Oolite Bulletins

I'm doing it right now. So I can't yet say anything...

(apart from my usual ceterum censeo, of course (Aquila-texture?))

So has anyone downloaded it yet?

Graveyards always make me feel so sad. In a happy sort of way.

Yep, I've downloaded it -- at least, I've downloaded the one from oosat (as linked from the wiki page) ... which seems to be slightly different from the one linked from Selezen's sig.

I've only had a wander around the graveyard -- haven't been so crass as to try and shoot anything, but it looks stunning. Is it finished or is there more to come (like named headstones?)

I noticed that the demoships.plist refers to non-existent ships... Or am I using an old incomplete version?

Since this is my first post, I think I ought to go over to the discussion board and introduce myself...

Hi MLS - I've already said hi under the discussion thread but then found this thread here!

Anyway - I downloaded my TOGY off the wiki link so I don't know if it differs from Selezen's own sig and if it does why and which is the better/newer.
The TOGY is such a beautiful thing I dream of the day when Oolite's graphics engine can cope with shadows and point source lighting so you can live the scene in "Dark Wheel" and light up various gravestones and dead ships with you "headlights" and hide in the shadows as the police kraits glide past.

TOGY is also why I think the game should be modified to cope with saving at non-main stations - why would you go all the way to the TOGY, fly around for a bit and then have to track all the way back to the planet's main station (or jump out of system) just to get to a position where you can save your game?

Nice to see you again!

I haven't been playing Oolite long enough to have formed much of an opinion about saving at non-main stations. Well, I've read enough of the threads to know *why* you can't save anywhere else, but in truth that seems to me to be a Simple Matter Of Coding (and a potentially huge save file). All the same, it also makes sense to me that main stations are somehow special and can think of some in-game rationalisation for only saving there. They might be the only stations with the necessary uplink to GalCop (or is it GalCoop? note to self: must read wiki again) -- after all, they are MAIN stations.

Hmm. But the TOGY IS a fixed point in space -- well I assume it is. At least, it always appears in the system at about the same place. And I suppose a save-game file saved from the TOGY is just as useless without the OXP as a game file where the player is in an OXP ship without the relevant OXP ... is. (That sentence ran away from me a bit,)

I'm sure there's a fantastically atmospheric mission to be had around the graveyard, though.

The only valid version is the one I linked to in the message saying I was standing down. Here it is again:

http://hughesd.co.uk/elite/content/file ... a2_dev.zip

The one in my sig is out of date. The one linked above is the one that contains the latest changes and updated models plus some text files with hints and code snippets. By the time you read this I'l probably have updated the link in my sig...

Selezen wrote:

The only valid version is the one I linked to in the message saying I was standing down. Here it is again:

http://hughesd.co.uk/elite/content/file ... a2_dev.zip

The one in my sig is out of date. The one linked above is the one that contains the latest changes and updated models plus some text files with hints and code snippets. By the time you read this I'l probably have updated the link in my sig...

Has anyone picked up the further development of this. Would love to see this completed.

Unfortunately my coding skills are limited to Basic on my C64 about 25 years ago.

Not that I know of. I know a few people have downloaded it, but no-one's said anything about doing any work on it.

Give the completely different world that Oolite is since I last picked up the TOGY, I think that SO much more could be done with it, there may be some mileage in re-engineering it for 1.73+

Gimi wrote:

my coding skills are limited to Basic on my C64 about 25 years ago.

You'd be amazed how far you can get with that knowledge. Most OXPs are copy-and-paste excercises, with added bits of ingenuity!

I have been changing a few things to the Tionisla Graveyard.oxp. Mainly because I was changing a few things in trunk and used this oxp as a test object and notice all kind of "strange" stuff in the oxp that was never intended to happen this way.

The main problem of this oxp is that it hits some limits of Oolite. With to many objects to close to each other, Oolite starts to get slow. Currently there exist two versions of the oxp. The wide spread version "tgy_dev.oxp" that most people have and is still the current version on the wiki. And than there is an official version "togy.oxp" that was only downloadable trough Selezens sign, but few have done so when I read the above posts.

The first version has as disadvantage that it severely slows down older computers, and the second has ad disadvantage that you hardly see any objects in space. Most are only visible on the scanner because they were to small to be drawn at a greater distance. Advantage of that version is that drawing all those objects does not slow down your computer. But on current 2GHz computers that is no longer a real problem.

Now was this oxp developed around the time of Oolite 1.52. The possibilities of Oolite are strongly enhanced since, and the average computer has become much faster. I now mixed both ox's a bit and scaled down a few objects from the first version and enlarged a few objects from the newer version. Selezen gave me permission to improve the oxp a bit and I hope I did change it to his liking: Tionisla Graveyard testversion

The old scripting had as problem that most signals and messages were only send to 16 nearby ships. This resulted that communication was lousy and instructions to attack the player were seldom heard by the patrol ships. With JS this problems could be bypassed. I also added some of the tourist ships that are now randomly launched by the station.

A problem stays that the patrol ships have difficulties avoiding collisions in the dense grave field. During patrol it goes most of the times good because of the used waypoint traveling, but as soon as combat starts they are more likely to fly into ships. This should have been improved in trunk.

Any comment is welcome. And I would like some suggestions for additional messages to be added in "descriptions.plist".

For now its only a test version. Fully working but it should not be linked to the wiki in this form without further documentation.

