Oolite Bulletins

Super Python, eh? How about the  Python Class Cruiser - might that serve?

Cody wrote:

Super Python, eh? How about the  Python Class Cruiser - might that serve?

That would be a better ship than what I'm planning to build. And I almost felt like cheating...

I wonder what it looks like! The wiki can be very confusing because it shows mixtures of old and new models and Versions from different games (Elite, Oolite FE2 and FFE). The classic style shown in the main picture wouldn't fit into Version 1.82, but I'll probably make my own OXP anyhow because I want to learn how to do it.

By the way, the "artist's rendition" somehow seems familiar. I'm not sure, but I think it was in the original Elite manual. I always wondered why it differed so strongly from the normal Python.

Griff's Python fits with 1.82 - simply tweak its stats to your chosen level.

Fritz wrote:

Most Elite ships seem to big for their looks, and I assume that somebody mixed up feet and meters at some point in the Elite history.

Only because you mentioned it, and purely for historical purposes, here's what happened. (And your not being critical of the scale issue in Oolite is appreciated, believe me. The subject has been debated to death in the past, and still rears its' head occasionally.) Basically, the switch from N feet to N metres wasn't a mix-up, but a deliberate design decision.

From the keyboard of our Master and Commander, the original creator of Oolite; aegidian (aka Giles Williams):

aegidian wrote:

The adjustment from feet to meters was necessitated by the increase in scale of the space station to it's full 1km diameter glory. If the ships had stayed scaled by feet then they'd almost all fit in the docking slit sideways - and docking is such an important part of the experience it was necessary to scale ships to match.

You may ask, why not reduce the size of the docking slit instead? Apparently, Giles tried that, but wasn't happy with the look of it.

So there you have it. You may not have really thought about it, but Oolite actually uses 4 different scales. From the keyboard of our present lead developer, cim:

cim wrote:

There are essentially four different scales in Oolite:
- ship scale (including stations, weapons, scanners). The freighters and stations could perhaps be a bit bigger, but the scale here is fairly consistent. Ships introduced from other SF universes won't necessarily work without rescaling - but that's the same for most pairs of SF universes.

- planetary scale (100 times smaller than ship scale)
i.e. for realistic scale the planets should be 100 times bigger

- solar scale (~25 times smaller than planetary scale)
i.e. for realistic scale the suns should be 2,500 times bigger

- inter-planetary scale (~1000 times smaller than planetary scale)
i.e. for realistic scale the suns should be 100,000 times further away from the planets

If you're interested in the subject, Redspear has a project underway to experiment with re-scaling Oolite to at least considerably reduce the extent of these inconsistencies. It's been in hiatus for a while now, but certainly isn't dead. Results to date have been quite promising. You can read about it here.

Moin Fritz,

concerning the Python Class cruiser fitting Griff's normalmapped ships (shaders and stuff) you might have a look here:
* http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Staer9%27s_Shipset

or for the default Oolite v1.80 shipset feel free to check out my noshaders version:
* http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/No_Sha ... ies#Staer9
* an ingame shot of it: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/File:N ... on_cc.jpeg

Both also come with another Python variant: the Python ET, which I also happened to like a lot in the past.

cheers down south

Amah

Ps. finally managed to set up some kind of user page with some kind of Amah's backstory:
* http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/User:Amah

Amah wrote:

finally managed to set up some kind of user page with some kind of Amah's backstory:

Love the backstory! Delightfully immersive!

Amah wrote:

finally managed to set up some kind of user page with some kind of Amah's backstory:

A:ma: was layed, hatched and grew up on the coasts of an uncharted little planet revolting around a dying g-class star in galaxy 3

Umm.. revolting, or revolving?

SteveKing wrote:

Love the backstory! Delightfully immersive!

Agreed.. a well-told little tale.

Fritz wrote:

And it is very frustrating when my cargo hold is full and I destroy a fully loaded pirate Python, because there is no means to mark a field of debris and come back later.

There are several OXPs which can help with this:

 Cargo Shepherd attracts cargo pods and holds them until you can scoop them, also includes a beacon.
 Cargo Spotter highlights scoopable items with a colour-coded glow.
 ETT Homing Beacon marks a position in space by deploying a pylon-mounted beacon.
 Targeter allows to automatically acquire targets in the categories: hostile/outlaw, neutral and cargoes.
 Tracker gives the capability to track up to 6 targets per system via the ASC.

(It should be noted that the Homing Beacon is really only useful for stationary targets)

Fritz wrote:

Even if something like this exists as an OXP, it would be of little use, because there are thieves around that try to steal my debris...

Not if you're quick.. Half the idea of the Cargo Shepherd was so that you could scoop what you can, dock and offload, then rush back out to get the rest of the cargo. More often than not, the reason you can't find the cargo when you return to the area isn't "thieves", but is because the motion imparted to them by the explosion of the ship has caused them to drift to another part of space.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Umm.. revolting, or revolving?

