Oolite Bulletins

Of course you shipbuilders do realise that you are encouraging all of us to continually upgrade our kit, In a couple of years time when 10 gig Ram is entry level there won't be any complainers about textures and multiple sub entities consuming memory.

@Star Gazer, this is the best view I could get (it's only in the demoships.plist at the moment)



@Gareth3377, I'm hoping to write a mission based around the Galactica, maybe involving flying a colonial viper for a specific part of the mission (if that's possible)

@KW, I didn't start from scratch, I hacked bits off a highly detailed one from an unknown creator.

@TGHC, it's only two sub-entities and a 512x512 texture, so don't upgrade yet!

It's still a cool piece of work mate.
heh, stick a blue flashy behind the cockpit, we can have a new police Viper :-D

I think the only problem with Galactica Vipers is that they are much smaller than the smallest Oolite ships (if I'm not mistaken) and thus appear to be a little out of their context in the game...

That is a very nice little model you've created there, full marks+ !!

Very nice model. The texture is just right. I take it you use the 'bogus surface relief' method to add much of the apparent detail?

I think Wolfwood is correct, however. I've found that extremely small ships, the size of a viper, tend to get collided-with and destroyed, if you try to fly up, and look at them in-game - using a normal ship, at least - so your texture is never actually seen in all its glory. The collision-detection and collision-damage has probably been improved, since my experiments, but that certainly used to be the case.

As a matter of interest, why not just make it bigger to fit in more with Oolite

that looks great! have you painted shadows into the texture? it looks awesome and is an idea i hope you don't mind me pinching!

My guess is, he painted them in. I wrote an article about it, about a year ago.

looks great!

You know what would even look greaterer ( )
smoothed enginepods!

Which is possible with a lot of fiddling in the .dat file, which I don't wish on anybody.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, sorry I didn't get back to you yesterday.

@KW, they haven't got the flasher yet but your right they do make a good police viper.



@Griff & FC, most of the detail has been done in the texture (see above). Griff use anything you like, I'll send you the whole texture if you like.

@Wolfwood & TGHC, the police vipers about the same length as a Cobra, which seems to work.

@AH, the engines are a sub-entity so I'll give that a try.

I'm not having much luck adding two lasers, I tried using sub-entities for each laser (as Wolf Mk II) but the police just aren't firing back! Has anyone got any ideas?

Nice, with subentities, sorting out the relevant groupings will be much less hassle.

Problem still:
Smoothing is an entity-boolean (?) it is inherited by subentites from the main-ship-data as being True or False.
This means that all edges will be smoothed, not just the subentities ones.
So you may need to 'harden' all the edges in the other model-parts by double-edging.
I may be mistaken by the smooting-groups technique... maybe not defining some faces as a smoothing group will have them non-smoothed.

You'd have to ask someone with more (succesfull) experiences with smoothing and smoothinggroups.

Just adding Smooth=True for the appropriate sub-entity works okay.

that copship looks *mean*!!

IMO, i don't like the smoothing. it goes against the rest of the ship's style. the first wedgey versions look gorgeous.

The smooth engines-look is classic design!!
(Hated the 'stealth' viper in BSG200X)

Good to see that independed subentity smoothing is functional.
What version are you using BTW?
wondering whether I missed some major version change...

and to the blue tex: It really looks like a totally different ship.
Amazing what a simple colourchange can do to a classic design.
Looks good though.

Where do you plan to put ***FLASHER***s?
Along the wing edges?