Oolite Bulletins

Right, where do I start?

Firstly, according to the Wiki (at least, I'm sure I read it in the Wiki, I can't check because it's currently down), the ship measurements are in Feet not metres. So the Viper is 55 Feet not 55 Metres, making those pilots 6 feet tall - well, okay they may be 7-8 feet tall but it's close enough.
Or I could be nit-picky and say it's more accurately 55 units long, so even if the ships are measured in metres, they can still be feet in my version and not make any difference.

Regarding the poly-count. As someone who has been working professionally as a video game artist for over ten years, I really don't feel that 2000 polys is very much on modern machines - and by modern, I don't mean £2000, cutting edge, next-gen gaming machines, I mean an average video card on an average PC produced in the last couple of years.

To be fair, most modern systems will complement a high poly count with a LOD system which Oolite doesn't appear to have - so if dozens of ships are being drawn in full even though they are only a pixel in size on screen then, yes, that is a waste of memory and processing power.

As an aside, if you really want to improve your frame rate, try shrinking some of the texture files. Oolite has models with only a dozen triangles and then one or more 512x512 PNGs slapped on top which are little more than a Photoshop noise filter - and many of which have nearly 50% wasted space!!!.
Try shrinking them down to 128x128, you'll notice very little difference in visual quality and it'll free up masses of vram.

Crow

Everything in Oolite is supposed to be meters. (That appears to have been different in 8-bit Elite, where measurements were in feet, which explains some of the transitional confusion between Elite and Oolite.)

Strewth!
Then I guess, I'll just have to call it feet. Small ships are more interesting anyway

Possible names for this class so far are, Angel, Archangel, Avenging-Angel or, more suitably, Guardian-Angel.

Hmmmmm....

Crow

that looks fantastic, both the old design & the new one!
Is that the flipped normal glass trick you mentioned earlier that we can see on the cockpit on the new design ship? that's a really clever workaround!

Thanks! Yes, as Ahruman says there is no way to do transparency in Oolite, so it'll have to be that. It's simple - it goes back to my Half-Life 1 modding days - but fairly effective.

How's the Cobra III going, btw? I'm really looking forward to seeing that one textured.

Out of interest, Griff. Your work is very professional and high quality. Do you do this professionally or is it just a hobby?

Crow

Just as a hobby, but i did go to art college after finishing school (the college in Cardiff convieniently located not too far from the Prison and the Law Courts!) to study textile design, so if anyone wants a half drop floral print all over their new ship i could whip one up!

The cobra III texture is sort of going ok, although it has become all muddy greens and browns, i waste too much time obsessing over a small area of the ship instead of thinking about the whole thing working together, i always end up painting out a lot of stuff i've been spending ages on or the whole thing gets so busy it looks awful.
Having all these lovely shader effects (and now normal mapping!) available in oolite is really mindblowing, i'm still working out what stuff goes in the colour map, what goes in the specular map etc, do i model this or does it go in the normal map.
it's really good of you to share your work here and document the process, i've got my notebook open ready by my desk to scribble down all the juicy modelling & texturing tidbits!

Hmmm... not sure I'll be imparting anything you don't allready know

College - You mean Howard Gardens? I did my art foundation course there.

Crow

@Scarecrow - How about the name Seraph, or Seraphim....
A six winged angel; the highest choir or order of angels in Christian angelology, ranked above cherubim, and below God.

No, I'm not a religious individual. Just an modestly educated one.

@ Scarecrow
yes that's it - i couldn't remember it's name - C.I.H.E or something?
I probably had too much Brains S.A. whilst i was there, it's wiped out my memories!
It was a great college and i really loved being in Cardiff, this would have been around 1991-1993, coming from a tiny village in up in west Wales it seemed like Cardiff was some sort of crazy MegaCity or something!

@ Cmd Cheyd. Absolutely brilliant! Seraphim Class it is! Cheers

@Griff, Wow. I was there 89-90 though it's convievable you may have know Tim Savage, Kevin Kavanagh and Mike Chard who did graphic design around that time. Sadly, I think Howard Gardens no longer exists - or maybe it's just that foundation is no longer there. not sure.

Crow

God my memory, i think i might know Kevin Kavanagh though, i think i went out boozing with him one or twice, i've got a faint memory of pushing him down a road in a shopping trolley we found abandoned in a side street,ahh student high jinks.. the guy i know was called kev, but i can't remember his surname, he was studying graphics, being taught by a white haired guy with glasses who looked and sounded a bit like a fleet street reporter from an episode of Minder.

Um - where does one get human models like that - I've been fuming over trying to build one?

Note: I am really curious to see if flipping the normals has any effect inside the game ...

I seem to be able to set a material=hole, but havn't found a way to do specular off the "glass" which kinda defeats the point. Same goes for just leaving the window out.

Simon, I can send you a human model in OBJ flavour if you like. PM me your email address. I'll be covering texturing it soon aswell.
To be honest, they're really really simple - and probably still more detailed than they need to be.

As for the glass, well, obviously I haven't tested it yet but the polys in Oolite do appear to be one-sided so it should work.

What is material=hole all about?

Crow

Holy Swear Word, Crow, those concepts are fantastic! I look forward to seeing these in game.

About the poly/triangle counts - I like the fact that Oolite has lower poly models since it makes the game accessible for those of us with lower-end machines. My computer isn't brilliant and I was attracted to Oolite because it was a pretty version of Elite. I can run it on my laptop with little trouble (unless a big battle goes off) but now there are things coming in that are pushing it to its limits. I already can't handle the shaders that are becoming the norm, and that's limiting my ability to do nice models. So I would ask that poly count can be kept low. Please?

If you're looking for human models I can recommend DAZ3D - that piece of software (free) has downloadable content (purchaseable) that includes PHOTOREALISTIC men and women and costumes for such. It's most famous for the highly detailed female models it has.

Free detailed human models are hard to come by, but places like 3DCafe do have them. Turbosquid might be able to help too.

Sorry, can't look up the URLs right now...

Sorry, Selezen. I'm afraid I'm sticking with 1800-2000 polys. I'm doing this for me, rather than anyone else.

As for DAZ3D - I'd heartily recommend against it. The human figures in that are hundreds of thousands of polys. Oolite would choke just trying to draw one pilot - even on a top spec machine.

The pilots in my ship are a trivial detail that will rarely be seen up close - and even then for a fraction of a second as the ship zips past. That's why I've deliberately modelled them very very low detail block models. They give the impression of a human pilot and nothing more. They'll probably only take up a tiny area of the finished texture aswell.

Crow