Oolite Bulletins

@Ahruman:
Good points...

My apologies to one & all ( esp Sung ) for any offence I've given.

One thing in this that does worry me is what Giles may think of this.
On the one hand the ships he did were a small part of a BIG project ( all hail Giles! & the other developers! ) so he may be pleased to see this plan.
On the other hand who likes to see others rehash their own hard work?

Specifics:
Plates or no plates?
I suspect none. ( Partly my preference, but mostly how to make a workable one size fits all plate texture for the sake of duplication? )
I'll have a go @ playing UVMap texture to see if it would do the job. Plate boundries should be in the correct places while duplication will remain easy.

I only just noticed the Sung-debacle. nasty stuff. long toes/short fuses.

What is this about plates?
number plate decals ala EF2 ?
or armour plating?

As for replacing the current shipset...just offering alternative shipmodels should be just fine for now.
All one needs to do is replace the standard-mesh plus skin with any favorite replacement.
I never even considdered this, as my philosphy is 'the more variety, the better', in contrast to 'less = more'.
As for new ships, I tried to follow Giles' example and keep textures relatively simple.

That said, the Creator has always acted favourable towards more detailed models, his main concern was ppl with low-end machines still being able to run things.
So I'd say: keep the basic models in the main download and
release an updated ships patch, that just overwrites the old shipfiles.
This way anyone can choose what is best for them individually.

(If you can get some programming support, you may want to include both sets in the basic game and have a detail-option to switch between the sets.)

Charlie wrote:

H
-@Sung: I've tried to be polite ( as have many others ) I've tried to be helpful ( as have many others ) I've tried to be understanding ( as have many others )
NOW PISS OFF!!
.
.
.
BAN THE SUNG!

Can told me what i have done, except that i have removed the packs from Oolite, that anybody here anyway don't want to use it?

As a advise, learn something about layers. Actually it has the same look as the original files.

Eh....what?

I don't quite follow your lingo.
(try writing in German first, then translate in the lines below. For clarity's sake)

What I have seen of your textures, they looked very nice.
(Only say a blue Anaconda, before you removed the files)
I dont understand why you'd say nobody wants it. The fact that other authors messed around with it shows a desire surely?

Layers sure, very nice for making textures, but not in-game.
Oolite does not support layers nor alphalayering or bumpmapping or mipmapping. So layers are no help with decals.
(unless you'd want to create an infinite number of textures bound to an identical number of models, only to add numberplates. Not very efficient.)

Sung wrote:

I only understand half what here is saying, but this is funny :D

That comment is really not helping you, and I suggest you edit it.

Regarding programmer support for detail switching: could be a good idea. A simple design would be, when high detail is on, to look for “detailed-foo” before “foo” whenever loading a model or texture. (Changes would require the program to be relaunched… not a design I like, but easy.)

Ideally, there should be low-detail models that look similar to the high-detail ones – similar/same textures, etc. The ability to set a lower texture resolution for low-detail mode, rather than having separate copies, shouldn’t be too hard.

I’d certainly be interested in implementing this if the detail pack project builds up sufficient momentum.

By the way...

What is the status of the 'shaders' Giles was working on, just before he went off?
Last thing I heard was that the Thargorn Battleship looked spychedelic.

There is no problem for me to help, but I don't see any posibility to get a close look if everybody works on the design. Over 100 different models, icluded Star Wars Ships make it hard to build a convincing universe.

One look at the chopped Cobra 3.5 tells me that given the time, Giles could indeed himself have replaced the entire basic set with something much better looking.

I must say that I'm quite puzzled whenever someone takes the position which sounds like they think that development on Oolite should end with 1.65 and that nothing further should ever happen forever and ever. It's the kind of position that sends me off looking for another game to love every time I hear it voiced. Standing still Oolite is bound to be overtaken. IMO 'Trooliteers' actually show Giles' efforts a lot less respect with their position than 'Nooliteers' do.

No one (at least to my knowledge ) has ever suggested that making Oolite better looking or improving the code would necessitate removing all copies of 1.65 from the Internet or kicking in somebody's doors forcing them to install a newer version. 'Trooliteers' will always have 1.65 - and if they want true orthodoxy they may consider playing Elite on an emulated BBC (or on the original hardware, of course).

So...I really don't get why people who find 1.65 somehow 'sacred' need to voice that opinion every time others talk about that they would like development of the game to continue and it's looks to improve. Sorry if that position somehow hurts anyone, but IMO saying that much could be improved with Oolite - even radically changed - does NOT need to imply that one thinks that Giles (and the other coders) didn't do a great job.

My current hardware probably wouldn't be able to handle a v.2.0 of the game (not if half the stuff I'd like in such a version was implemented), but Oolite is actually one of the few things that could make me consider upgrading.