Dude, it looks as awesome as ever! Some comments, not criticisms!

Krait patrol ships are performing as I envisioned! Nice work. They patrol happily until something gets shot at, then they attack! Class! Do Lancets launch from the Dodo when something is attacked? That was one of the things I could never get working.

The rusty adders were never meant to be a permanent part of the GY - I used them as placeholders when \I was developing. They were to be replaced with the simple cube/cuboid monuments or a pyramid monument I never got round to designing. I was going to use primarily triangle based markers since they are the easiest to render. Until then, the lwf_headstone, rip_headstone and silver, gold and blue mausoleums were the main content. Simple flashers are representative of very simple grave markers, and they give the GY an eerie feel, as well as making it twinkle like stars.

The moai headstone was to be discarded as too complex for a repeating structure, as was the chaos symbol. One or two of these were viable as custom monuments.

There was a plan for a shuttle pod to launch from the station on a regular schedule and do a round trip of the yard. The model for it should be in the archive with a very simple texture. If you can script this that would be cool.

Any more information you need, please let me know! Fantastic job so far though.

Selezen, thanks for the behind the scene info!

I've got two questions now, proof that a little information is a dangerous thing!

1.74.2 should be able to deal fairly well with more variety. What about if people on the forum designed new monuments & monument textures?


Even though they're there mainly as placeholders, I personally do like the 'Viking funeral' feel of rusty ships as tombs, and maybe others do so too.

Would it still be ok to keep some of the rusties around? Maybe reduce their overall number to a third or so?

Selezen wrote:

Dude, it looks as awesome as ever! Some comments, not criticisms!

Krait patrol ships are performing as I envisioned! Nice work. They patrol happily until something gets shot at, then they attack! Class! Do Lancets launch from the Dodo when something is attacked? That was one of the things I could never get working.

It was impassible to get it work in old Oolite. One of the reason is that only ships of role "hunter" or "police" would react to distress messages. The other reason is that the messages were only send to 16 nearby ships. Even when I gave the patrols a hunter role with a JS script, they hardly ever reacted. The 16 nearby ships were almost ever just monuments.
With JS the patrols are now added to the station group and monuments send their distress call explicit to the station. Having merged station, patrols and shuttles to one group, they now react promptly on groupAttack messages. (shuttles only send them)

The rusty adders were never meant to be a permanent part of the GY - I used them as placeholders when \I was developing. They were to be replaced with the simple cube/cuboid monuments or a pyramid monument I never got round to designing. I was going to use primarily triangle based markers since they are the easiest to render. Until then, the lwf_headstone, rip_headstone and silver, gold and blue mausoleums were the main content. Simple flashers are representative of very simple grave markers, and they give the GY an eerie feel, as well as making it twinkle like stars.

The moai headstone was to be discarded as too complex for a repeating structure, as was the chaos symbol. One or two of these were viable as custom monuments.

The appearance of the ships can easy be changed by changing the role weight. (I'll drop the adders and increase the headstone and mausoleum weight) ) In my feeling there is no need to use only simple structures for faster rendering. Complex structures are just nicer for the eye. And the rendering only starts when you are close to the field. With me I now have a FPS count of about 50 on launch in Tionisla (100 in Lave). That is mainly an effect of the number of objects. When I enter the field the FPS rate drops to 25. That number can be changed by using more primitive models. However, the flight experience does not change between a FPS of 100 and 25. So, in my opinion it is better to go for a nicer view. (I tested FPS count on both my 2GHz and 3GHz i-mac)

There was a plan for a shuttle pod to launch from the station on a regular schedule and do a round trip of the yard. The model for it should be in the archive with a very simple texture. If you can script this that would be cool.

I noticed the model in your archives. I already added is to this test version and I also added a light map for the windows. The station will sometimes launch a tourist shuttle. The shuttle launch is scheduled when a non-patrol ship docks, with a maximum of 5 shuttles available for launch.

Any more information you need, please let me know! Fantastic job so far though.

Thanks.

EDIT:
One addition to ship numbers in the graveyard. When ships are coming closer together, Oolite starts to explicit monitor their distances. When you press "shift-F" you will see a "c-xxx" number on the third line. This is the number of object-object distances that is calculated on each update. Normally that number is 10 to 100, but with the graveyard present, the number goes sky-high up to several thousends. (10000 to 20000 in trunk).

Eric Walch wrote:

One addition to ship numbers in the graveyard. When ships are coming closer together, Oolite starts to explicit monitor their distances. When you press "shift-F" you will see a "c-xxx" number on the third line. This is the number of object-object distances that is calculated on each update. Normally that number is 10 to 100, but with the graveyard present, the number goes sky-high up to several thousends. (10000 to 20000 in trunk).

That's something I always wondered about, because I didn't understand why there are always collisions in Oolite (it never drops to 0). But if it's not the counting of actual collisions but the monitoring of potential collisions, it all makes sense.

Out of curiosity, have you managed to stop players getting kills for destroying gravemarkers? Or does this need changes in trunk? Might it be worth seeding the graveyard with Q-bomb dampers in any case?

mlewissmith wrote:

So has anyone downloaded it yet?

Graveyards always make me feel so sad. In a happy sort of way.

That's a point! Can we get some Emo ships moping around the grave yard please. Filling up the comms channel with inane wittier about how depressed they are? That would be cool.