Oolite Bulletins

FDL story - after having difficulty shooting down one of (my) twin-engined FDLs I decided to find out just how tough it really is ... faked up a save file so I could fly one with all the extras and hunted down my first target...

Hmmm ... Boa with escorts - cool. Lets go get that Boa number one ... yes, it calls for help, only one other ship visible to me - didn't check what it was ... soon find out ... oh, it's a mamba escort ... wait: what is it escorting ...

Well, it was an Anaconda battlegroup!

OK, so now I have the two remaining escorts for the Boa, six off the anaconda, the anaconda itself and the boa - oh look, a couple of cobra3s and a moray too... has someone fiddled my build?

Want me to clear the sky commander?
Make it so number one - make it so...

Well... the Boa and the Anaconda got away, but everything else was toast before the police showed up. Pause - get whiskey.

This encounter is why I decided to tone down the default FDL - ultimately relegating the twin-engine glx model to an oxp.

Coriolis Station

There are already coriolis models a-plenty - this one I did a while ago to teach myself quarternons.

Do we want anything as elaborate for stations?

Simon B wrote:

Nobody commented on the possibility of adding a skiff - but it's too tempting so I did it anyway. I've also rescaled it to be more in line with the boa and made it sleeker.

That's fine for me...I just didn't ask for that feature as I couldn't help to get it to work, which I somehow understood as being a problem with the other skiff.

Simon B wrote:

Just a note on gameplay - I tried out the ramming abilities of this craft - it can happily plow under any fighter. You don't get the kill for it, but you also don't change status and the other fighters stay ignoring you.

Perhaps this needs to change? Have no idea how it can be done.

That's strange, as I have been very fond of running fighters (and asteroids) over when flying a BCC: I never checked the kill count, but I do get the bounty, even when I'm cloaked! Furthermore, I do get the status fugitive for ramming a police or navy ship, it's just that I don't get an offender status by ramming clean Hatchling BoyRacers.

Screet

Simon B wrote:

Coriolis Station

There are already coriolis models a-plenty - this one I did a while ago to teach myself quarternons.

Do we want anything as elaborate for stations?

Good station Simon, The more variation the better. Plus I like the rounded bay and the colour. I think it will make a welcome addition to the pool of Oolite stations.

pagroove wrote:

Simon B wrote:

Coriolis Station

There are already coriolis models a-plenty - this one I did a while ago to teach myself quarternons.

Do we want anything as elaborate for stations?

Good station Simon, The more variation the better. Plus I like the rounded bay and the colour. I think it will make a welcome addition to the pool of Oolite stations.

Gentlemen!

Please excuse my ignorance, but what happens when I put in multiple Coriolis Station OXP's. I love the variety, but won't these OXP's clash, and how do the OXP's make sure that the same variant comes up at the same system every time. Would like to know before I stash on more candy.

Thats the cunning bit, they should all play nicely together. When Oolite populates the Galaxy with stations it always selects at random a 'card' with the role of "coriolis" to use as the station for lower tech systems. It does the same thing with dodo and ischos for the higher techs. With no OXPs in there's only one card in the deck with the role "coriolis", so all coriolis stations you encounter are the standard Oolite one. But if in an OXP you give a new type of station the role coriolis there are now 2 cards in the deck and half and half are OXP / Standard. As long as all OXPers do this by adding the role rather than overwriting the original key, with 10 OXPs with different takes of the coriolis you get a nice variety with different types spread over the Galaxies.

LittleBear wrote:

As long as all OXPers do this by adding the role rather than overwriting the original key, with 10 OXPs with different takes of the coriolis you get a nice variety with different types spread over the Galaxies.

Does that mean that the card chosen for a particular system is saved in my save game for future reference when I return, or do the stations change every time I enter a system.

To the best of my knowledge, the selection is pseudo-random. That means it is a bit difficult to predict which coriolis card gets drawn.

But as long as the odds remain the same, which means your sets of OXPs remains the same, Oolite will draw the same card every time it rebuilds the system (i.e. you jump in or resume playing).

If you change the OXPs you have installed, the stations will be reshuffled, but remain consistent again after that.

Best wishes,
Oscar

To my knowledge it draws the station everytime. You can test that with any of the station OXP's

Please forgive my ignorance fellas, but has anyone tried to tart up the exterior of the torus stations?

JohnnyBoy wrote:

Please forgive my ignorance fellas, but has anyone tried to tart up the exterior of the torus stations?

