Oolite Bulletins

i can't reach it either, man, i hope the oxp isn't cursed in some way like the video tape in 'the ring' making people vanish, quick everyone who's downloaded it already, upload it to another server before the end of the week

El Viejo wrote:

I can't seem to get the Deep Horizon Industries page up at all.
Is it just me?

Nope, same here

Ah good... it's up and running now!

I was running a full-site sync with the webserver on my home desktop. So that we'd have a full backup of Griff's OXP. You guys probably ran into the site while I was sucking it down. I was fairly out-of-date, so...

Griff - I'd recommend dropping the apostrophe from the name. (I can do it if you would like.) I don't know for sure that it would cause problems, but it might.

Cool... dropping the apostrophe certainly pleases the bb, anyway.

I've taken out the ' from the filename (was there even one supposed to be there?) and updated the link in the first post, thanks again Cmd. Cheyd for donating the filespace!

Just checked: Dizzie's site is back up

been mucking about with some dry cracked earth textures and the parallax shader, whipped up some demo asteroids in that odd sparkly style used for my rock hermit. Not too sure that cracked earth textures are the way to go for asteroids so these might not make the final oxp but the parallax looks quite neat on the cracks, although once again i've UV unwrapped these really badly - some clearly visible and horrible seams in the texture which the parallax makes even worse ! The oxp is in the box folder with the standalone ships http://www.box.net/shared/rpkms25cc9

I like the texture, but it's to shiny for earth or rock. How about trying to make it look more like ice. A lot of asteroids consist of ice anyway. White shiny or reflective patches of ice might work. I'm no expert, but with that texture and the shine you are close.

It looks fantastic, but as you hint at yourself, not much like an asteroid--more like a rock on earth. Check out images.google.com for inspiration (search for asteroid)...

The asteroid looks good in-game, Griff:



I like the way it spins slowly.

Maybe the shininess could be a special handwavium long chain polymer coating that some Rock Hermits have applied to their asteroids to help keep air and moisture? Maybe a version of Ironhide Armour specially made for the Rock Hermit niche market?

Yeah, it's still early days for the asteroids i think, i do have a few alternative textures to try based on those different grades of sand you sometimes see on the beach with different bands of colour running through them.
That's a nice idea to have some icy looking ones, i'll be annoying and ask the devs to spend many hours rewriting the graphics engine to support 3d 'sampler3D' textures so i can try implementing the 'glitter' example shader in rendermonkey on the asteroids frosty parts, i'll spring the request on Ahruman when he's still on his 'just back from holiday lounging on the beach' high

maybe i could use the animated swirly camo shader and the planet nightime city lights demo shader to make some asteroids with twinky glowy space mushrooms on them that glow on the rocks dark side?

The main problem with the oxp at the moment though is the bad UV unwrapping, i'll really have to try and fix that, some of the distortion at the poles is really really awful

Nice, but shiny as other have said.

could you not spoof a sparkle but painting in clusters of very bright shiny dots on the effects map's green channel, then scrolling a "masking" thing over like your Moray tex so that the bright bits kept blinking out by something like a mottled cloud texture?

The ice-idea seems more suited for comets than for asteroids. We don't have any in Oolite yet... (hint )