Oolite Bulletins

Stoopid question: where's a download link?

EDIT: never mind, I found it from the first post

make sure you get version 1.1, one link is to version 1 which has more problems.

This ship is player flyable, but it reqires docking computers to dock or it will explode

This is rather a personal preference than a hard rule, but personally I think that no ship which doesn't fit into a standard docking bay should be player-flyable in the first place. Logic dictates that if it can't dock, it also can't launch. So how would you even leave the station after you purchased it? Therefore I am of the opinion that standard-dock-size (width and height, minus a few meters for safety; length doesn't matter as much) should be the absolute limit for player variants of ships. NPCs can get away with being bigger, provided they have an AI that under no circumstances tries to dock them with any standard station. But for me at least one of the fundamental rules of the Ooniverse is that the player is confined to the role of a 'small' trader and cannot fly a capital ship. It's not Oolite's perspective.

Of course your mileage may vary on this point. For me personally, it would just bug me to have to constantly explain away the actual size of my ship, because I constantly dock and launch from stations.

I am flying an Imperial Courier, which happens to be small enough for a standard dock, but too big for a Rock Hermit. When I first bought it, I only wondered why I couldn't dock with Rock Hermits without losing my shields. Since I found out that the ship actually cannot fit into the hexagon, no matter how I turn, I've all but stopped visiting Rock Hermits at all. I think in the long run I'm going to end up manipulating the IC's model, making it small enough for a Rock Hermit docking bay, just because it bugs me so much.

The external views don't work

Where did you c&p those from? That code is ancient. That's the buggy external views from Oolite 1.65, which were replaced in Oolite 1.70! They do work, by the way, but they're not external, because all view positions are inside your ship. What do you expect if your ship's front extends to coordinate -0.030000, 60.66330, 242.22336, but the view position is at 0.0 20.0 200.0? 200 is smaller, therefore less forward, than 242.22336. You can't see the outside of the ship if you position the camera inside.

Please c&p the custom_views from the biggest ship in the original set (Anaconda) of a current version of Oolite, and you may still have to increase the viewing distance.

The exhaust is in the wrong place

Where do you want to have it? Measure the desired coordinates on your model, and put them into the exhaust array. Again, if your ship extends to -188 meters behind its origin, why do you place the exaust only -32 meters behind the origin, within the ship, 156 meters in front of the ship's rear end?

The laser is in the wrong place

Same thing again. Measure the position(s) on your model where you want the laser beam to begin, and write exactly these positions into the corresponding weapon_position_foo coordinates, instead of filling in just some random numbers.

sometimes a missile/mine will detonate inside the ship

Same thing again. missile_launch_position needs to be in front of and slightly below your ship, not deeply inside it.

For explanations what the various keys in shipdata.plist mean, and how you use them, please refer to the documentation on the Wiki.

Mr Mclane is not happy with me...

here is why the exhausts, missile position and laser are in the wrong place: I use blender, in blender it is impossible (as far as I can tell) to veiw the co-ordinates of somewhere. because of this it takes forever for me to code a position of something. I have to move it a little bit, restart oolite, move a little bit ect.

I therefore guess that cobra 3.5 oxp is deaply out of date all of this shipdata/shipyard/demoships was pretty much copy and pasted from cobra 3.5 (in the future I shall use a more up to date oxp to c&p code from)

I will try and find out how to display co-ordinates in blender, then when I find out I will update the oxp.

Unfortunately it shows how unserious I am... I can't help reading your post without cracking up

It is dockable!!!!!!!!!!! I tested it at a main station and it docked without a scratch, you just have to dock it sideways... and at a griff coriolis variant

Staer9 wrote:

I will try and find out how to display co-ordinates in blender, then when I find out I will update the oxp.

For starters, all your ship's vertex coordinates are listed in plain text in the DAT file. That's what a DAT file is: a simple text file with coordinate lists. By opening it with a text editor I found out in under a minute that the front end of your ship is located exactly at -0.030000, 60.66330, 242.22336, and the lowest z-coordinate is about -188 (which BTW also makes that the ship isn't centered around its origin, resulting in its target box being a little too big and off-centre; but that's a minor nitpick). (I misremembered, it's actually -190.83036.)

