IPCop firewall box is set up as a transparent proxy/cache, and it additionally caches updates for Windows, Linux and anti-virus, (though it nightly checks that it has the latest versions) Some ISP's cache popular files too...

Posted: **Mon Oct 19, 2009 5:56 pm**

Hi,

it looks like something still has evaded previous fixings...at line 165 the autorepair-script tries to install a timer for this.repairNode which does not exist. I think it was meant to call this.repairShip - is this correct?

Screet

Posted: **Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:20 am**

I've just switched over to a Caduceus Alpha from my Morrigan as I fancied a serious combateering ship (I also have a thing for forward sweeping wings - possible Klingon fetish?

). Got to say it is a very nice vessel.

Knew it had a couple of quirks, and it duly went "pop" in fuel stations and by a SLAPU. When it did the same for a flyby of a Thargon Carrier I decided to have a little poke around under the bonnet.

Turns out that removing the three cmounts appears to be enough to fix the Caddy killer problem. Only tested against Fuel Stations so far but at least those work fine. There aren't any other "cmount.DAT" files lurking on my C: drive so it can't be picking up a different one of those. Had a glance over the .DAT file in Notepad++ but couldn't see any obvious problems (no vertices with huge numbers) so am kind of stumped as to what can be done to correct it.
Edit: Seems to only work after flushing the cache (by going Strict play -> Unrestricted play -> Load -> Jump -> Refuel). Otherwise pops again

btw - small point, but in the shipdata.plist the Tactical (top down) view is identified with <key>view-description</key> rather than <key>view_description</key>. Only means that the view's name doesn't pop up, but maybe a tiny fix to sneak in to the next release.

Posted: **Sun Oct 25, 2009 7:26 pm**

interesting so it may NOT be the turrets then? I'll try stripping off the turrets and fly it through a fuel depot. I'm going to get to the bottom of this if it kills me. It's screwing up my joy joy gaming experience damn it.

Posted: **Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:21 pm**

ClymAngus wrote:
interesting so it may NOT be the turrets then? I'll try stripping off the turrets and fly it through a fuel depot. I'm going to get to the bottom of this if it kills me. It's screwing up my joy joy gaming experience damn it.

Easy m8 its a game

Posted: **Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:49 pm**

Okay - I've done a written log of what I got up to without the Caddy A going "pop". Afraid I'm a bit of a numpty, so don't know where to begin getting a detailed log from debug.oxp on a PC

Removed cmount from caduceus-alpha-player subentities (one or two other small tweaks as well - won't clog things up with full shipdata.plist)
Loaded save with Caddy
Launched
Witchspace jumped
Did a close flyby of Thargoid Carrier
Used Fuel Station
Got pounded by Thargoids (memo to self: destroy carrier before refuelling...)
Had equipment bits repaired by DCN
Got into combat - turrets fired fine
Docked (with shift-D)
Save *
Launch
Witchspace jump
Went to "Begin New Game" from Pause menu
Reloaded (from *)
Launched
Witchspace jump
Thargoid Carrier flyby
Used Fuel Station
Witchspace jump
Killed Thargoid Carrier (mainly by turret)
Used Fuel Station
Combat (including a kill by deliberate ramming)
Docked (manually this time)
Save
Quit Oolite
Restarted Oolite (without flushing cache)
Loaded last save
Launched
Withspace jump
Used Fuel Station

No problems with a random Caduceus death through all of that. Although as I said before, I have had it go pop after removing the cmounts. No idea what changed to reinstate the Caduceus Killer problem.

Posted: **Mon Oct 26, 2009 12:03 am**

pagroove wrote:
Easy m8 its a game

Allow me, (if you will) to illustrate a comparison, and through it illuminate my modus operandi to therefor explain my righteous indignation.

Imagine a texture of yours, killing any ship when it tried to dock with a fuel station. I'm sure you would move heaven and earth to find it. Because you are a responsible creator and wish to produce nothing but the best.

Yeah, that was a bit too much. but not being able to iron this one out really does anger me. I don't like not being able to fix something I create. Powerlessness has never been a state in which I can find pleasure.

Not that I'm implying that in anyway you do, in fact I'm counting on and appealing to the fact that I assume (based on the high quality of your work that) you don't.

Please understand, I hold you in the highest respect.

as for the sub-entity issue being the cause of the problem:

Interesting work. I'm thinking that maybe it's the destructibility of said sub-entity might be to blame. I'll give it a try.

Hmm maybe it has some mad ass vertex in the model. I've seen that cause problems before too.

Posted: **Mon Oct 26, 2009 12:19 am**

ClymAngus wrote:
Interesting work. I'm thinking that maybe it's the destructibility of said sub-entity might be to blame. I'll give it a try.

Hmm maybe it has some mad ass vertex in the model. I've seen that cause problems before too.

