Oolite Bulletins

My screenshots folder is filling up with loads of images as I work through the Classic Ships WIP, and some of these are rather nice and would make good 'wallpaper' images. Most recently is this one of the Python Blackdog, spawned in the Aegis and with a Navigation Buoy from my 'Better Buoys' OXZ in the background. Click on the image below for a full-size (1900x1000px) version.

That's not too shabby Smivs.

Today, after a long time, I actually sat down to play the game for a while. And the game rewarded me with a quite rare spectacle: A full-on combat outside a rock hermit, between a gang of pirates and the hermit's defenders. I considered jumping in but after witnessing what was going on, I decided to let them have a go at each other for a while and try to capture some of the intensity of the battle in screenies. It was around 12 to 16 ships (some jumped out during battle too) and it was simply amazing. And here is just a small flavour of what happened:

Cool! I find that rock hermits and their environs are quite often the source of interesting entertainment!

Wow, those are some beautiful pictures! Mostly because they have so many stars in the background, though that one with the ship nearly colliding into you is hilarious.

Out of curiosity, how DO you get so many stars in your skies?

Cody wrote:

Cool! I find that rock hermits and their environs are quite often the source of interesting entertainment!

I feel as though Rock Hermits and their surrounding space are like the American gold rush days...

Falcon777 wrote:

Out of curiosity, how DO you get so many stars in your skies?

The entire sky you see in those shots is the result of ZygoUgo's Cinematic Skies OXP, which I fully recommend if your system is anything above low-end.

If you want to get more technical than that, the number of stars, number of nebulae, scale of nebulae, chance of them clustering etc., are all controllable via planetinfo.plist. We distribute the game with a lot less stars and nebulae in the sky for reasons of performance on low-end systems, but you can adjust everything manually if your system can afford it. All the information required if you want to experiment with the settings can be found in the planetinfo.plist page on the wiki. Have a look at the Properties of the Sky section.

I found the high number of stars to be great looking, wonderfull for screenshots but absoluteley disturbing when it comes to detecting enemy ships far away. First thing after some admiration of this Cinematic Scies OXP was to reduce the number of stars in this plist. The nebulae still look great

ralph_hh wrote:

I found the high number of stars to be great looking, wonderfull for screenshots but absoluteley disturbing when it comes to detecting enemy ships far away. First thing after some admiration of this Cinematic Scies OXP was to reduce the number of stars in this plist. The nebulae still look great

You can alternatively try to experiment with the ambient_level value, which refers to the amount of ambient lighting illuminating the dark side of objects. Default is 1.0, but you can set it to higher than that if you want. It does brighten up things if you increase it and the reason you have difficulty distinguishing ships with Cinematic Skies is probably because the OXP sets this property to 0.05.

Oy.... Thanks. That explains a lot. I was not aware, that this OXP darkens the ships...

Yep pretty as it is i removed it because i had trouble seeing anything. I couldn't even spot the stations. I already have the gamma set to 1.2 to brighten things a bit.

Probably changing ambient_level would have been a better way rather than removing it. For ease of comparison, here is the same shot taken with ambient_level at 0.05 (OXP default) and 4.05 (arbitrary value to increase it). I am sure that the station in the second one is visible from much further away. Note also that the blackness of space doesn't change, only the level of lighting:

0.05


4.05

Uh, whow....
I even tried to upload a new shipset and even there lighten up the tails of Krait and Gecko a bit wih a paint program. If I'd known, it's that easy..

Zygo's OXP's are great and I like the ambient level as it is. Seems very natural to me.

CaptSolo wrote:

Zygo's OXP's are great and I like the ambient level as it is.

It's a little too dark for me - I use ambient_level = 0.5; (what is Oolite's default?).