Figuring out the highest and lowest x- and y-coordinates doesn't take more effort as well. Voilà, already you have good starting points for placing external views, exhaust(s), lasers and missiles. You'll still need to fiddle with them in order to get it right (for instance start with adding or subtracting 10 or 20 to one of the coordinates, check what it looks like in game until you're halfway happy, and continuously fine-tune it with smaller changes until you're completely happy).

I have updated the shipdata script with the anacodas one (so now the frame is no longer out of date) and I have fixed the external veiws, and just to top it off I have found out how to display co-ordinates in blender, so I am now fixing exhausts, lasers, missile lanch possitions and the like

strange problem, I was able to set up the external veiws by removing th oxp part from the name, starting oolite, closing oolite, adding the oxp bit again, re-starting oolite and then it would be changed... but for the lasers and exhausts it isn't working. I do know that holding the shift key is suposed to work meaning that renaming isn't neccessary, but since 1.75 the shift key thingy hasn't worked for me.

I know that the laser is in the right place, blender gave me exactly the same co-ordinates as you found for the front of my ship, I changed the laser possition in th shipdata, but it wont change possition in the game, no matter how many renames I try and no matter how hard I press the shift key, it doesn't change.

there is probably something simple I am doing wrong but I have no idea what it is

Staer9 wrote:

I know that the laser is in the right place, blender gave me exactly the same co-ordinates as you found for the front of my ship, I changed the laser possition in th shipdata, but it wont change possition in the game, no matter how many renames I try and no matter how hard I press the shift key, it doesn't change.

How do you check the position in game? You only should be able to see where it emerges from your ship from a suitable external view. From the normal 'cockpit' view it always looks the same: emerging from the bottom of your screen. If it starts from somewhere in the bottom half of the screen you should reduce the z-coordinate. Technically that makes the laser come from within the ship, but that's a small price to pay for not having the strange visual effect of it originating out of the middle of nowhere.

after restarting oolite many times and leaving it to cool it now shows 2 out of three corect co-ordinates, the rear laser is completely correct and the exhausts havn't changed at all despite changes to the shipdata, front and rear camera positions are now correct...

I have no idea why parts are changing whilst others are not.

Commander McLane wrote:

You only should be able to see where it emerges from your ship from a suitable external view.

when checking from a front side veiw it is clear that it leaves the ship several metres after the ship finishes (you can actually even see it from the front veiw target camera.

It may just be problems with oolite rebuilding the caches, latest.log shows no errors in the shipdata reading.

Obvious question: is your ship moving? Try testing while standing still.

Then buy a normal Cobby or any other ship, install a side laser and fire it while you're looking to the same direction. Accelerate and decelerate while firing. What do you see? What does is tell you about the effects of ship speed on the seeming laser origin point (and seeming exhaust origin point as well)?

Commander McLane wrote:

Obvious question: is your ship moving? Try testing while standing still.

I know that moving effects laser/exhaust positions, my ship was perfectly still... I am serioulsy thinking about handing development over to someone else.

maybe it is a good idea to split this thread to [WIP] Hauler P30 to stop this thread filling up.

Started work on a stupidly high polygon cobra III remake to try and get over my current edge bevelling mania i can't resist extruding those edges! The stick out engines i've got on the top of the cobraIII in my normalmap shipset have really started bugging me, i couldn't take them out of the model without doing some drastic reworking to the shape so it turned out easier to start again from scratch and stay more faithful to the cobra III in the default shipset

started work on an experimental 'Warp Ring' the first ship in the galaxy to use warp drive:



@Griff, I may need some help with the shaders, but definately keep the other cobra in your shipset if you do change it.

Griff wrote:

Started work on a stupidly high polygon cobra III remake to try and get over my current edge bevelling mania i can't resist extruding those edges! The stick out engines i've got on the top of the cobraIII in my normalmap shipset have really started bugging me, i couldn't take them out of the model without doing some drastic reworking to the shape so it turned out easier to start again from scratch and stay more faithful to the cobra III in the default shipset

Liking the rework very much Griff, I think many of your Cobra IIIs could easily fall under the category/idea of "Manufactured under license" - thus all the variants could exist each one tweaked by local system builders, satisfies my concept of a Ooniversal balance anyway!

Got my ship, the Crusader, ingame. I'm playtesting and tweaking, so here's a couple of teaser shots.


Not too bad looking for a big fat ugly bulk hauler, huh?