IIRC Eric once found out that changing the info of all subentities does solve the problem, but that "fix" did lead to all turrets firing forward. Was very impressive as every ship was down in less than 3 seconds

Since the new info is that it's only the cmounts, I've tried something like that: I changed the info of the cmounts only to

Code: Select all

        <string>cmount 0.0 -2.6 26.0 0 1 0 0</string>
         <string>cmount 0.0 -2.6 13.0 0 1 0 0</string>
         <string>cmount 0.0 -2.6 0.0 0 1 0 0</string>

I've yet to find a fuel station or hive to shoot, but at least for the modified trade outpost at Raceedat, which did kill my Caduceus on a few hundred meters distance unless I docked on autopilot, it did work

IIRC Eric also said something about Quarternions always having to sum up as 1...and really, I don't even know WHAT I did change. Looking at the ship, I was unable to notice what changed

EDIT: Found a fuel station...got pretty far in, but then BOOM...looks like I've got to find the original post about the "fix" and then continue trying with other values...

Screet

Posted: **Mon Oct 26, 2009 12:30 am**

I appreciate everyone's continued efforts to help me fix this "almost great" oxp.

Posted: **Mon Oct 26, 2009 12:56 am**

I still do not know what this does, but after moving the "1" one step further to the left in the cmount entry, I was able to refuel in a fuel station

Code: Select all

        <string>cmount 0.0 -2.6 26.0 1 0 0 0</string>
         <string>cmount 0.0 -2.6 13.0 1 0 0 0</string>
         <string>cmount 0.0 -2.6 0.0 1 0 0 0</string>

Could anyone please explain why this does work and what it does?

BTW: eject and missile launch position could also get an update...guardians typically slam into the ship and missiles also sometimes do the same. When using injectors, missiles ALWAYS crash upon launch...the second value in those position entries seems to do the trick. However, with the crash-thing on the ship itself solved it might not be necessary to modify these anymore?

EDIT: It's now possible to fly through the side bars of a fuel station with the omega variant

Screet

Posted: **Mon Oct 26, 2009 1:51 am**

Addendum to my account from earlier. Did a load more flying, docking, launching, refuelling, flybys etc and eventually it did go pop in a Fuel Station.

But Press Space Commander -> Strict Play -> Unrestricted Play -> Load was enough for me to be able to use that station of DOOM with no problems. All very curious.

btw Screet, the Wiki suggests that the magnitude of the quaternions doesn't matter

the Wiki wrote:
Now because quaternions are normalised (adjusted so that W * W + X * X + Y * Y + Z * Z = 1) when Oolite reads them in, you can multiply each part of a quaternion by the same value and still have it represent the same angle. So this rotation can also be represented as W = 1, X = 0, Y = 0, Z= 1 (let's use [1 0 0 1] as shorthand).

And I think Guardians are destined to slam into any ship if you undergo a swift slowdown soon after they launch (I edited them out of my save file for my Morrigan after one self-pwn too many).

Posted: **Mon Oct 26, 2009 5:32 am**

Makara wrote:
Addendum to my account from earlier. Did a load more flying, docking, launching, refuelling, flybys etc and eventually it did go pop in a Fuel Station.

I can confirm this...my dog woke me up sooo early...thought I should fly a bit before going back to sleep. First jump I end up beside a fuel station, enter happily and kaboom.

Exit Oolite, shift-launch it to rebuild the cache, make that jump again, once more there is the fuel station. Enter it and can refuel.

Looks like the problem is inside Oolites cache

EDIT: just made a bug report in the appropriate forum.

Screet

Posted: **Thu Oct 29, 2009 6:39 am**

How do you shift-launch. I play OOlite on a Ubuntu box. I launch it by choosing it from the application menu . Do I press shift while clicking it on the menu.

Posted: **Thu Oct 29, 2009 8:53 am**

Screet wrote:
Code: Select all
        <string>cmount 0.0 -2.6 26.0 1 0 0 0</string>
         <string>cmount 0.0 -2.6 13.0 1 0 0 0</string>
         <string>cmount 0.0 -2.6 0.0 1 0 0 0</string>
Could anyone please explain why this does work and what it does?

The quaternion "1 0 0 0" describes the orientation in space. You need 4 parameters for that. Take for example an arrow. To describe the direction it points you need 3 spacial directions (x, y, z). But even when you know its direction, you don't know how it is rotated around its axis. Therefor you need the fourth component.

To describe changing orientation one must constantly translate angles into directions. That is complicated so those four parameters are transformed in something new, called quaternions. With this numbers the computer can calculate much more efficient but they are a bit abstract to us humans. The first digit mainly contains the rotational component while the next three are mainly the x, y, z direction.

The squared sum of the components must be 1 but don't worry about that, because Oolite will lower the values accordingly on loading the values. Only 0,0,0,0 is illegal as that would lead to a division by zero to normalise.

Posted: **Thu Oct 29, 2009 9:53 am**

Ahhhh - so you are saying that the original quaternion (1 0 0 0) was a rotation about an undefined axis. So this is why the cmount subentities caused problems. Still doesn't address all the troubles, but explains this one.

Chrisfs wrote:
How do you shift-launch. I play OOlite on a Ubuntu box. I launch it by choosing it from the application menu . Do I press shift while clicking it on the menu.

Don't know how that style of cache flush is done on a Linux system. But you can start Oolite normally then Retrict to strict play followed by Resetting to Unrestricted play. This seems to flush the cache (or at least has that effect for the Caduceus

)

Oolite Bulletins

caduceus and neocaduceus