Oolite Bulletins

This Boa comes with the texture pack.

The Boa is not a render. The backround is a deepspace art. I paste the 2 Boas directly from Oolite.

What you think?

Beautiful, like I said before your work adds a lot to the universe, dont stop now and let us know as soon as there is more to instal.

Cos

Beautiful!

I wish the gfx renderer could do bump mapping but hey with these textures we ain't gonna miss them quite so much!

Sung, you're a very welcome addition to the Oolite community. Bravo.

@ Sung:
Wonderful work. PLEASE keep it up.
( I'm going to have to update some of my .oxp's again and do a bit of tidying - will have to be a little less lazy with Sung about! )

@ DaddyHoggy:
I quite agree with you.
Here's a little something I recently came across. News to me...
http://www.3dgamers.com/screenshots/gam ... arfighter/
And the game is few years old.
Makes me want to cry. ( Bit OTT there )

Looks better than Oolite? - Yes.
Look closer... More polys? - Yes.
Look closer... Textures nowhere near as good as Sung's? - Yes!
Still looks better than Oolite? - Yes, d*mn it!

Can I do .oxp's? - Yes
Can I do models? - Yes
Can I do textures? - Yes! ( not in Sung's league )

Is it a royal pain in the .... squeezing new & interesting stuff out of the current engine? - YES!!!

Can I program in Objective C? - NO0oooooo...... . . .

Giles: If you can, PLEASE come back to your loyal followers! ( OTT again? )
If not possible - somebody?

The basic game is there - enhancements are comming ( java-script? ), but what it needs is an updated ( new? ) GFX engine + some optomising...
My limited knowledge of such things tells me there are open-source 3D engines 'out there' which would improve things no-end ( and may improve the frame-rates for the more demanding .oxp's ) So I would hope the wheel does not need re-inventing...

PS
@ DaddyHoggy: ( again )
I fully support your comments made earlier in this thread.

@ Everyone else:
It's late & my rambling gets worse when I'm tired - sorry about the rant.

Oops, sorry again, double post too!.
( and getting more off-topic )

Quick Google:
Both 3D engines are open-source & seem to support all the curent Oolite platforms...

Crystal Space 3D:
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/Main_Page

Screen shot:


Neo Engine:
http://neoengine.sourceforge.net/tutorial04.php

Don't know where I'll find the time, but I'll learn C if I have to. Please don't let me do it!!!
( Mind you, considering how poor my scripting is - would that be wise? )

LB's idea is a good one if Sung's textures ever did become the defaults.

Until then you can use these textures without overwriting the originals. Just create a Textures folder under AddOns (where your oxp directories all live) and put Sung's textures in there. Anything the game would normally load from its default resources will be loaded from AddOns first.

Then if you don't like one of them you just remove it from AddOns/Textures and the game's original version will be used.

Same goes for making these textures an OXP. Just have a directory structure like "SungTextures.oxp/Textures" with all the textures in there and the game will load them in preference to its own ones.

That should solve everyone's problems, except whoever is complaining about the textures being directly ripped off Homeworld2. No-one here can verify this and if you choose not to believe Sung when he says they're his own work, don't use them. Just don't give him grief and make him go work on some other project because 99% of Oolite people want him working on our game!

We've waited a long time for a real artist to show up, lets not stuff him around.

Regards,
David.

Oolite would certainly benefit from integration with a game framework or scene manager - quite a bit of its code is taken up with these functions.

But all of the ones I've seen (including the two above) are C++ which means they're basically incompatible with Oolite.

Theoretically Oolite should be able to use C++ libraries but it doesn't work in practice on Win32/Linux, and probably wouldn't be as simple as you'd like on the Mac.

I have tried this and to interface to a simple C++ library you need to use an intermediate "C" interface and a C++ compiler. This means you have to build your own GCC because the one that comes with GNUstep doesn't have the C++ stuff compiled into it. This is how the textures-planets exe is built.

Then to write a real Obj-C++ program where Obj-C classes can use C++ classes directly, even having built the right compiler it doesn't work because it fails trying to compile the GNUstep headers. I can only assume the NS* headers on the Mac are much different from the GNUstep ones.

So you're going to have to learn an awful lot if you want to try this route. I've been thinking about it for a while and I don't think it can be made to work.

@ dajt:
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my late-night ramblings...

I suspect though Giles rightly gets the creds for Oolite, your very important hand in the project may get overlooked...

My apologies for being one of those people.
Thank you for your efforts.
From your comments I suspect you have already given this much time & effort.

Maybe a particularly stupid question:

Cross-compilers exist to point essentially the same code to different processors...
There's nothing that exists to 'translate' objective C to C++ if that is the main problem?
or
Is it that the form of C is not the problem but rather incompatabilities between the two sets of libs?

Charlie wrote:

There's nothing that exists to 'translate' objective C to C++ if that is the main problem?

It’s not that simple. C++’s more primitive architecture means the current scripting architecture could not be meaningfully converted, for instance; it would be necessary to implement a translation layer.

That aside, going from Oolite’s built-in rendering to using a different graphics library, while working with existing data, OXPs, some self-modifying entities etc. would be a huge task, and creating a vanilla-C intermediate layer would be the smallest part of it. The language barrier isn’t that big an issue.

A little eyecandy for python pilots (Background Art from Don Dixon)



A loneley Fer de Lance over a red Planet (Background from unvorgiven-art.de Artist:10c)

Did you here that clunk, that was the sound of my jaw hitting the floor! Really, very, very pretty.

The new Oolite Gecko that comes with the texture pack, inspired by a pixel Art Image of a Fan Site.
Hope you like it.

Excellent stuff, can't wait to get my hands on the new textures.

The deadly Krait Assault Craft...

Hello Sung, I noticed the link has gone, does that mean no more textures?

Cos