Oolite Bulletins

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.

A_H wrote:

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

sure, but even rusty ships have windows and such features.

and rust is among the most size-taxing textures there are..

no, I didn't find the source for the debris-ring (and got caught up with Lave and learning coordinate AI maneuvers) sorry.

guys let's keep up morale!
noone's dumping hard work. it's too early to talk about making cuts. we'll just be smart about it, and that can only happen when we have collected all that we want to include.

we should discuss rotating (as is, all is still in the graveyard) and superslow movement would be nice. subunits rotating totally fixed together, OTOH, might not be too cool.. y'dig?

OK then, for now size is no object. I am just opposed to bloatware (being a forced user of Microsoft Bloatware XP, after all).

I'm against the rotation of the monuments independently mainly due to concernts with the rendering of the yard. It's upwards of 200 objects at the moment, and there's another level to be implemented yet. That's upwards of 300-400 entities (be they root or sub) and each with its own rotation? Some machines might get a bit cranky...

However, if it can be managed without the same problems, rotating the entire yard slowly would be cool, and accurate to the description of the yard in TDW...

independent rotation, you're probably right, although it would be nice. I'll experiment (on a low-end machine) when I go into it next week.

entire yard rotating, that would be excellent, but at all possible?
the alibi for not doing that, what body of mass would contain the orbit..?

Heh - good point...maybe we should just leave it static - there's enough going on there without making the whole lot move too!

BTW - small announcement - I've just created three new small monuments and added them into the zip file on Alioth. They are viewable on the demo at the game start, but not actually in the game yet - they need to be added in the planetinfo file.

Feel free to play.

rust textures:
missing windows would niot be a huge problem.
Rust in space is non existent anyhow and probably a slow buildup of spacedust on stationary vessels could be the explanation why the windows etc are no longer visible.

I agree about bloating....to a point.
If we re-use the same rust texture on several ships, the bloating would be contained.
I have already used the same rust texture for several monuments.

We could constuct a sort of small library of available textures that can be used for generic small monuments.
For more special projects, I still advocate unique textures should be allowed.

Rotation:
Although TDW states the yard as rotating, I don't think it could be rendered efficiently using current computers and code.

It is not neccecary either: the orbits are ignored everywhere in Oolite, so why suddenly change this policy in the togy?

Would we be able to see the yard in it's entirety?
I didn't think so at the start, but with the size reductions, maybe it is possible now?
the max rendering distance is 5km or somesuch?




I'll check and upload any half-finished projects I got lying around...

some screenies

Crashed Boa:



The wreck of a Python (variant):


Shot of a single debrisring section:



My purpose was to have several ring sections around a central object (such as the Boaroid or Python) and have the complete model rotate slowly.

it's all great stuff.
chapeau.

I humbly submit my space coffin weighing in at 65kb.

What size is it?

There are quite a few coffins in the debris ring, they are around 2m in length. (the small spots you can see floating between the big chunks).

But as a freestanding monument, such a small coffin would be impossible to find/see.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

What size is it?

oh it'll fit you.

ca. 2m sounds about right. about half an escape pod.
it's the kind of thing I could imagine would work ok in chunks of subunits.

A problem would be that you would have to mess a lot with quaternions to get them to be scattered around...
I just pasted them all over the ring-SU as seperate (12vex) models. (one cannot fly through the rings)
0
To create a ring/cluster of Coffin-SU's would be an herculean task of calculating quaternions and plotting XYZ-coordinates, that would scare even Selezen.

It is a beautifull chest though. Good job.
(Is that Winstons name in Disan-characters I spot on it?)

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

Is that Winstons name in Disan-characters I spot on it?

good eye!

you're right about the quaternions, and I don't think it would make any difference for Oolite if I squirted out a bunch and called it one object.

no need to scare Selezen unnecessarily.

All I have to say on the subject of quaternions is

Ahem.

I'm working on the hypthesis that visibility of monuments is more important than scale, so I'm making the ickle ones about half the size of an adder.

I like the coffin though... good shape. Maybe just make it a bit bigger and we're sorted!!

You can make them bigger: they need to be protected against looters, retain their liquid Helium, in which the bodies are preserved for eternity, the powersource that shields it from spacedandruff..etc etc... The shape is only a reminder of the olden days of Terra... (yaddayaddayadda...)

Having been wondering what the result of all you guys work on this graveyard was for a while now I actually went and bought a nvidia fx5200 256mb pci card for my poor old 1gb integrated chipset no agp slot ex office dell (with money that my girlfriend would much rather I had spent elswhere...) so I could find out.
Awesome guys!
And respect to Oolite in general that it can deal with all those objects smoothly on my crap hardware and make it look goooood!
If the missus finds out what I spent that £89.00 on and why, you may have to build a monument to my balls!

E.