I mailed it to Griff a while ago. While he was exited about the idea he is simply to busy a.t.m. I made a new texture for it. I looks reasonable but It didn't put serious work into it. The model is flawed. you crash on docking. So first a new good model has to be made.

Starting to mess around with the textures to give them a slightly more realistic metallic/bumped about a bit feel, here's a couple to give you an idea, you can right click to down load them if you want to try them on and let me know if people like it. They should look slightly more solid in game, it's only a tweek but I think it works, Simon said go ahead.
Haven't done the grills yet on the two Cobras, this is just a note for peoples opinions.







It doesn't matter if others have versions of their own, I can do the same for those as well if you like.
I'm waiting for the full set to finalise before I go ahead and dose them up with lots of rust and dust for the Old-Ships replacements, I hear Griff is working on Normals so this will influence where wear and tear occurs, so there's no point starting that yet...
Unless he's finished one....?
Also, Simon, if you're working on a glow map can I have a tweak at those too? See if we can get the best out of both of us

JohnnyBoy wrote:

Please forgive my ignorance fellas, but has anyone tried to tart up the exterior of the torus stations? :?

Of course I have ;)

This is an Isis themed torus - done before I knew about the torus oxp or Isis shipping.


Here's a closeup of the dock - fdl for scale.


I don't really like this one - the dock seems very... promiscuous?
... and thus I succumb to photobucket ...

I had actually thought of reworking the stations - starting from a simple dock-structure for poor + low-tech worlds and building from there. I also thought that galactic hubs could get something real special - beffitting the traffic they'd get ... multiple docks works now right?

That's cool, and nice ideas, I think that entrance looks grand, gives the structure more scale.
Oh, and welcome to Photobucket!
It would be good to see a variation in quality and repair according to the tech level.
I started messing around with a grander look for the factory dock in Dictators, I'll fetch it....



It's a bit of a mess where I'm trying to work out where the different bits are represented on the texture, but any way, it's possible to add 3D elements like the doorway, the grills on the floor are still being experimented with.
The point is I can add details like this if you want in my spare moments, the only problem being the time factor as there's no easy way to view the texture in game. If you supply me the dock texture, can you mark where the boundary of each part lies, then I can set it up as a mock up in blender and much more easily see wether the elements I'm adding work.

Also as a bit of a request, I personally think the dock textures should be bigger as you see them so close up, any one else bothered by that?

Currently - there are lots of dockable objects - some currently broken, torus being one of them.

Tho torus oxp seems to ue a brute-froce method rather than roles to assign it's stations - it does it by a list of system numbers. So the author went through the lists and sorted out which exact systems should have the stations.

I can add to the list easily - I have bumbell and coke-can stations as well as geodesics and spheres. Tried to do a Death Star but couldn't got the big dish to work properly. Wondering if I can do a dockable moon ... you fly over a textured surface of craters and crags, find the base, enter the hangar...

But the neolites idea is to replace existing models... leaving the player the option to run them in parallel. So I'd redo the ones in the base plist. Just need a philosophy as to how the shape is chosen to represent the station - looks to me like the stations are almost pre-fab structures - admittedly on a colossal scale.

That coriolis model was built on that premise - the objects comprising it are:

square face
triangular face
dock
rectangular panel (to block the hole in the square panels)

the lattermost has a false dock on the reverse side (closed doors) and a row of huge vent-structures on the side you can see in the pics.

I also notised that there is no reason to make the dock square - the wide ships (cobra3) are short and the tall ships are narrow - which suggests a slit which gets narrower towards the ends.

Many dock textures seem to treat it as a sort of guarage - some provide small doors anh counters in the back, and lots of floor+ceiling lights. But, thinks I to myself thinks I, where does the ship go?

I have added floor and ceiling bay-doors and put the lights along the walls... the ship stops in the middle and automatics pull it through the hatch to the interior of the station.

I figure a coriolis can house two anacondas and more smaller craft ... though quarters will end up cramped. STill don't see where all those viper are housed - but then, there is a technobabble about using witchspace technology to make the interior bigger than the exterior - nicely accounts for the protection given quirium inside stations - it's literally stored in a different universe!

If you could let off a q-bomb after docking - you'd destroy the space-time fold but not the station. This won't work on ships - they are too small to house the equipment needed to stabilize the wormhole.

"When your ship is drawn into the station, you are entering a witchdrive vortex: the space you see does not physically exist in the conventional universe - the experience may disturb some commanders - it certainly scares the willies out of me!"
-- Commander S Bartfast

Cmdr Bartfast is also famous for the nuclear "redesigning" or Norway's coastline - "All those fiords: I just couldn't stand them!"