Oolite Bulletins

Ah...I see...sorry bout that. Maybe you should move the query to the Discussion section then?

sorry. only an apropos.

I made a few spacecoffins. I take it you have the AI sorted out? what is next?

Nope, still beavering away at the AI code. Last couple of days have been pretty busy at work, and the wife has annexed the laptop for the next couple of days, and the main house PC is lying in bits in my surgery following a PSU transplant.

Makes it kinda hard to program.

I tried the AI mods that Giles suggested last night at work, but the ships loaded up then refused to move. I even shot them a few times, but no-one cared. That's the last time I get Disans as pilots.

Disans huh?

yes, you do have obstacles. good luck on the surgery. and beavering.

mine work fine most of the time, except if I crowd the place with too many of them, I get the impression there's an epidemic of AIfatigue. a bunch of them can just go brain dead. a little laser gets them sharp again though.
could be a hole in my AI of course.

It's wierd - I just had a 20 min pootle with the patrol AI, and the ships still ain't moving. I removed the collision code that Giles suggested, and they still won't move. Oddly, this code is the same as the code in my laptop version.

stdErr.txr reports that there's a parsing error in the AI file!! Goddamn it. Now I have Trumbles in my AI!!!

a parsing error in the AI would be quite enough to paralyze the lads.

how does one pootle? something between you and your trumble?

Pootling is a wonderful thing.

I sacked all the Disans. I got some Tionislans for the ships. More loyal.

Or, in other words...I GOT THE AI WORKING!!! Thanks again Giles for a wonderful code snippet. I now have three Kraits flying around the GY making sure things are all hunky dory.

Now to finish writing up the AI (I only wrote the collision code into the first three beacons) then I'll try and post it to the download site tonight. I need to post up new planetinfo and shipdata files too.

I might just upload them to my site for now: saves trying to figure out the rsync thing or upload another huge file...

Update time.

I've uploaded all the new plist files to my site. Download them all and replace the currently existing ones in your AI and Config folders for the tgy_dev oxp.

Download ALL of the files listed, as there have been changes to all of them.

Files can be found here: http://www.hughesd.co.uk/elite/content/ ... onisla.asp

Notes:
- planetinfo.plist now uses precise positioning for the beacons and dodo (this is noticeable on the scanner)
- Beacon AI has been improved. It will now scream for help when shot at.
- Krait patrol ships now patrol. This code seems to be a bit flaky, as it works fine one time, then doesn't work the next. Kraits have a tendency to fly into the first beacon...
- all AI is now properly assigned.
- the Dodo in the yard is set to launch Lancets, but for some reason is only launching vipers. If someone can peruse the shipdata.plist file and see why this is happening, I would be grateful.
- I have upped the Dodo's energy and recharge rate to prevent being exploded by ship collisions.
- The Dodo seems fond of launching Hognoses. Can't think why.

an initial thing to make it run: a file named tgy-dodo.dat needs to be among the Models.

for my puny machine I had to reduce the numbers of everything. maneuvering at 4fps isn't to live with.
I wasn't seeing any official TGYships, just Cobras and Adders, so I changed the "checkForShips: kraitpatrol" to "checkForShips: togy-patrol" which in turn let me see the suicidal behaviour you mention. that, or adding to the kraits the role kraitpatrol, is the only way I could see that working.
the similar change with the Lancets didn't make any appear. I'll try to look deep into why.

but well done so far.

isn't that in the existing zip file?

I'll upload a copy of the dodo files as soon as I remember what the password for my Elite site is...

Hi guys. Right, a bit of an announcement here.

I'm taking a bit of a break from TOGY devs to work on the manual. I've not done anything with it for a couple of weeks now, whilst trying to work out the AI problems with the patrols, but progress is slow.

If anyone else wants to take a look, then feel free. I've uploaded the latest version of the zip file to the location mentioned in my sig.

If any of the Gravediggers want to have a look and do a bit of work, be my guest.

My immediate todo list is:
- sort out the AI for the patrol ships: I thought it might be an idea to move the waypoints about 1000 units away from the beacon locations, which would sort out the collision, but not really cure the cause.

- design a few more monuments of a nice, simple nature (coffin shapes, bevelled rectangles, headstones and so on).

- do a few more derelict ship models (using the zip file of ships that Giles so graciously made available)

- use subentities in the GY layout to save memory.

- look at reducing the size of the zip - the textures are taking up about 4Mb of the 5Mb download. I might be tempted to just use one texture for the monuments and one texture for derelict ships.

Please, if you do some work, please post what you do here so I know what's happening, and send me any updated files so I can keep the download up to date.

I will still do some stuff on it between doing manual stuff and real life...promise.

Selezen wrote:

I might be tempted to just use one texture for the monuments and one texture for derelict ships.

hmm. could be a crude move. let's see what size we're dealing with when things are close to finished, and maybe we can compromise.

what is our target filesize? 3-4 MB isn't so unreasonable considering the scale of this project.

I'll be travelling a bit these next days, but next week I could dig into the AI's. I finally feel I have the sufficient experience to claim I can do it.
of course that will depend on their status at that time. this is your top TODO?

I have already made 2 coffins/space sarcs (very kb-lite ones) that should be agreeable. will send you those when I get settled again.

also, could we discuss the subentity solution? it's a smart move, but must be done carefully so we don't get caught having too obvious repetitive patterns..

Murgh wrote:

what is our target filesize? 3-4 MB isn't so unreasonable considering the scale of this project.

Considering that we only have about a tenth of the models and textures the finished yard should have to make it interesting (i.e. little repetition of models), I am quite worried about the size. Once all the Oolite ships are represented in derelict form, and enough custom monuments are included, we could be looking at 10Mb to 15Mb, and that's a conservative estimate. I'd like to keep the whole thing to about 5 Mb tops.

Murgh wrote:

I'll be travelling a bit these next days, but next week I could dig into the AI's. I finally feel I have the sufficient experience to claim I can do it.
of course that will depend on their status at that time. this is your top TODO?

Yeah, it is - it's most important to get things flying round the yard and looking like it has as much life as is permissable in a graveyard...

Murgh wrote:

also, could we discuss the subentity solution? it's a smart move, but must be done carefully so we don't get caught having too obvious repetitive patterns..

Not having used subentities, feel free to talk at me about them!! I agree though, something should be done to ensure that the patterns aren't too regular.

Did anyone fix my debris-ring monument?
It used several SU's, and was supposed to rotate.


I am not happy about the filesize conundrum. It would mean a huge lot of work dumped. And several monuments would become very dull and ugly.

For simple derelict-skinned ships, we could just use a simple rust-texture.

5 meg for textures for the graveyard ain't a bad thing - that's about the size of a single MP3 file! I wouldn't be throwing out any textures just yet.