A makeover of the basic set might just be what is needed to attract new players to this game and perhaps among them the horde of coders that it so desperately needs. My guess is that many younger players just need to see the spinning Cobra on the start-up screen and the basic HUD (yeah, my own isn't much less ugly - I'm quite aware ) to close the game down de-install and never return, which is why I don't really buy the argument that improvements should only come as expansions never to be made part of the basic game.

On Sung's textures: They might take the game from a mid-eighties to an early nineties look. I don't really think that they're much of an improvement over the basic set. Compared to ships like the 3.5 Chopped Cobra and the DW-Cobra, they are definitely a step backwards... IMO.

These are my honest opinions on the subjects touched upon and I did not voice them to make friends or enemies.

Dr. Nil wrote:

On Sung's textures: They might take the game from a mid-eighties to an early nineties look. I don't really think that they're much of an improvement over the basic set.

Really? For me that looks like from stoneage to hightech

You don't seem too realistic in judging your own work. Suddenly having to build spaceships from small unevenly sized pieces of welded together scrap metal does seem like a huge step backwards in technology. Your Cobra Mk.3 looks like something printed on cardboard when compared to the 3.5 and the DW.

Btw: I agree with those who suggested that you keep to your own new forum. I couldn't help noticing that somebody misspelled Dajt's nick in a post there (djat), shouldn't you be all over that poor fellow, like you were with LB for misspelling yours? (Probably not since the culprit in this case is yourself).

Sorry everybody - I've had that piece of mud lying in a loaded sling since this morning, I'll do my best to ignore Sung from now on.

I think, (know) I could improve on my DWCobra (and I promise I'll stick some pics up of my Anaconda soon).
Buuuuut...the only trouble is computer speed, or namely what specs should we try and keep to.
A lot of commercial games don't seem to care about older computers, I've got Battlefield 2142 and even with my bbbbeeeautiful PC I can't run it in a resolution higher than 1024x768.

Sooooo, I can make the ships as good as Battlefield 2142 (because of a great thing called sub-entities) buuuut how many of us will be able to play with them.
Someone ought start another thread called "how powerful is your 'puter" and have some sort of a poll on there, to find out what we've all got.

Also, I agree with the dream team idea. Charlie has mastered lights better than all of us so he should definately be in charge of that on all the models, the more people that can actually build the basic set the better. I for one don't mind posting my meshes online to see if someone else can add to them (or take something away if I've gone overboard)

Sung wrote:

Can told me what i have done, except that i have removed the packs from Oolite, that anybody here anyway don't want to use it?

My reason for wishng you would now leave is that you have taken the work of Giles, the other developers and modders on this forum and started using it as a platform for your own self-promotion. You've ripped off the work of two or more years by Giles and the team then built a site and forum around that to call it the 'German Oolite' and I find that offensive.

Anyone can create nice texture maps for basic shapes and admittedly yours are nice, but I think that LittleBear, Arexack_Heretic and the guy who did the Llama (Flying_Circus) are actually better than you - their stuff has depth and imagination. You just make dirty textures with highlights on the edges then rinse and repeat. Everyone else here models thier own ships, creates thier own textures and even makes missions to go with them on occasion.

You don't even come close, sonny.

ramon wrote:

Sooooo, I can make the ships as good as Battlefield 2142 (because of a great thing called sub-entities) buuuut how many of us will be able to play with them.
Someone ought start another thread called "how powerful is your 'puter" and have some sort of a poll on there, to find out what we've all got.

As the Doc said above, we should not worry too much about staying within the abilities of 5-year-old computers. There's always the basic 1.65 for those who cannot run the fancier stuff.

What might pose a problem is the capability of the Oolite base code itself to handle more complex models. IIRC, Giles said at some point that it would need some improvement in order to handle complex models - and indeed the nice stuff like self-shading etc.

There was some development to improve how massive ships (behemoth/generationship/stations) were shown on the scanner...whatever happened to that?

I'll try to wrap some of the more complete ships on my drive into a package for anyone to (ab)use at will.

From the top of me head i got lying around...

Various wrecks and debris.
Several ships that can become damaged by losing subentities. (bounding box problems!)
Numerous racers, including the turbo krait.
Some 'fishy' ships. (no stats, just models.)
A set of alien squidoid ships. (never tested these ingame, IIRC they were quite complete, but lacking scripted story.)
Dukes of Kharak County themed ships. (just models)
PPC_AHversion with quadruple blistermounted beamlasers, and two skins.
A fleet of Capital Class vessels that behave like puppies.
Bug-buster mercenaries (just new skins and some scripting)
A half finished destructable battle-station.
Also a half finished asteroid base.
Several failed attempts at a shipyard station.

EDIT: Oh yeah, why I started this reply: you might like the PPC_AH and the turbo krait as more complex ships. (only by a small increment though)

@KW: Take a look at the newly updated ships and stations pages in the wiki to get a look at how the ships look.

missed this! damn, excellent update!