Oolite Bulletins

Hmmm, is there no way to replace the black background with a flat (mission?) image? It just seems to be begging for something there. Scenes could be ray-traced in Blender..? I may just put up a concepts thread to chuck ideas in, although I have some ships I was intending for a company with a backstory, but ideas are all good even if I don't make them.

ZygoUgo wrote:

Hmmm, is there no way to replace the black background with a flat (mission?) image? It just seems to be begging for something there. Scenes could be ray-traced in Blender..? I may just put up a concepts thread to chuck ideas in, although I have some ships I was intending for a company with a backstory, but ideas are all good even if I don't make them.

Sure, lots of things are possible and this one is even easy to implement.

But it brings back the other problems. A image will always look somewhat boring over time (in an animation) and you'll need to add other effects (like smoke, rotating lamps, etc.) to fill it with life. Additional toys are eating shader throughput - performance is important in these moments (docking, launching and witchspace jumps). And then you have to think about the style clash again (station <-> tunnel <-> bay). I'm not sure about it - would be interesting to hear some more opinions.

ZygoUgo wrote:

Hmmm, is there no way to replace the black background with a flat (mission?) image?

You mean that momentary black screen between the tunnel effect and the docked screen?
How about some sort of greyish force-field effect - it would always be the same (that's force-fields for you), but not too boring?

Well on the way out you see the planet, on the way in, there's just a black void. As a flat image it would automatically have a parallax effect relative to the moving tunnel, appearing as a back wall of some kind. This could from a perspective point of view but may look wrong unless the room is large though.
I should think a standard image could be that of a lift cage, that would signify under assumption that your ship gets automatically stacked or parked in the stations' garage mechanically.
Stations could define their own *multiple images causing a random selection from variations with different parked vehicles or droids in the background etc. But that would be what we would be trying to avoid, no?*
The lift cage/airlock excuse would only need one image and avoid any scenery complications you've mentioned, although a flashing light and random number could be good
At the back of the lift could be clearly marked exits for those who want to leave their ships to explore the station, or perhaps even a reception style glass airlock entrance that is clearly fixed separately to the station as opposed to the lift frame, with a very smart round design.
Some lovely posh glass work *frosted/clear* comes to mind. Couple of plastic plants and all that jazz If the foyer details were all behind the glass, the flatness would be excused by the pane.
Anyways, thats digging too far alreadys!
I would love to sort one out for the hoopy, always imagined the tunnel and entrance to be reminiscent of a circus with lots of LasVagus/theatre lights.

No parallax - the shader uses a fullscreen scaling and a point relative to the tunnel where the plane would appear (actually it suppresses the rendering and you see Oolites black background). Some scaling on texture coordinates to simulate depth (a minimal zoom if you want) would do the trickery, I guess. As it would be only displayed on docking we have a little bit headroom compared to the launching part.

Pagroove has also done a few bay textures before we trashed the cockpit/bay thingie. Maybe it's time to revisit the textures.

Remember it doesn't have to be an image: you can have more than one visual effect exempted from break-pattern-hide at once. So you could just build a 3-D lift cage model, make it into a visual effect, position it behind the tunnel effect, and let Oolite's general rendering engine take care of scaling for you. Probably quite a bit more efficient than fancy shaders would be, too.

cim wrote:

Remember it doesn't have to be an image: you can have more than one visual effect exempted from break-pattern-hide at once. So you could just build a 3-D lift cage model, make it into a visual effect, position it behind the tunnel effect, and let Oolite's general rendering engine take care of scaling for you. Probably quite a bit more efficient than fancy shaders would be, too.

But you can't position a model correctly. view_position is not exposed yet and the bindable viewpointOffset is meaningless for other entites than the player. It was the reason for using a fullscreen shader in the first place, as I don't want to use huge models only to minimize the offset.-)

I'm aware that you have mentioned already that view_position gets exposed in v1.79 (which is really cool).

Svengali wrote:

New BGS-XMapping:
The second new feature is that BGS-XMapping has been implemented. BGS-XMapping is a mechanism to display the named areas and lanes from Clym Angus excellent maps in the game. To use this feature the player needs the ANA (ADVANCED NAVIGATIONAL ARRAY) and starts with one area and one lane in all galaxies. Via Snoopers updates are received (so you need Snoopers as well for this feature).

Hmm, a question... what does a lane do, exactly? I see it in my ANA and got the Snooper's updates but have tried looking up what it actually is to no avail. Is is just a cosmetic/descriptive thing (e.g. indicates good trade routes to follow) or does it add new functionality to the game?

laxori666 wrote:

Hmm, a question... what does a lane do, exactly? I see it in my ANA and got the Snooper's updates but have tried looking up what it actually is to no avail. Is is just a cosmetic/descriptive thing (e.g. indicates good trade routes to follow) or does it add new functionality to the game?

Hi, Laxori666, welcome to the boards! At the moment, the lane is purely cosmetic ... but the devs are busy adding in some "geographic" features to future versions of the game, where - for example - the number of pirates you might meet in a system will depend in part of what sort of systems are within easy reach, so it's possible that the lanes might become more important later on.

Disembodied wrote:

Hi, Laxori666, welcome to the boards!

Thanks! Quite the fun little game this is =).

Disembodied wrote:

At the moment, the lane is purely cosmetic ... but the devs are busy adding in some "geographic" features to future versions of the game, where - for example - the number of pirates you might meet in a system will depend in part of what sort of systems are within easy reach, so it's possible that the lanes might become more important later on.

Ok, gotcha, thanks for the quick reply. That would be interesting. The game takes a bit of getting into but I really enjoy how immersive it gets.

laxori666 wrote:

... I really enjoy how immersive it gets.

Do you have  Random Ship Names installed? Adds to the immersion rather well, does that... and welcome aboard!

Cody wrote:

laxori666 wrote:

... I really enjoy how immersive it gets.

Do you have  Random Ship Names installed? Adds to the immersion rather well, does that... and welcome aboard!

Thanks! I do indeed have Random Ship Names installed. That's one of my favorites. That little change did so much to bring the universe to life. There was an unfortunate discontinuity that happened with it recently.. I accepted an  escort job and unfortunately got exploded, but when I reloaded and relaunched to try again the trader's name was different =(. I assumed the way the game engine was set up made it impossible to work around but now that I think about it I might as well report the bug, eh? Should I just make a post in the Escort Contracts thread?

laxori666 wrote:

Should I just make a post in the Escort Contracts thread?

Problem with that is that the author of EC, Capt Murphy, is missing, presumed left the community.

Aye, Murphy is MIA. I think the problem is probably down to the way Random Ship Names works.
Mind you, I'm only a dumb pilot - I expect a boffin will be along shortly to answer the query.

It should be possible for the escort contracts script to store the name of your current employer, and re-assign it when you reload. In fact, I think that the naming continuity is bound to break not only after a player death, but also after saving and reloading during a contract. Randomshipnames doesn't track NPCs that stick around the player. Oolite creates the Ooniverse from scratch each time the player gets re-spawned, and randomshipnames assigns random names to every object each time that happens.

Out of curiosity: are there other OXPs that require naming continuity of certain ships across startUp events? It would be quite easy to write a small script to make that possible, even as an amendment to the original OXPs, even when the OXP creator is no longer around.

EDIT: and sorry for hijacking the BGS-thread. Please direct any replies to this issue to the Randomshipnames-thread. Over and out.