Oolite Bulletins

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

Griff wrote:

awesome decals Disembodied, i'll sort out some preview pics of them in a mo.

Added the Rockhermit to the ship pack, only available as an individual download at the moment, i'll sort out adding it into the Dizzy all in 1 bundle oxp a bit later.
There are 2 versions - a fullsize texture version and a half size texture version, i was a bit staggered to find that the full size texture version comes to 16 MB zipped up, heaven knows how much texture memory it uses, there's quite a few maps involved:-
two 512x512 maps, three 512x1024 maps, two 1024x512 maps and four 2048x1024 maps

It looks awesome! But I'll bet a lot of older systems, and even a few recent ones, would choke on it.

Not only older systems. Today my FPS rate suddenly dropped from 50+ to 4. After some time it jumped back to the normal value. I had no clue but when displaying a F5 screen or similar the FPS was normal, so it had to be something with texture and not ship activity.

It just happened a second time. This time I noticed the griff-hermit in sight. I hadn't seen it before in game. Awesome entrance, but unplayable with fps = 4. I suspected the hermit, so I exploded it with the console. At the moment of the explosion, my fps was back to normal. I must admit that the system was already crowded with 160+ entities in it, but without the hermit this hardly affected my fps.


(2.66 GHz Core 2 duo mac with NVIDIA GeForce 9400 card)

Odd that, Eric… with 83 entities in the sytem, I’ve just swooped all around a Griff hermit, docked and launched, and my fps hardly dropped from its normal 64 fps… 58/60 fps was the lowest it went, and then only very briefly.
Admittedly, I don’t have many oxps installed, but I wonder why it’s so different on your system.

E6600 2 x 2.4
ATI Radeon HD 3650 500
4GB 6400 Ram
Win XP

It's all four years old, apart from the GPU, which is three years old.

El Viejo wrote:

Odd that, Eric… with 83 entities in the sytem, I’ve just swooped all around a Griff hermit, docked and launched, and my fps hardly dropped from its normal 64 fps… 58/60 fps was the lowest it went, and then only very briefly.
Admittedly, I don’t have many oxps installed, but I wonder why it’s so different on your system.

I now deliberately spawned a griff hermit. This time I had the same as you: No significant effect on fps values. Even with 140+ entities no fps drop after addition. So there is probably a combination of factors needed.

Just one warning: don't use full screen while in front of the entrance: you will be looking at your screen for over an hour, fully amazed.

Eric Walch wrote:

Just one warning: don't use full screen while in front of the entrance: you will be looking at your screen for over an our, fully amazed.

I always play in full screen mode… and yes, I find myself gazing in awe at that entrance, sometimes docking, launching then re-docking, just for a second look. It's a thing of beauty.

El Viejo wrote:

Eric Walch wrote:

Just one warning: don't use full screen while in front of the entrance: you will be looking at your screen for over an our, fully amazed.

I always play in full screen mode… and yes, I find myself gazing in awe at that entrance, sometimes docking, launching then re-docking, just for a second look. It's a thing of beauty.

Oolite's first virus!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

El Viejo wrote:

Eric Walch wrote:

Just one warning: don't use full screen while in front of the entrance: you will be looking at your screen for over an our, fully amazed.

I always play in full screen mode… and yes, I find myself gazing in awe at that entrance, sometimes docking, launching then re-docking, just for a second look. It's a thing of beauty.

Oolite's first virus!

Oolite's first porn

Smivs wrote:

Oolite's first porn

No, that was Cheyd's 'Argellian loveslave in a gorilla suit'... sadly missed.

I haven't had any problems with the Griff Rock Hermits. I was kind of surprised the first time I saw one, and very impressed. I even slowed down from my usual landing mode of "full throttle + injectors" to kind of slowly float in. LOL It was impressive.

I don't actually look at framerates, but everything in Oolite so far runs smooth and easy, even when things get busy.

System is Linux Ubuntu "Jaunty Jackalope" running on dual core 64 AMD, 2.8 Ghz, 2 gigs of ram, nVidia GeForce 7025. (I also run with a second soundcard, an SB Live 5.1, but that wouldn't affect graphics)

"4 MB 6400 Ram "

MB?!?!

Killer Wolf wrote:

"4 MB 6400 Ram "

MB?!?!

Good spot KW, fixed... that would have been my first desktop PC, sixteen years ago.
From 4MB to 4GB... progress!

My first desktop was a Tandy HX 1000. Something like 128k of ram at 4 mhz or so. But it ran the DOS version of Elite!! Also Starflight. It was on that machine that I first tried writing my own space game as well. Some things are best just not attempted in BASIC. LOL

Starflight II had to wait till I upgraded to a 486 SX, with 4 mb of ram, later upgraded to a mighty 8 megs.


for n=0 to 2
Those were the days.
next n

(from the song "Hey, Hey 16K" by MJ Hibbett)

my first was the acorn electron (yes, Elite bought to go w/ it!).
32k : can't even get an icon for that nowadays!

El Viejo wrote:

Smivs wrote:

Oolite's first porn

No, that was Cheyd's 'Argellian loveslave in a gorilla suit'... sadly missed.

But it certainly qualifies as scenery porn.

Ganelon wrote:

My first desktop was a Tandy HX 1000. Something like 128k of ram at 4 mhz or so. But it ran the DOS version of Elite!! Also Starflight. It was on that machine that I first tried writing my own space game as well. Some things are best just not attempted in BASIC. LOL

Starflight II had to wait till I upgraded to a 486 SX, with 4 mb of ram, later upgraded to a mighty 8 megs.


for n=0 to 2
Those were the days.
next n

(from the song "Hey, Hey 16K" by MJ Hibbett)

Atari 2600 (with Keyboard expansion pack) (1977) -> C64 (1984) -> Amiga A500 + 2nd C64 (1989) -> A500+ 1MB Expansion, Fatter Agnus, A590 20MB HD+2MB (1991) -> P90 48MB RAM, 4MB gfx card (1996).

(I still own the A2600, C64s and A500s - they still work and I have Elite for both the C64 and Amiga)

Thanks for the new patch of decals everyone, i'll sort out some previews of them in a bit
There is something definately a bit rum about the hermit, it seems to behave itself in oolite but does display some occasional oddness when previewing it in rendermonkey, especially if i've got another other openGL app running at the same time - textures blink on and off, the frame rate in the preview window drops to 2-3 frames per second, i've got to close all the programs and open them again to clear it, including internet explorer any windows that have a tiny thumbnail preview of a texture image in them - weird, could be some sort of Windows7 openGL inefficiency, or old graphics drives ( i haven't updated them in a while) although it's probably just the amount of large textures the ship uses that's behind it all, i have been through the oxp and shifted some stuff around between various texture channels and managed to do away with the need for a seperate effects map for the 'running lights' in the tunnel, although i then went and doubled the width of another texture map as i'd tried to save space previously by overlapping the UV's for the 'tunnel pipes' objects on top of each other, but then i realised this was breaking the illumination map and each pipe needed it's own UV space with it's own bit of illumination map on it.
I've added these fixes in as well of tweaking the tunnel lighting a bit and reuploaded the oxp, although i'd hold off redownloading it for a day or too, i've tried some new stuff with the normal map for the asteroid and the version in the oxp available for download at the moment looks a bit like, well, pardon my bluntness, an old scrotum.

tsk, the UV unwrapping on that rock object is really badly done, really obvious seams running along it