"revolving" Thanks for spotting. Upgrading the unispeech translator database, atm. Found some other mistakes as well. Will correct them asap (can't log on the wiki atm). Maybe I should buy me a Babelfish.

Amah.

Btw. the last revolution there was ages ago, before the space age when a junta of bird creatures seized power, enslaved all other inhabitants and reigned in terror for years... In the end they were overpowered by poisonous worms sacrificing themselves for the greater good. From these ages, the saying goes: "the late birds caught the worms".

Amah wrote:

... the last revolution there was ages ago, before the space age when a junta of bird creatures seized power, enslaved all other inhabitants and reigned in terror for years... In the end they were overpowered by poisonous worms sacrificing themselves for the greater good. From these ages, the saying goes: "the late birds caught the worms".

<chortles>

It's the early bird that gets the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese!

Yes, we are all glad that bird junta had no rodents for advisers then. Our species would have never made it into space. One of their laws was "only birds can fly"

Diziet Sma wrote:

You may not have really thought about it, but Oolite actually uses 4 different scales.

I actually thought about the scales, because they could be changed in Oolite, at least in theory. This would of course need a change in the performance of the different engines (normal, injectors, torus, hyperspace); probably you would have to define completely new engine types. You would also have to expand scanner ranges and probably many other things.

But a much bigger solar system would make it extremely unprobable to meet other ships, and you could, for example, never find a Rock Hermit or even a space station without some kind of radio beacon. A realistic universe would result in something like a space simulator, but not in an action game. Even if you could design an interesting game inside an universe with realistic dimensions, it wouldn't be Elite anymore. And there are many other unrealistic things in Elite/Oolite, like the lack of momentum and gravity, so changing the dimensions alone wouldn't make it much more realistic.

The adjustment from feet to meters was necessitated by the increase in scale of the space station to it's full 1km diameter glory. If the ships had stayed scaled by feet then they'd almost all fit in the docking slit sideways - and docking is such an important part of the experience it was necessary to scale ships to match.

Why do the stations have to be 1 km big? If the ships were smaller, the stations could be smaller as well! You can see most stations from the witchpoint location with bare eyes, so they could be much smaller without affecting the game.

I thought about it while thinking about the Galactica: It has two docks, and if each of them is wide enough to accept a Cobra Mk III (about 150 m), the ship as a whole would be almost 1,5 km wide and more than 4 km long. Among fans there is some debate about the size of the Battlestars, but an Oolite version would be really big! If we reduce the Cobra to 130 feet, i.e. 40 m, it would result in a Galactica about 500 m wide and 1,5 km long, that's more realistic - if you want to use the word "realistic" in this context...

But I didn't want to start a discussion abut this! Leave it as it is, as any substantial changes would probably result in a new game, a kind of spin-off.

Fritz wrote:

I actually thought about the scales, because they could be changed in Oolite, at least in theory. This would of course need a change in the performance of the different engines (normal, injectors, torus, hyperspace); probably you would have to define completely new engine types. You would also have to expand scanner ranges and probably many other things.

But a much bigger solar system would make it extremely unprobable to meet other ships, and you could, for example, never find a Rock Hermit or even a space station without some kind of radio beacon. A realistic universe would result in something like a space simulator, but not in an action game. Even if you could design an interesting game inside an universe with realistic dimensions, it wouldn't be Elite anymore. And there are many other unrealistic things in Elite/Oolite, like the lack of momentum and gravity, so changing the dimensions alone wouldn't make it much more realistic.

If you read the re-scaling experiment thread I linked to above, you'll see that everything you mention has been discussed, and proposals for dealing with various things put forward and tested. It actually requires far fewer changes to the game than you might imagine. The result to date has been a much bigger (though not "realistic") Ooniverse, and it's still 'Oolite', but gives a far better sense of the scale of things, and those who've tried it find it makes the game even more awesome than it already is. Hopefully, (I'm about to check the replies to some questions I posed), work on the project will shortly resume.

(As for other unrealistic things, such as the lack of momentum and gravity, there are no plans to mess with those.. we don't want to kill Oolite, just make it even better.)

I'd like to have a little bigger universe, especially bigger planets, so that sounds very interesting. I'll probably read the discussion this evening and perhaps make some comments (it is off-topic here...).

Fritz wrote:

So my dream ship would be something like a compromise between the Cobra Mk III and the Python. Until I'm able to make my own model I'll probably try to write an OXP to create something like a "Super Python": I would sacrifice some of the cargo space to install stronger engines, and the result would have about 75t of cargo space and the top speed of a Cobra Mk III.

Welcome Commander, i had the same desire about a ship of about 75T when i first started playing. So i moddeled the Eagle from Space:1999. the model is mostly done but i have found scripting it troublesome. i just dont have the time to learn how its done at the moment... so if you want to use it and get the scripting don and have it added to the Ooniverse the model awaits... lol.

I used Wings3D to model as do a few other ship modelers and i have read that someone starts with wings then uses Blender to finish?

P.S. my avatar is a screenshot of the model.. shameless plug.